Time in Villages: Timekeeping and Modernization in Rural Communities in the Long Nineteenth Century in Hungary

Gábor Koloh
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 1  (2023):66–86 DOI 10.38145/2023.1.66

The study explores the changing perception of time through the records of a multi-generational peasant family. By comparing several rural manuscripts from different times and places, the study traces the refinement of the way time is thought, its new meanings, and its emergence in farming and family life. The appearance of the clock plays an important role in the analysis. The clock, first as a prestige object in the household, gradually becomes a tool for the modern use of time. The replacement of calendars by newspapers in the first decades of the 20th century is also a decisive factor in the perception of time. The world expands and information about more and more distant lands is brought into peasant households. The study places important emphasis on the idea that rural households are the last base for the spread of globalization phenomena. What is already occurring at this level within each country is where the spread of the phenomenon has come to an end.

Keywords: rural history, globalization, family history, use of time, peasant traditions

Background and Proposition

Concepts and understandings of time are a research problem on which spans generations of historians have touched. This is hardly surprising, since the passage of time itself sets the coordinates, to use a metaphor, of a historian’s propositions. As a straining dual system of cognition, the narrowness or vastness of space and time determine our everyday lives, just as they did for those living in times past. This is one of the reasons why the endeavor to arrive at a grasp of time has become a fundamental human undertaking. Of the relevant examples, it is worth highlighting the abstraction already indicated in the subtitle: the arrangement of time in a framework defined by centuries. A century is not in itself an abstract period of time developed organically from the use of calendars.1 It is, rather, a solution that stems from the need of the human mind to organize and structure. It is a clue which has provided a more precise demarcation and nuance to an earlier approach, which was based on massive blocks of epochs in the professionalization of historiography.2 And this is precisely why its use should not be regarded merely as a factor of “convenience,”3 but rather as a logical necessity, much like historians’ narrative constructions and deconstructions over the past half century or so are also logical necessities. The difficulty lies in further abstracting the century as a clue, since the adaptation of the century (for instance, stretching it to cover a set of allegedly epoch-making events and thus reducing the time and, by implication, significance of other centuries) is a practice that partly forms the coherence of an epoch, and it generates problems.4 The use of Koselleck’s Sattelzeit or the fin de siècle is scale-specific and thus is at best a point of reference for the time concept of a micro-level study rather than a framework for interpretation. The concept of the “prolonged turn of the century,” as proposed by German historians and dated to the period between 1880 and 1930, may be a wiser choice. For Central and Eastern Europe, however, this is true only because this was also a major period of demographic change, which is interpreted as an important indicator of economic and cultural changes. Indeed, the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth were times of demographic transition, even if it is clear that the people living at these times were not aware of this. Attempts to grasp traditional life-worlds and document the transition have given rise to several methodological approaches, of which microhistory, born out of disillusionment in the wake of the quantitative revolution, serves only as an illustration of the one extreme. However, even with its exceptionally normal objective, microhistory has led to a kind of loss of hope, to which first postmodern historiography and then, more recently, globalization history have been trying to provide an adequate answer. The increasingly greater availability of sources as historians find themselves closer in time to the periods they are studying increases the number of problem-oriented questions. So the continuous return to the individual and her everyday life and experience provides inexhaustible opportunities. Pushing the peasant into the spotlight thus also implies the masses (or the statistical majority), and we can boldly hope to grasp this peasant as an individual while also getting a broader picture of the general population and the world in which this population lives.5

The foregoing justifies an attempt to outline the conceptual journey of the peasant approaching the regime of time from the perspective of everyday life, using a multi-generational chronicle, or the so-called Gyüker Chronicle. For this chronicle provides a tangible point in the source material where the variability of individual and social perceptions of time are clearly expressed in contrast to the constancy of physical or natural time.6 According to the entry made by József Gyüker (1862–1932),

they started in [19]28 to fly over the sea from Europe to America or from one country to another, and travel under water and powered cars and powered ploughs that had no horses in front of them were not new by then, and bicycle riders were also abundant; and the wireless telegraphs, they talked from one country to another as if they were sitting in front of each other.7

In my view, this is the point where the chronicler becomes aware that his own time is no longer the same time as his father, grandfather, and earlier ancestors had lived it (presentism), so this is where he begins to reflect consciously on the fact that his life is different from the lives of his predecessors.8 The quote, taken out of context, is the result of a longer process of inquiry, a continuous opening to the events of the world. It also implies thinking in a global perspective. It is a summary in which production conditions, weather, and trade also play important roles textually, but the mentions of world events become increasingly frequent and detailed. The significance of the passage lies in its concentration on emblematic events.9 The documentation of change seems relevant from multiple angles. As a basis for the comparison, in order to formulate the question, it seems appropriate to include another quote, this time from the grandfather, József Gyüker the Elder (1799–1874): “István Kovács the Elder was the first to buy a clock. He did so in Bőcs around 1840. Nobody had had one before. I bought mine around 1850.” By 1860, after a year of a bountiful harvest, he continued, it had become common to own a clock in the village. In Gyüker’s writing, the clock first appeared as an object of prestige.

By comparing the entries written by the grandfather with those written by the grandson and also with other entries written by other villages, one can examine the impact of modernization across generations. But how can we grasp the changes in the prevailing understanding of time in a peasant family? How does acceleration appear? To what extent did technological progress and in particular the spread of the clock as a device play a role in the transformation of the understanding and structuring of time in a peasant world? In the chain of influence, the strong natural determination of the agricultural world, marked by the seasons, and the important feast days of Christian culture are present at the same time. Alignment with these appears regularly from generation to generation in the chronicle, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century and lasting until the min-twentieth century. In addition, however, to the cyclical nature of seasons, feasts, agricultural tasks, and rites, as well as life events,10 new points of time were slowly appearing too. József Gyüker the Younger records three different times when recording the birth of his daughter: “Zsófi Gyüker was born on the third day of August 1890, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, under the sign of the Pisces.”11 When specifying the time of birth, Gyüker makes no mention of Christian feast days. Rather, he refers very specifically to the moment of time as specified by the calendar and the clock. In 1887, Gyüker the Younger also recorded a moment in time with reference to a clock when there was a fire in the village. References to the signs of the zodiac also became recurrent elements in the chronicle as a means of indicating the date of a birth. Taking these references to new methods of specifying and structuring time as my point of departure, I seek an answer to the following questions: what role did different aspects of the understanding of time have, and how did this vary across generations? And on the basis of this, what can we say about prevailing perceptions of time among peasants in light of the Gyüker Chronicle?

Source, Data, Method

To begin venturing answers to the questions raised above, it is worth considering the understanding of time and methods of managing time from a bottom-up perspective. Historical time is considered personal time when the individual interprets the age in which he lives in light of her own circumstances. Changing concepts of time in peasant communities are the last stage in the spread of modernity.12 Given the scarcity of intermediary channels, it is in these communities that we can hope to find the endpoint. This approach is more exciting when analysis is possible across generations. From the viewpoint of the availability of sources, however, we must consider ourselves lucky to have even a single source on which to rely. So far, only one such source is known in Hungary.13 A peasant chronicle, written by multiple generations, has survived from the village of Bőcs, more specifically a part of this village called Külsőbőcs, near Miskolc in northern Hungary. József Gyüker is thought to have begun recording his memories and what he had been told of the decade or so preceding his birth in 1863. In the late 1880s, his grandson, also named József Gyüker, wrote his notes in chronological order as a convenient means of linear narration.14 His son and grandson later wrote a few entries of their own. In the absence of a comparable source spanning multiple generations and a century and a half, I find it worthwhile to compare this chronicle with records that cover the same period and the roughly same territory of the country and relate to rural, specifically village communities. The selection was based on two data banks. In addition to the database of more than 600 items compiled by György Kövér, Zsuzsanna Kiss, and Anikó Lukács, I browsed the nearly 250 annotated first-person accounts written by peasants and published by the Lendület Ten Generations Research Group at the Research Centre for the Humanities.15 In the selection process, territorial representativeness and the connection to the periods were important criteria. The main parameters of the selected sources are summarized in Table 1.

Reliable records produced by members of the peasantry and suitable for deeper analysis began to be kept in greater quantities in the mid-twentieth century. The stratum-specific nature of literacy means that there are relatively few sources available from earlier periods. In any case, the diversity of village life justifies the need to focus not only on serfs and peasants, but also on the local intellectuals, clergymen, and schoolmasters, who were also an integral part of this life.

Title	Author	Occu­pation	Date of origin	Covered period	Location
Vajszló Chronicle	Dániel Kis Tóth	peasant	1830	1700–1830	Vajszló (Baranya County)
Gábor Kátai’s chronicle	Gábor Kátai	peasant	1838	1700–1838	Karcag (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County)
The records of the Gyüker family	József Gyüker the Elder; József Gyüker the Younger	peasant; peasant	1863–1866; 1889–1933; 1940–1944	1787–1944	Bőcs (Borsod-Ababúj-Zemplén County)
János Helle’s memoirs	János Helle	pastor	1821–1870	1821–1870	Alsónyék (Tolna County)
Lajos Arató’s memoirs	Lajos Arató	school­master	1928–1934	1863–1934	Szeghalom (Békés County)

 

Table 1. The source material providing the basis for the analysis

 

Source: Mándoki, Ormánság népéletéből; S. Püski, “Kátai”; “Gyüker család feljegyzései”; MMgMK IV. 456. Helle János feljegyzései; Szeghalmi Könyvtár és Közérdekű Muzeális Gyűjtemény T.86.84.1. id. Arató Lajos visszaemlékezése.

In terms of geography, the sources are from the northern region of Hungary, the Great Plain, and the southern parts of Transdanubia. In terms of farming opportunities, arable farming and animal husbandry predominate, especially as, in addition to Karcag and Szeghalom, which belong to the Great Hungarian Plain, Alsónyék and Vajszló, although Transdanubian villages, belong to the same lowland landscape structure (the former as part of the microregion known as Sárköz, the latter as part of the microregion known as Ormánság). Their economic profiles included trade, which is emphasized in all the sources except Arató’s recollections, and also trade to distant commercial posts, such as market towns in Hungary and abroad. A further direction for research could include discussion of sources from northern Transdanubia.

Findings

The multi-generational Gyüker Chronicle of the peasant family that forms the backbone of the analysis here starts with an entry which is relevant to the life in the village and the local church and which and which touches on events which predated the birth of the author by more than a decade and thus were clearly descriptions offered by him based on second-hand information, presumably accounts given by his older family or community members.16 Among the comparable nineteenth-century chronicles, the Vajszló Chronicle by Dániel Kis Tóth, which was written in 1830, and the chronicle by Gábor Kátai of Karcag, which was written in 1860, precisely define 1700 as the starting point of the narratives they offer. For these narratives, this year is presumably a reference point, namely a year which, in the perception of the authors, had been a very specific watershed moment for their own age. If interpreted in a flexible way, 1700 in Hungary means the post-Turkish period, which meant the reorganization of economic and social life. In the areas depopulated during the period of Turkish occupation, such as Karcag in the Great Plain, this was also a difficult period of resettlement. Kátai starts with this:

In the year 1700, Karcag was captured by the Tatars; those who escaped went to Rakamaz and lived there for nine years, and the town was burned and destroyed by the Tatars; in the year 1710, those who were in Rakamaz came home […]. And the Church was finished in 1797, it was consecrated on All Saints’ Day in the same year.17

For Dániel Kis Tóth, who lived in Vajszló in southern Transdanubia, where the Turkish occupation affected the lives of the locals but did force the continuity to flee, this year was notable in other ways: “I begin to count the origin and history of this clan from 1700; it was then when our forefather István Kis Tóth was born; his two sons were György and János.” The Tatar armies devastated Karcag a few years earlier, in 1697,18 while the exact date of the birth of Dániel Kis Tóth’s forefather cannot be determined due to the lack of birth records, although it can be assumed that it dates back somewhat earlier.19 Their concept of time is thus strongly based on the memories (if second-hand in some cases) of the life and history of the settlement or the family, but the fact that the local residence was also decisive for Dániel Kis Tóth is indicated by his remark about the place of his ancestor’s birth. He notes that István Kis Tóth was born in Haraszti, which was already part of Vajszló when he was writing his narrative in 1830. An important difference between the two is that Dániel Kis Tóth wrote a family chronicle, the basic organizational principle of which is the succession of generations, while Kátai followed a chronological order in his chronicle. The generational narrative is only present in Kis Tóth’s writing. Reflections on the lives of ancestors is at most a minor element in the other narratives. József Gyüker the Elder, like Kátai, starts his chronicle with an event relevant to the settlement:

The writing of Stories Worthy of Memory; the order of priests and schoolmasters was established in 1787 by the venerable Ecclesiastical See; in 1788, the reign of Emperor Francis I of Austria began, the first French war started with his reign, lasting four and a half years […], 1793 was the great lean year, which some of the old may remember, it is said, that 1794 was also such a year, until the harvest came.

The events mentioned by Gyüker can be interpreted in several ways. The determination of the order of priests and schoolteachers meant the determination of salaries, presumably due to the lack of extra-parish minutes, especially the presbyter’s minutes. The income of Calvinist priests and schoolteachers depended to a considerable extent on the number and financial situation of the members of the church community. However, this was before his birth, so his source must build either on the accounts of members of the community in which he lived or the local historical sources already mentioned. The latter seems more likely. Gyüker relies, presumably, on inherited oral accounts to date the “Great Tribulation,” a difficult period that left a deep imprint on the memories of older people. However, the definition of the pastoral and teaching order would not have been a similarly traumatic event and thus was unlikely to have survived as part of the recollections of members of the older generations. Gyüker was presumably drawing on information found in a written source, which may have been a late eighteenth-century record. As the village’s magistrate as of 1836 and therefore a lay magistrate, he would have had the opportunity to consult this kind of source, since he had access to the village’s official records. Either then or later, but knowing the source, he learned of the event which had taken place in 1787. We can assume that his source may have been a contemporary record since, in the case of a village history or similar compilation, medieval or early modern references would presumably not have been missed. In connection with Bőcs, there are no surviving accounts of tragic events resembling the accounts of events that had taken place in Karcag. There are no indications that the inhabitants were driven away or that those who remained at home were deported at the end of the seventeenth century. In Kátai’s writing, this is a traumatic point, which was of great importance and also stood out in the chronological narrative, since the account of the period of resettlement is followed by a mention of 1772 as the year in which the three-field system was established, followed by the consecration of the church in 1797. From this point of view, there is no significant interval in the historical time as seen by Kátai and Gyüker the Elder, which undoubtedly focused on important events in the life of the settlement and reflected the division of time into periods in the accounts handed down from one generation to another in oral narratives.20

In Gyüker’s entry, however, the monarch is also named. In this respect, of course, his memory is not flawless. In 1788, Joseph II was still on the throne, but even Leopold II, who reigned for two years, was no longer remembered. Although Francis was the first emperor of Austria, he began his reign as Holy Roman Emperor, numbered Francis II. And the French War which Gyüker called the first, began not in 1788 but in 1792. But for Gyüker, who was 64 years old in 1863, the beginning of his personal time was marked by Emperor Francis (emphatically not named as king of Hungary) and the war with the French, which meant that Gyüker placed himself in both local and, in his conception, global history. The latter, that is, a concept of time that goes beyond the local as global, should not be mistaken for a sign of the global impact of the French War, even if one can argue from the perspective of later events that this war did have a significant impact, but rather is better understood as an indication of the size of the world conceivable by Gyüker. The period during which Emperor Francis sat on the throne, who was also King of Hungary between 1792 and 1835, may have been an early time for him because of the length of Francis’ reign. The memory of Francis as a ruler was also deeply imprinted in public consciousness visually because of his portrait on coins, where for much of this time the following inscription was running around his head: FRANCISCUS I D G AUST IMPERATOR. In Gyüker’s entry, therefore, only the “by the grace of God” part was omitted with regard to the monarch. In Helle’s case, the beginning is in medias res:

In 1821, towards the end of August, the water, which had already prevailed, flooded so much that, as travelers from Pest said, the whole Pest market, the part towards Pest, Óbuda, the lower part of Buda, the “water city” was completely submerged; consequently, it also took the embankment of Nyék, and entered Déllő and the courtyard of the school house. The cattle have also been displaced from the inner pasture, from the forest. According to residents, the last time the water was this high was eight years ago.21

Helle’s opening does not create a historical context. He was the village pastor, and he had come to this village from far away (his birthplace, Nagyharsány, is half a day’s walk from Alsónyék). He may have made these notes not only because the events described seemed worth remembering to him but also perhaps as a way of identifying a possible explanation for any shortfall in the benefits he was given by the congregation. Compared to the first passages of Helle’s notes, Arató’s recollections tell of experiences. He was associated with several municipalities, and these associations indicate the places where he served in addition to his place of birth. For him, too, regional and personal time takes on a different reading, as in Helle’s case.22 Arató spent most of his time in Szeghalom, but his municipal history cannot be compared to that of Gyüker or Kátai. He presented the years and events in which he personally played a part or had a particularly formative role (such as the improvement of the May Day celebrations or the unveiling of the statue of Kossuth). The temporal structure of his narrative is therefore peculiar compared to the temporal structures of the previous ones, because he focuses on turning points, on the “outliers” of memory. Kis Tóth saw his life as a parallel to that of the biblical Job:

It is true (says Solomon the Wise) that the light is sweet, and it is delightful for the eyes to see the Sun; but I can write for myself what Job the patriarch says in Job 3:11. Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb; you will find in this Book all the great details of my life, my condition, my sufferings, and my complaints; each epistle is numbered and can be found on the index table; (though it is too late for the remnant, that if God hath pleased me to be).

Arató’s stories, however, seem more to follow the Solomonic approach, as the motto introducing the manuscript makes clear: “Joyful years and happy days. Oh, when I think of you! You have drifted away like the waves of spring!” In contrast, the two Gyükers (especially the elder) and Kátai do not discuss the events of each year from an emotional perspective. Rather, they focus on the circumstances that provide the framework for peasant and everyday life.

In the entries composed by Gyüker the Elder, the interplay of family, local, national, and sometimes European events are sometimes captured, even when these events all took place in a single year:

In 1809, my elder sister married András Bényei, who was with us until Saint Michael’s Day, when he was drafted as a soldier and served for a year and a half. As a child, I was so shy, and we managed to make do with the help of others. In the same year, in anticipation of the fourth French war, the emperor ordered military mobilization for the nobles, which they did, and they assembled in camp near Komárom; France broke through the greater part of Hungary at Győr, and here the armies and nobles engaged them, but fortune favored the French; and then having made peace, the German emperor suffered a great loss; the nobility dispersed in the same year, each to his own place.

The close temporal connection also suggests causal links, which may well have been one of the principal aims of the author. András Bényei, who had recently married into the family, demonstrates the labor organization in extended families, and the war primarily represented damage and loss (as was later the case for his grandson with the outbreak of World War I), as was evident in the corruption of the family labor organization. In addition to the indirect mention of Napoleon as a historical figure of global significance, the reference to the Battle of Győr also reveals the violation of the foundations of the feudal order and a gradual awareness of this. After half a century, the disgraceful flight of the nobility at Győr, who were doing military service instead of paying taxes, remained an integral part of memory even after the dismantling of the legal framework of the feudal order. Of course, the comparatively small town of Bőcs found itself on the stage of global history not only because of the French wars but also because of the arrival of the potato, which originated in South America. This was also a significant event that transformed the culture of consumption.

Festivals and saints’ feast days are regularly mentioned by the authors of the sources under study. In fact, mentions of these occasions can be seen as indications of moments of normality, whereas everything else that happened was a representation of the extraordinary. It is not my aim to describe the festivals and the rites associated with them, which have been thoroughly studied by scholars of ethnography,23 but only to give a brief overview of the significant days that the authors whose recollections I am using as sources chose as recurring points. The chronological order is not linked to the start and end dates of the agricultural year (traditionally the feast days of Saint George in April and Saint Michael in September), which is why the year-start entries in the Gyüker Chronicle were linked less frequently to the Epiphany or to the feast days of Saint Vincent and Saint Paul (if not to a specific day). The two feast days are mentioned only in Gyüker the Younger’s entries, while the Epiphany or Russian Christmas was used by his grandfather. Saint Vincent’s Day (January 22) is recorded as being consistently foggy, while Saint Paul’s Day (January 25) was sunny. The saints’ feast days at the end of January were followed by the feast of Candlemas (February 2) and the feast of Saint Gregory (March 12), which marked the beginning of plowing for both the older and the younger generation. On Saint Joseph’s Day (March 19), still in keeping with tradition, sowing began so that it would be finished by Saint George’s Day.24 In the records composed by János Helle, Saint Joseph’s Day is mentioned as a recurring event because of the fairs in Pest. The Easter holidays were mentioned less frequently, not appearing at all in the case of Gyüker the Elder, but mentions of Saint George’s Day (April 24) were all the more prominent, for the reasons indicated and not merely because of its role in the agricultural order. According to the recollections of József Gyüker the Elder, in 1814, his brother was taken away as a soldier under orders. The importance of the feast day is underlined by the fact that it still had its gravitational force from the Middle Ages:25 the events before and after it were related to this day. For example, in 1863, “[a]fter good weather in March, April came with cold winds, which didn’t grow but rather spoiled everything, the vines were worked in the weeks before Saint George’s Day, in cold winds.” Saint John’s Day (June 24) was also, if not to the same extent, an important part of the task-oriented annual rhythm.26 In 1831, it was the spread of cholera that made this feast day memorable for the Gyüker the Elder:

On Saint John’s Day, we started to hoe on Batka, but already then cholera had appeared in many places; it started in Lucs sooner than in Bőcs, it was impossible to go straight to the fields, there were guards, but one had to go a roundabout way to the wild waters; it appeared in our village too after a short time, and in two months, 65 people died, not children, but men and women; one was not allowed to go from one village to another, there were guards everywhere.

 

The prominence of the feast day as a marker of the passage of time is evident in several entries, not only in the case of Gyüker the Elder but also in the case of Gyüker the Younger, for instance in one entry writes, “starting on the day of Saint John, it was very hot for three days.” The fact that József Gyüker the Elder’s records may have been based on almanacs or other earlier records is, however, suggested by the passages in which the days before or after the feast day are not necessarily mentioned in the context of the feast but as independent days.27 Saint Martin’s Day, in contrast to Saint Michael’s Day (which brought the agricultural year to a close), seems to be more significant for the chronicle and was observed by both generations in their lives. After Saint Martin’s Day, only Christmas appears, with Saint Andrew’s Day (November 30) going essentially unmentioned (except in 1928). The special days of the agricultural year were major events in the lives of members of both the older and the younger generations, or at least these days are frequently mentioned in the source. Particular feast days remained points of reference even for the grandson, even though by the time he was writing the use of the month and the day was a more widespread method of indicating a date. A noticeable change, however, took place in the naming of the feasts. References to Saint Martin’s feast in the entries composed by Gyükér the Elder always included the word “saint,” while this word is found in this context in entries by his grandson only until 1889, and from 1910 to 1927 he simply called it Martin’s Day (in 1927, he again referred to it as Saint Martin’s Day). Saint Andrew’s Day, only mentioned in 1903, is also given without the word “saint.” Mentions of Saint George’s Day and Saint John’s Day consistently include the word “saint,” while Saint Paul’s Day is called by various names, but again only by Gyüker the Younger. Obviously, this might suggest a slight degree of laicization, but given the frequent expressions of gratitude to “God Almighty” and assurance of trust in God, this seems unlikely.

The accounts of individuals’ lives included mention of major events, namely marriage, birth, and death. Women and girls were mostly mentioned in these contexts and less often in connection with a vacancy in the family labor organization. There is a marked difference in the recording of births between Gyüker the Elder and Gyüker the Younger. József Gyüker the Elder considered it important to record his and his wife’s birth dates (although he never referred to his wife, Erzsébet Makláry, by name), and so did his grandson (but he referred to his wife, Julianna Almási, by name). Gyüker the Elder did not record the dates of the births of any of his children, while Gyüker the Younger wrote them down one by one: József in 1885, Julcsa in 1888, Zsófi in 1890, and Julianna in 1894. Death in the family played a more important role for Gyüker the Elder. He noted that his father died in 1802, his paternal uncle, the bell founder János Gyüker, in 1831, his brother, István, in 1849, and his son, Samu, in 1850. Apparently, József Gyüker the Elder’s attention was essentially directed towards the older members of the family, and his son was an exception only due to his tragically premature death. In the case of his grandson, József Gyüker the Younger, the deaths of his parents, his wife, and his younger brother are listed, as well as the deaths of his daughters Julcsa in 1889 and Zsófi in 1893. In his case, even the children were given more attention. Their births and deaths were milestones in his understanding of personal time. This tendency to devote greater attention to the fates of his offspring may be reflected in the practice (also only observed by József Gyüker the Younger) of indicating the astrological sign of his children at birth. When it came to this, however, his references were inaccurate. He thought that his son József, who was born on November 8, was a Sagittarius, his daughter Julcsa (born on February 8) a Capricorn, Zsófi (born on August 3) a Pisces, and Julianna (born on December 29) an Aquarius. Not only was he consistently wrong, his blunders were sometimes quite notable (for instance, the notion that someone born in August is a Pisces), so it is different to imagine that he drew on the almanacs. Regardless of this, however, his interest in the signs of the Zodiac as a means of structuring time offers some indication of his interest in the eventual fates of his offspring, since he presumably hoped to learn something of his children’s futures from these signs, for instance, whether they were born under a so-called lucky star.28

Although astrology emerged as a new marker in the concept of time among peasants, the spread of the clock brought about a more significant change. According to an entry by József Gyüker the Elder, the clock first appeared in Bőcs around 1840, he himself bought one around 1850, and then, “in 1860, as there was a very abundant harvest, everyone could afford anything, so others bought them too, as the price was not much. One could be bought for five or six silver coins, whatever kind the poor farmer needed; thus began the clock in Bőcs.” What could he have meant by the phrase “whatever kind the poor farmer needed?” In his 1864 entries, he repeatedly describes events to the nearest hour. For instance, he notes that on March 13, at 4 p.m., there was a strong, cold wind and sleet, and on June 11, around 5 or 6 o’clock, there was a strong wind with little rain. On October 24, 1866, at 11 p.m., there was an earthquake. It is unlikely that it was some need to record these kinds of events that made the clock important to the farmers. Beyond the fact that it was obviously a prestige object, the clock may have had a more practical use as well. Gyüker the Elder began his account of the events of 1859 with the construction of the railway, which played an important role in the life of the village in the development of both trade and employment. And keeping up with the train now required the precise measurement of time to the minute.29 In the case of József Gyüker the Younger, documentation up to the hour is, understandably, much more frequent. In addition to the weather events, he also recorded family events mostly to the hour. For example, his daughter Zsófi is known to have been born on August 3, 1890, at 2 p.m. and to have died on March 19, 1893, at 10 p.m., and his mother, Zsuzsanna Nagy, died at 10 p.m. on June 7, 1913. Consequently, the emergence of the clock had not only an economic role, either as a prestige object or as a means of keeping up with the train schedule. It was also a means of experiencing certain events, especially family events, in a deeper way. In 1830, the clock is mentioned in the Vajszló Chronicle more as a hoarded prestige object,30 while in the case of Arató’s narrative, the exact or approximate time of certain important events was kept rather as part of the flashbulb memory. In Helle’s records, an indication of the time of an event that was precise to the hour was exceptional, but in these cases, one can assume that Helle used the time signals of the church. Gábor Kátai gives the first exact time when recording the earthquake of July 1, 1829 (8 p.m.). He writes, “at the town hall the bell rang and the sheep bells on the nail rang.” It can be assumed that here, as in the case of the fire at noon on May 23, 1831, the tolling of the bells drew attention to the clock tower, if there was one (further research is needed to determine this).31 The clock was also a sign of modernity in contemporary society. The clock represented both the figurative and the concrete sense of the passage of time in the home. More abstract units of time than the hour itself, such as the minute and the second, become part of life in rural homes. They were given form and sound by their structural carrier, or in other words, modernity itself became a tangible, rapidly running, ticking experience for rural society.

Conclusions

József Gyüker the Younger learned of the events described in the proposition, such as the possibility of flying in 1928, the spread of the bicycle and the powered plough, and many other pieces of information from the newspaper rather than from the almanacs.32 He had access to more information and apparently thought it important to write down more things than his grandfather had. Price statistics appear in his entries more and more frequently, which must have become increasingly important for him because of purchasing and especially selling. The question is whether this greater amount of information, which took more time to absorb and process, was worth the time spent. I believe that Gyüker the Younger’s aim by following price movements was to make more money by selling and to get a higher return on the time invested. This was probably facilitated by local rail transport, but it required keeping up with rail transport. Exposure to the natural environment continued to play a significant role in the perception of time for members of Gyüker the Younger’s generation, but more efficient management also required more efficient time management. The spread of the clock and the way it became an integral part of the main areas of life definitely furthered this. Regardless of this, however, the regular use of references to exact years, months, and days and the occasional use of the clock as ways of marking the time of an event indicates a modern concept of time in the case of József Gyüker the Elder. Not only is this practice refined in his case of his grandson, who notably indicated the very hour of an important event, but there are also more frequent moments, in his narrative, of retrospection. While József Gyüker the Elder looks back on the events of the past by writing the chronicle itself, his grandson repeatedly reflects on earlier events even within the very text. Indeed, this becomes quite common in entries written after World War I. We do not know why József Gyüker (1836–1897) (the son of Gyüker Elder and the father of Gyüker the Younger) did not continue his father’s chronicle, but we do have information about why the youngest József Gyüker (1909–?) abandoned it: “he has no time to write.” In other words, for Gyüker the Elder, the time he spent writing was understood as leisure time, not work time, while for his grandson, Gyüker the Younger, this time was work time, as it facilitated work and productivity. From this point of view, this time lost its purely leisure-time character. Instead, the importance of time as a means of keeping accounts became more and more important. In time, Gyüker the Younger devoted even this time spent on writing to work, which is one more indication of the disappearance of traditional peasant life.33

Acknowledgments

The study of larger-scale processes of modernization and globalization at the local level has been a long-standing interest for me. For a long time, however, I had had trouble finding suitable source materials. György Kövér, My Ph.D. supervisor, helped me overcome this when he recalled a seminar he held more than ten years ago in which we also studied the Gyüker Chronicle. For the scanned copy of the original manuscript, I would like to thank the staff of the Scientific Collections of the Reformed College of Sárospatak. I would also like to thank the director of the Szeghalom Library and Museum Collection of Public Interest, Klára Hajdú, for providing the transcription of Lajos Arató’s memoirs. I am grateful to Gábor Gyáni and Veronika Eszik for their suggestions and comments regarding the manuscript.

Archival Sources

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DGS 004704131–32: Belsőbőcs (Borsod). Calvinist registers, 1714–1895.

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Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum és Könyvtár [Hungarian Agricultural Museum and Library] (MMgMK)

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456. Helle János feljegyzései [János Helle’s records] [1821–1870],

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Szeghalmi Könyvtár és Közérdekű Muzeális Gyűjtemény [Szeghalom Library and Museum Collection of Public Interest]

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Milk and Laboratories in Urban-Rural and State-Society Relations: The Case of Hungary from the Beginning of Wartime Shortages until the Great Depression

Róbert Balogh
University of Public Service, Institute of Central European Studies
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 1  (2023):118–146 DOI 10.38145/2023.1.118

The paper analyses the roles of milk production and milk supply in the changes of the state-society relations and knowledge production in 20th early century Hungary. It places laboratories and the perception of milk as material in the centre of analysis prompting a narrative that takes account of the hybrid nature of milk. Building on arguments that Bruno Latour and Timothy Mitchell formulated, this study reveals key aspects of government, economy and modernity by using the notion that there are no clear boundaries between culture and nature. Hybridity also refers to the impossibility of controlling for all aspects of “nature.” The first part of the paper takes laboratories as junctures of legislation and urban-rural relations. The second part highlights the urban conditions as well as the local political contexts of milk consumption and milk shortage in the World War I and post-World War I period. Overall, the paper is a case for why food history is one of the ways to take research beyond methodological nationalism without having to ignore the realm of politics.

Keywords: Food shortage, urban-rural relations, milk history, history of science, history of cooperatives, interwar Hungary

Introduction: The Political Implications of Milk as a Hybrid in Modernity

This paper is about the ways in which the social meanings of urban milk consumption and the testing of milk in laboratories influenced relations between urban and rural areas, and also between the central state and local society in Hungary during World War I and in the interwar period. Hungary in this period offers a particularly good case for linking political history to the developments of the milk economy, which was a global history.

Largely due to the fall in grain prices in the second half of the nineteenth century, when World War I broke out, the milk economy had already been expanding rapidly for more than half a century in Europe.1 From being a niche market in the early nineteenth century, it grew into one of the major economic activities and markets. It is indicative of the timing of the surge in Hungary that, in 1905, the eminent educationalist László Mócsy (1871–1955) published an educational parable titled “The Good Cow,” in which he offered farmers advice on how to select cows that would have plenty of milk.2 Mócsy mentioned the presence of official advisors in rural areas the importance of knowledge about proper stable conditions, and he also noted that there was a state-run breeding campaign.

The history of milk brings together the history of science, agriculture, and agrarian policy. There would be no processed milk without human intervention, and there would be no milk to pasteurize, homogenize, and consume without the animals in the background. Research concerning animal nutrition, the genetic qualities of various breeds, and milk quality were all important aspects of this encounter among the sciences, livestock practices, and state policy over the course of the twentieth century.3 Building on arguments put forward by Timothy Mitchell and Bruno Latour on the historical implications of such hybridity, I show how incessant efforts to draw boundaries between culture and nature and the repeated failures of these ultimately hopeless efforts shaped the perceptions of urban consumers, rural suppliers, the physical constellations of marketplaces, and state presence in the marketplace between the second half of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression ten years later. Summarizing the historical research in biotechnologies, Helen Curry posits that the backbone of experimental biology was the belief in technological control throughout the twentieth century.4 Mitchell points out that the idea that control was possible was a grave error. He offers the following somewhat cautionary remark:

Instead of invoking the force and logic of reason, self-interest, science, or capital and attributing what happens in the world to the working of these enchanted powers and processes, we can open up the question […] of what kinds of hybrid agencies, connections, interactions, and forms of violence are able to portray their actions as history, as human expertise overcoming nature, as the progress of reason and modernity, or as the expansion and development of capitalism.5

Focusing on Louis Pasteur’s experiments and discoveries, Latour came to a similar conclusion, and he demonstrated that the encounter of germs, scientific experiments and demonstrations, scientists’ ambitions, specific agricultural practices, and the culture of public spaces ended up changing many aspects of rural and urban life in France and, then, worldwide.6 In the period discussed here, milk traveled through society impacting and triggering responses in many different milieus and power relations. Monographic studies by Peter Atkins and Deborah Valenze on the economy, politics, and knowledge production behind the rise of milk economy and its globalization in the late nineteenth century show that the history of the interaction between the human on the one hand and the material on the other is one of the ways to take research beyond methodological nationalism without having to ignore the realm of politics in a specific state.7 As Atkins puts it,

As a commodity, [milk] became a site of politics as different groups vied to have their interests protected or their solutions implemented […] Milk was never the same materially, socially, culturally, economically, or politically after its entry into the networks that provisioned cities. These were not just systems of delivery but vast engines of transformation. They nourished bodies; they spread disease; they encouraged the make-over of agro-ecosystems and landscapes in the distant countryside; they enabled a re-imagining of cities as spaces without farming; they transformed food economies; and they encouraged a new form of food politics.8

Indeed, there are at least four specific contexts in which the realm of high politics and milk met in the period under study. First, there is the impact of wartime food shortages and rationing imposed by the state on citizens, which often pitted urban and rural communities against each other.9 Second, the sate attempted to bring milk cooperatives within the supply chain that was under its control. Third, one has to consider the regional specificities of the place of milk-cooperatives outside the most developed core of Europe. Fourth, one also needs to take into account the municipal level of politics.

Regarding the first two points, Tiago Saraiva’s work on the importance of agriculture in establishing interwar regimes in Europe is immediately relevant theses.10 Saraiva shows that there was a close relationship between authoritarian control and agriculture. In Hungary, the central state was not able to alter the shortage economy in the immediate post-World War I period, but by the mid-1930s, it gradually overtook and established control over the network of milk cooperatives.

While there is a rich secondary literature on milk cooperatives in Europe, there is hardly any work discussing Central Europe. Most of the existing studies foreground the political aspects of the realm of cooperatives in general and of milk-cooperatives in particular. Csekő Ernő offers a skeptical view and casts doubt on the notion that the milk market was beneficial for inhabitants of rural communities.11 With regards to Estonia and Greece, which, like Hungary, were also semi-peripheral countries, Johan Eellend, Dimitris Angelis-Dimakis, and Catherine Bregianni emphasize that access to credit was the main factor when it came to the potential success of the milk cooperative movements, and that comparatively easy access to capital gave leverage to states and prevented an autonomous cooperative realm from emerging. Eellend suggests that this influence of states was in tension with another defining feature of cooperatives. As he observes,

By demanding participation and responsibility from the members and demanding that the farmers put a great portion of their production in the hands of the cooperatives, the cooperatives had a comprehensive impact on the farmer’s life and the local community. This created an alternative rural public, which ideals were based in economic efficiency and cooperation within the community.12

In his discussion of various cooperative networks in Hungary, Attila Hunyadi places the cooperative movements of the late nineteenth century in the context of nationalism, and he characterizes them as venues for learning and developing political culture in terms of attitudes towards the state and the act of voting. Attila Vári frames the cooperative movement in Hungary quite differently, situating it within Agrarian politics and the struggle for primacy within or control over the National Hungarian Economic Association (Országos Magyar Gazdasági Egyesület, OMGE) and influence over its membership. Agrarians in Hungary promoted the modernization of machinery and tools as well as the cooperative movement. At the same time, they were hostile to trade unions and other nations in the region. Many Agrarians held various anti-Semitic views, seeing land-owning Jews and the alleged mass immigration of Jews as one of the elements that went against the formation of a wealthy Hungarian class of landowners. OMGE and the Alliance of Farmers formed within it in 1896 were the major force behind the cooperative movement in Hungary.

At least one contemporary popular didactic short story made it clear that the relationship between anti-Semitism and OMGE’s support for the spread of cooperatives was strong at the local level already in the early 1900s. László Salgó told a fable about how activists from Budapest used the influence of the local Church personnel to trick local wealthy farmers into forming a cooperative shop in order to get rid of the local grocery shop, which was fun by a Jewish couple.13 Salgó’s story ended with a scene of farmers going bankrupt due the cooperative’s irresponsible business practices. The ending even suggested that the activists from Budapest and big time Jewish traders eventually benefited and perhaps even planned the whole trap together. This association between cooperatives and anti-Semitic thought is potentially relevant to the milk economy. For example, based on contemporary municipal business directories of Debrecen published in the interwar period, most milk sellers in the city were likely to be persons who had Jewish backgrounds (Sándor Lefkovics, Klára Schenk, Manó Gottlieb, Mózes Steinmetz, József Glück, Mrs. József Popper, and Erzsébet Werner).14 Krisztián Ungváry suggests that anti-Semitism is a key to any nuanced understanding of economic policy in interwar Hungary, while other overviews of the period see the character of these policies differently.15 No one has yet offered substantial support for the hypothesis according to which there were anti-Semitic motives behind the formation of milk cooperatives or behind state intervention in this area. An analysis of the withdrawal of permits for milk trade in 1938 and thereafter would likely indicate political motives behind this form of state intervention in the field in the post-Depression period. The data about the issuance and withdrawal of permits to sell milk would also tell a great deal about the roles of women in the milk economy.

In any discussion of the milk economy, one needs to include the municipal level, too. Laura Umbrai’s research on the milk market of Budapest shows the importance of municipal institutions and decisions in establishing a balance between the demand for milk on the one hand and the public health risks of permitting milk to be sold on the market on the other.16 This will come up in more detail in a later section of this paper. Miklós Szuhay was the first agrarian historian to explore the background to the attempt of the central government to reorganize the supply chain of milk in the Budapest market in the early 1930s. Since the goal of governmental decrees was to eliminate small producers and make price depend on agreement reached between large stakeholders who would negotiate within a board chaired by the Ministry of Agriculture, the episode points out the growing ambition for direct state control over the economy as well towards corporatism.17

In order to address the implications of the various contemporary under­standings of the milk trade for urban-rural and state-society relations, I have broken up my discussion into four section. The first section introduces state authorized quality testing of milk in laboratories in Hungary. It outlines how the laboratory environments interacted with various practices of rural and urban communities. It shows how, furthermore, as a result of these intersections, laboratory testing was the meeting point of top-down and bottom-up understandings of a modern economy. The second and third sections turn to a selected region in western Hungary. By focusing on tensions and discourses caused by the shortage of milk in an urban context (that of the city of Szombathely) and on the history of the milk cooperatives that were to supply this city, I show how the shift from low to high food prices and the history of food control are essential factors if one wishes to arrive at an adequately nuanced understanding of the relationship between rural and urban areas as well as between state and society. The choice of a border area as a case study (specifically, Vas County in western Hungary) means putting some emphasis on the role of smuggling in the post-World War I economy. This does not mean, however, that this case is so particular that it is not relevant to the broader discussion. Rather, this case shows that the presence of a regulatory state should not be taken for granted, and it also integrates geographical concerns into the picture. Milk cooperatives in the region enter the framework as scapegoats for shortages, but their story is also about the emerging agenda of the expanding state in the interwar period in Hungary.

Milk Testing in Laboratories as the Meeting Point of Top-down and
Bottom-up Understandings of Modernity

As the secondary literature has shown, milk was a prime target of control and was something beyond control at the same time. Contemporaries attempted to commodify a hybrid: milk was a natural-cultural phenomena with which both people with medical and engineering expertise and administrative bodies struggled. This section examines the ways in which laboratories can be seen as sites which yield insights into the ways in which local rural society responded to the rise of milk consumption and new institutions it brought with it.

Research on the history of the emergence of scientific institutions in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungary makes it clear that the idea that the state needed to control food quality and develop food items for the international market was a large part of the motivation for the establishment of laboratories and the justification for providing them with funding.18 However, laboratories are not neutral sites of scientific inquiry and experiment: they transform the materials with which they work and, in turn, influence the outer world. Milk products had several social meanings, each of which was influenced by the state, scientists, and local communities. First, as urban poverty and the vision of a demographic crisis arising from the (alleged) waning capacity of women to be good mothers caused moral panic, milk became a key commodity of urban economy and urban governance.19 In an article published in Orvosi Hetilap (Medical Weekly) in 1890, Ede Egán, the inspector general of the milk industry, who had British origins and a well-functioning estate in Vas County, emphasized the importance of milk as a commodity in increasing demand.20 He claimed that ensuring safe milk at affordable prices had motivated him to set up a milk cooperative structure (Budapesti Központi Tejcsarnok Szövetkezet or Budapest Central Dairy Cooperative) in Budapest.21 Outstanding contemporary researchers, such as Ernő Deutsch (1875–1944) and Salamon Székely (1860–1936), focused their efforts on making cow milk safe for consumption by newborns.22 According to Székely, the main challenge was to reduce the proportion of casein, and he believed that carbonic acid was the key to this. Infant mortality due to the inability of young babies to digest milk substitutes indicated that cow milk could save or kill children. In the interwar period, as eugenics continued to gain sway among some circles of scientists and in the public mind, the political meaning of children gained a new significance: national revival. Accordingly, several national-level organizations (such as Magyar Asszonyok és Nők Nemzeti Szövetsége, or the National League of Hungarian Wives and Women, Országos Stefánia Szövetség, or Stefánia League, which was named after Rudolf Habsburg’s widow, and the Zöldkereszt Mozgalom, or Green Cross Movement) disseminated knowledge about the importance of breastfeeding and the feeding of small children.23

As historian Peter Atkins and veterinarian Ottó Fettick (1875–1954) amply demonstrated, milk was both a potential carrier of deadly diseases and a key to feeding urban populations. In 1931, Fettick and another leading researcher, Lajos Szélyes (1885–1963), wrote a paper about the possible causal relations between anthrax in cattle and human illness. Referring to a case from 1928, the paper contained a passage about the potential economic impact of the decisions of scientists concerning the existence of links between disease in humans and milk produced by sick cows: “This question was not fully clarified, thus, the expert is puzzled when having to give an opinion as to whether milk produced during an anthrax infestation in stables should be offered to the public. With regards to such questions, interests of public health confront economic interests.”24

The social implications of the quality of milk also shifted in part because, by the 1910s, scientists had rediscovered cow milk as a nearly perfect food that contained enough calories and minerals to sustain a human being even if nothing else were available. It seemed especially advisable for children and sick adults to consume milk. As medical researchers and chiefly American biochemist Elmer V. McCollum began to discover the role of vitamins as an important part of a healthy diet, cow milk looked even more essential.25 This knowledge became common in the Western World and began to spread to areas known as colonies. In Hungary, the most spectacular example of the campaign to spread this new understanding of milk as an essential part of a nutritious diet was the poster emblazoned with the words “Milk is Life, Power, and Health” (A tej élet, erő, egészség), which was designed by Greek-born Hungarian athlete and artist Miltiades Manno in 1927.26 The poster was part of the efforts of the government to increase demand for milk, which was such an important policy objective that a specialized committee, the Milk Propaganda Committee (Tejpropaganda Bizottság), was set up in 1927 to achieve it. 27

Finally, dairy products, especially butter, emerged as an important item of international trade. The international congresses of various experts taking part in the milk economy were important sites of standardization of procedures, quality, and required stable conditions. These meetings had been taking place since 1903 under the umbrella of the International Dairy Federation. The aforementioned Fettick published a detailed report about one such congress in 1907.28 The key point in this transnational commodification of milk and dairy products came in 1925, when the standards for butter were accepted and márkázott vaj (branded butter) appeared in Hungary. Indeed, as Fettick’s report demonstrates, scientific research on the health effects of permissible and non-permissible technologies of milk processing fed into the ongoing process of international standardization. Prospectively, becoming part of the international supply chain of butter was one of the ways to achieve prosperity in rural settings. Archival sources indicate the importance of the British market for Hungary in the post-Depression period.29 How such prospective markets influenced rural milk producers in the 1920s or in the prewar period remains to be answered.

Laboratories and stable inspections were junctures for revealing and altering the social meanings of milk, and they also provided insights into the daily workings of the milk economy in rural and urban contexts. The Permanent Supervisory Council (Állandó Felülbíráló Tanács), which was one of the key institutional bodies of the milk economy of the first half of the twentieth century, relied on the results provided by local laboratories. The council was one of the agents of continuity between the interwar and postwar periods. This committee had the right to overrule decisions of first-level authorities about the quality of food items and refer decisions to the minister of agriculture. The surviving resolutions of the committee are held at the archives of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Budapest.30 The documents show the criteria used, the testing procedures, and the uncertainties surrounding these procedures, and they contain some indications about the provenance of samples, despite general anonymity. Most reports date from the years between 1911 and 1914, thus they took the 1896 regulatory provisions as their basis. The cases that came to the attention of the council due to appeals mainly concerned small-scale sellers who brought the milk from a single cow to the market and other retailers who sold the milk from three or four cows. In each cases, the suspicion was that the milk which had been brought to the market by these vendors was mixed with water and/or at least partially skimmed. The appeals show that the local authorities who did the testing often claimed to have found proof that these suspicions were founded even when several uncertainties remained unresolved. The most common problem with their testing method was that they did not control the stables or did not test milk milked in the morning and milked in the evening separately for fat content. In one of its decisions, the council also remarked that there was no single decree regulating the method to be used during stable inspections, though there were in fact several circulars regarding the issue. Moreover, the variance of chemical qualities of the samples that were compared to standards was sometimes so small that it might have been due to local specificities and not any process of dilution, as the first level authorities assumed. Overall, the number of cases in which the council felt it was not possible to make a statement about whether the milk had been diluted is remarkable and shows that the precise definition of milk as material and hybrid often defied scientific expertise. Unfortunately, only three milk related appeals are documented for the period after 1920. The first of these appeals was lodged in 1921. This appeal may offer a good introduction, for us, to a typical profession related to the production and sale of milk in the early twentieth century. It concerned a young woman bringing a family milk that had been diluted with water. The young woman who brought the milk and her mother had only one cow. The council ruled that the decision concerning the milk, according to which it had indeed been diluted with water, was not valid, since the cow’s milk had not been tested on two separate occasions that day and the environment in which it had been produced had not been inspected. The description in the appeal of the circumstances make it clear that the women were so-called “milimári.” This word is no longer in everyday use in Hungarian. In the first half of the twentieth century, it referred to milkmaids who brought milk to Budapest in small quantities, often directly supplying certain families or selling milk on Budapest markets.31

The University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest was home to the Milk Hygiene Laboratory, which was one of the major laboratories for milk testing in the early twentieth century. The registry of the laboratory shows that the institution was a center from which knowledge and technologies were disseminated across the country.32 Despite the diversity of themes on which the various surviving documents touch, the bulk of entries in the registry of the laboratory concerning testing milk produced in or transported to Budapest. According to the registry, most of the samples came from a very limited number of places. The private company called Central Milk Market-Hall Co. (Központi Tejcsarnok Rt., hereafter KT) frequently asked the lab to test whether its products were sterile. The results show that the company often experienced quality issues during milk processing in the years from which records related to the interwar period survived, that is, 1921–1929 and 1935–1937. Another milk-processing firm that often turned to the laboratory was Count Imre Károlyi’s private company, which was located in the northeastern fringes of the city. In addition to these companies, the National Child Shelter was the most frequent client. In their case, there were hardly any occasions when the milk that was tested proved problematic. These records suggest that most milk processing enterprises outside the capital were not interested in having the quality of their milk monitored by the laboratory at the university. The firms that sprung up during the 1920s, such as the ones in the towns of Eger and Nyíregyháza, were monitored by another institution, the Royal Milk Product Testing Station, which was set up in 1928.33 This institution was the only one authorized to allow firms to use state authorized stamps on their products. Due to the international standardization of butter in the mid-1920s, without such certification, export was no longer possible.34

The Milk Hygiene Laboratory frequently provided advice on issues concerning the handling of milk, suggested reasons why milk went bad, and offered guidance concerning how to stop contagious disease in stables. In doing so, it came into contact with local veterinary doctors and inspectors of agricultural establishments and also with managers. Thus, the laboratory was a key agent in identifying sites infected with forms of animal tuberculosis. Moreover, through quality testing, it indirectly defined who had done their job well locally. In fact, at times, science became a direct part of labor relations. When the management of one estate suspected that one of the maids had been pouring water into the milk on a regular basis, for example, it asked the laboratory to test a sample. The result of the test, however, was negative,35 the maid presumably kept her job. The documents offer no further details, but it was presumably the maid who asked for the test to be carried out. It is remarkable that the manager of the estate did not make a decision without certification from the laboratory at a time when labor was no longer a scarcity.

Indeed, the milk industry was a field in which women could have careers. The career of Lídia Nagy is a case in point. She managed one of the small Transdanubian centers of Count Pál Eszterházy’s Milk Firm.36 When she was about to be promoted, she recommended, as a potential replacement, another woman who had completed the same specialized school as she had, probably the one in Sárvár (a town in Vas County). Besides keeping track of the amount and provenance of milk that reached the skimming station in Középbogárd (a village in Fejér County), Nagy was in charge of taking measurements with thermometers and butyroemeters, and she also monitored and adjusted butter production to meet demand and to address complaints about quality. She submitted reports in writing on a weekly basis and sometimes more frequently. Although her manager scolded her at times for not keeping proper count of the milk cans used for transportation, she had considerable responsibilities. The manager entrusted her with assessing possibilities for the expansion of the range of the station and attracting vendors from the nearby milk cooperative.

The laboratory was an agent of changing tastes. In 1932, at one of the meetings of the National Milk Economy Committee, Lajos Gerlei, general manager of the Budapest General Central Dairy Hall (Budapesti Általános Központi Tejcsarnok Rt.), which at the time was the major producer of milk products alongside the large state-run network known as the National Hungarian Center of Milk Cooperatives (Országos Magyar Tejszövetkezeti Központ, OMTK), remarked that Hungarians were not willing to eat real yoghurt because they could not digest it.37 Letters exchanged between the laboratory and other institutions disprove this point. The Milk Hygiene Laboratory provided cultures necessary for yoghurt production to various parts of the country and even beyond the borders. This was the case, for instance, with the so-called milk bar at the Central Hotel in Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Romania. Before 1919 it was located within Hungary. In the later 1920s, it still had a significant Hungarian population), which was run by nuns.38 The milk hygiene laboratory played a role in influencing customs among the Jewish community of Szerencs, a town in northeastern Hungary. In February 1934, the local milk producer was eager to convince the Orthodox rabbi about the compatibility of the organic culture required for producing Kosher butter. In his reply, the head of the laboratory indicated that the Orthodox rabbi of Budapest had already accepted the recipe.39

Milk testing laboratories were not simply state agents entrusted with the task of ferreting out illicit economic activities or pointing out failures and impurities. Rather, the daily activities of laboratories were interwoven with the ways in which the different types of milk producers responded to the emerging milk market, including work relations, new ventures, social care, and tastes.

Milk Shortages and the Dysfunctions of Modern Institutions: Szombathely in Vas County

The milk shortages in post-World War I Szombathely, the seat of Vas County in western Hungary (close to the interwar border with Austria), offer a telling case of how urban-rural exchanges intertwined with state-society relations and the role that laboratories played in these relations. The case also offers insights into local, urban perceptions of the essence of a modern economy and a modern state.

Just before World War I, Vas County and its seat were in a state of transition. The northern areas of the county were among the developed regions of Hungary, so much so that Szombathely was seen as the model of the emerging modern city. At the same time, the southern areas were closer to neighboring Zala County in their outlook, and they were among the markedly underdeveloped zones of the country. The developed parts of Vas County along with the areas neighboring it to the north were the first centers of the milk economy in Hungary. This had to do with the closeness of Vienna as a large market, but this factor would not have been sufficient for the first milk cooperatives to emerge. As agrarian historian Antal Vörös has pointed out, Vas County was among the first areas where a rural economy based on the practice of keeping livestock in stables and fodder production replaced the previous system of three-year agriculture. One of the main conditions of this shift was an adequate output of cereals so that there would be land available for fodder to grow. In this regard, it is important that in Vas County fertilizers came into the picture as early as the 1880s.40 While before the 1920s the impact of fertilizers in Hungary was overall not comparable to what was seen, for instance, in the Alps, in this particular region, manuring coupled with fertilizers brought about significant changes.41

After World War I, western Hungary and Vas County within it remained an area with distinct characteristics in terms of its economy. Smuggling became one of the key activities at a time when food shortage was a major political factor. The geographical proximity of Vienna was yet again a decisive factor. Several recent studies have pointed to the importance of food in interwar international politics between Austria and Hungary as well as between Austria and the Western Powers.42 Having studied nearly a thousand cases of smuggling, Adrienn Nagy concluded that, in a few years, smuggling became a part of everyday livelihood locally and regionally. Moreover, these kinds of activities were not stigmatized by local communities and at times received forms of support from the authorities, including the police.43 Nagy did not mention dairy products among the prevalent items in terms of volume, but in times of shortages, even small amounts of butter were of high value.

To assess the position of Szombathely and its inhabitants within the context described above I relied on news reports in dailies. This type of source is biased in terms of the voice to which it gives space. It reflects the point of view of mainstream urban society and of the authorities. News reports dwelt on vendors in the market and milk producers, but they did not report the points of view of these actors in a direct form, if at all. Documents about actual cases of alleged infringements might counterbalance this bias, but I have not yet managed to locate the reports on infringements in any of the archives I have consulted.

As the fluctuations in the numbers of news reports published in any given year indicate, the social and political importance of milk was at its height during moments of shortage. In 1916, dailies operating in Szombathely published 19 news items related to milk, compared to 28 in 1917, 13 in 1918, 18 in 1921, 37 in 1922, and 31 in 1923. These figures then dropped drastically. Between 1916 and 1924, most of the news reports concerning milk focused on the question of dilution, processes used to monitor the quality of milk, the punishments meted out for infringements. They also touched on instabilities in the supply chain of milk and dairy products.

In Szombathely, milk shortages reached a critical level almost three years into the war, in April 1917. From that date, it was prohibited to serve milk in the restaurants and cafes that were still open. A few days before the ban, the deputy head of the county administration (alispán) made an exception for businesses serving coffee, which were able to offer 100 liters of milk for public consumption daily, but even these enterprises failed to manage to set aside this relatively meager quantity, and this clearly reflected the extent of the shortage. Rationing of milk at the municipal level only began in early 1918 and lasted until September 1919. By the spring of 1920, news reports concerning milk lamented the outflow of dairy products to Vienna and Budapest, where significantly higher prices were offered. It was at this time that the state secretary for public supply, Rezső József Temple, toured the region. The accompanying public events reflected the gravity of the situation. Temple announced a large-scale plan to resolve the milk question, but the situation became even worse in the winter. In January 1921, Vasvármegye (Vas County), the leading daily, published a lengthy report on how butter was allegedly being smuggled across the Austrian border, which according to the article was the main cause of milk shortage. The proposals that appeared in the news centered around regulating the price and establishing a well-controlled milk market hall under municipal supervision. Indeed, the idea of such a market hall was first raised in the summer of 1916, but in May 1920, it began to reappear more and more frequently in the news. Yet, in July 1922 it suddenly seemed as of the plan, which had almost been accomplished, was going to fall apart. The article published in Vasvármegye on July 13, 1922 offers insights into perceptions of the working of the economy:

The value of the korona [the legal currency in Hungary until 1926] is falling, and prices are rising. Let’s just take one item from the horrible complex: milk. It is the food of the sick and children. It is indispensable. Today, it costs twenty to twenty-two koronas per liter. Some months ago, when the price of milk was just half what it is today, we were shocked, and we hoped that eventually they would create the municipal milk market hall that has been on the table for so long… [but] given the current monetary situation, all hopes are in vain… It is so difficult to buy milk, we actually need to know someone who has some influence to get some… If authorities began controlling the market today, even the most reliable milk traders would leave Szombathely for good.

Contemporaries believed that, in addition to the depreciation of the korona, the cause of the milk shortage was that milk suppliers would not be willing to submit themselves to quality control. Let us look at the latter part of the equation and focus on the reasons for the behavior of suppliers and the processes used to try to control the market.

According to news published in the dailies, the main actors on the milk market in Vas County were the Milk Cooperative of Sopron (Soproni Tejszövetkezet) and the Milk Business Co. of Sopron County (Sopronmegyei Tejgazdasági Rt.). Since the demand for dairy products in Vienna was virtually unlimited given the production capacity of western Hungary, these entities were primarily interested in exporting dairy products to Austria. Thus, they offered a higher price to cattle owners in villages of Vas County than the price cap used on the markets in Hungary. In the spring of 1923, one of the actual responses of the farmers of Vas County was to form their own county-level cooperative business, and they allowed the cooperative in Sopron County to buy a large share. However, this did not alter the export-oriented strategy of the existing companies, and prices soon began to rise. Eventually, a solution was reached thanks to a merger of a milk processing firm with a large enough consumer base (that of the public servants) and another local milk processing business in Szombathely, so-called Dömötör’s. As a result, milk became accessible at four different market points of the city, and by 1924, the issue of milk shortages had disappeared from the news.

As Laura Umbrai has demonstrated in her discussion of the milk market in prewar Budapest, quality control and testing were essential and decisive preconditions for the creation of a viable milk market hall. Umbrai added, however, that testing mostly did not go beyond finding out how much water had been added to the milk.44 This was also true of wartime and interwar Szombathely. Despite the legal channels that the Law on Food Adulteration created in 1895 and concerns about communicable diseases that can spread via milk and the diversity of chemicals that milk suppliers sometimes added to dairy products to make them look fresh, the testing determined only whether milk had been diluted with water. This is clear from the reports that were published in dailies following so-called milk raids. Milk that was regarded as suspicious had to be transported to the testing station in Mosonmagyaróvár (more than 100 kilometers to the north), as Szombathely did not have its own laboratory until 1930. Testing itself was carried out by a chemist from the laboratory station in Mosonmagyaróvár, which had gradually reached independence from the prestigious Academy of Agriculture operating in the same town. Based on the reports published in the dailies, there were at least 14 such raids in Szombathely between early 1916 and the end of 1923. The raids did not take place at equal intervals. Seven were held in the first year, between January 1916 and March 1917, but we know of only one more that was definitely held before the end of the war. There were four testing operations between April 1921 and October 1922 and two more in 1923. Generally, the reports noted that some 4,000 to 5,000 liters of milk were tested, which must have meant hundreds of barrels. In comparison, very little milk was found to have been diluted: between three and 15 barrels. This is surprising in light of newspaper accounts, according to which virtually all the milk on the market contained added water, sometimes (allegedly) as much as 50 percent.45 The punishment for dilution was usually a fine, though it was legally possible to send perpetrators to prison for half a year. Thus, we can conclude that there was a large variation of milk quality on the market over time, and shortages were continuous for at least seven years. During this period, the business behavior of milk cooperatives remained in the spotlight.46

Milk-cooperatives between Autonomy and Centralization

Despite the fact that milk cooperatives had something of a dubious reputation in interwar Szombathely, around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, many economic thinkers believed that these cooperatives could serve as adequate vehicles for improving welfare in rural areas in Europe and, more narrowly, Hungary.47 Moreover, processes of testing, certification, and centralization of the milk economy brought distant rural localities into the national economy. In Hungary, yet another factor should be added: the expansion of the role of state in the supply chain of milk.

Vas County was one of the first centers of the milk cooperative movement in Hungary. Szombathely (as noted above, the seat of the county) was the site of the very first milk cooperative in 1881. Two decades later, the county bore witness to a second wave of establishing cooperatives. According to the registry of businesses in the county, there were at least 80 cooperatives registered that operated for various lengths of time.48 Reports in the local dailies also indicate that the number of cooperatives underwent a boom in the first years of the twentieth century, although the numbers reported differ from the registry.49 After World War I, the Kingdom of Hungary had to cede more than 70 percent of its prewar territory to the newly established or considerably enlarged neighboring countries, including ten of its biggest cities and millions of inhabitants, not to mention human and natural resources. Due to the accompanying economic crisis, many of the milk cooperatives ceased to operate. There was a new wave of establishing such entities in the early 1930s.

According to an economic historian, in Hungary, in 1935, there were 429 cooperatives operating as members of the aforementioned OMTK, which had been established in 1922. In addition to the cooperatives in the OMTK network, there were around 100 independent ones in Hungary.50 In the state-centered structure that emerged in the early 1930s, it seemed necessary to bring every local cooperative into a state-controlled network to ensure a well-functioning milk economy.51 The idea of cooperatives gained a new meaning and new prominence. 1934 was something of a turning point in the history of milk cooperatives. In that year, OMTK provided a template for the rules and procedures for cooperatives that were to become members of the network. Many cooperatives reestablished or refashioned themselves accordingly. In 1935, Miksa Düsing, the director of OMTK, boasted about the rate at which the network of cooperatives was growing.52 In 1934, the network produced and handled 82 million liters of milk, which constituted 20 percent of the national total. Moreover, by this time OMTK had become part of the administration of the milk market as one of the authorities responsible for issuing new licenses.53 In his talk, Düsing spoke of the need for a comprehensive law on cooperation and specific regulations for the relationship between the center and members of the network of milk cooperatives. Although such a law was not passed until the end of World War II, the ministerial decree 131.380/1937 FM. about regulating voting rights in OMTK cooperatives issued in December 1937 made it clear that the course of policy was centralization and expansion. According to standardized statutes, as of 1934, OMTK had the right to preview and modify the decisions proposed by the management of local cooperatives to the general assembly. The trajectories of the development of milk cooperatives converged towards a uniform structure between 1934 and 1947 and especially after 1942.

Due to the number of entities, Vas County offers a revealing case study on how milk cooperatives figured in the autonomous economic life of rural communities and how these cooperatives impacted the relationships between the state, society, and the economy in the interwar period. I will focus on the cooperative in Acsád because it formed comparatively early, was reestablished in the early 1930s, and has left enough traces in the archival documents to allow for calculations related to its business ventures. However, before turning to the specific cases, I must offer a few notes concerning the nature and content of the available sources.

Despite the comparatively large number of available sources concerning milk cooperatives in Vas County, it is not easy to interrogate these archival traces. Without analysis of intra- and extra community networks and the statuses of the founding members of cooperatives, there is little to say about the social capital behind them.54 The statutes that applied to the milk cooperatives simply stated that members came together to form a cooperative to collect and collectively sell milk produced in individual households. The most important condition was that a member could not sell milk to anyone privately, only to the cooperative. The doors for membership were open both to women and to men. The statutes required respectability and trustworthiness as conditions to join. A board was responsible for taking care of the capital of the cooperative and for negotiating contracts for the sale of milk at reasonable prices. The size of the board varied between three and six people. There were no specific laws regulating the business undertakings of the cooperatives, so the same economic regulations applied to them as to companies. Before standardized OMTK statutes became the order of the day in the 1930s, the scope of milk cooperatives varied significantly. Sometimes clauses about the cooperatives’ rights to regulate the composition of fodder or stable conditions appeared in the draft statutes but were removed from the final versions. Most cooperatives had their own hall where basic processing could take place. Milk cooperatives were to submit quarterly reports and lists of members to the court, and they were compelled to hold general meetings each year to authorize the accounts. The call for this meeting had to appear in a newspaper to assure the authorities that it was well-advertised.

The papers of the cooperatives do not allow too much insight into possible conflicts or negotiations within the cooperative. Regarding the political culture within the entities, it is important that through having to fulfil requirements that regulation demanded, and courts enforced, members of the board regularly encountered the rule of law. Office bearers also became acquainted with the link between financial accountability and the rule of law. This experience differed from seeing power and prestige ruling social life that were characteristic features during the interwar period in Hungary. Experiencing the power of abstract notions about rights and obligations carried a democratic potential.

We learn a bit more about the economic aspects of cooperative life even if we need to start with a caveat even in this sense: official documents that cooperatives produced do not tell where they sold milk. However, a questionnaire in the archives of the Ministry of Agriculture informs that in 1935 the authorities of the municipality of Szombathely believed that milk is brought to the city from a range of 25 kilometers. We may add to this figure that the availability of railway transport was an important factor in determining the range.

In fact, part of the reason why the milk cooperative in Acsád was one of the few that existed both in the early years of the twentieth century and during the Great Depression was that it had railway station and that the stop was close to two other neighboring villages. Acsád is a village of around 600 inhabitants 16 kilometers to the northeast from Szombathely. The milk cooperative began to operate in March 1905. Its statutes did specify that all milk produced shall be offered to the cooperative but did not set any criteria for the quantity. This suggests that the board of the cooperative could estimate the quantity of produce and that it did not expect changes in the varieties that villagers kept.

In the first year of its operation, the cooperative sold 140,000 liters of milk to an unspecified butter making factory, probably the one in Sárvár. They received 11,500 koronas in return, meaning a price of eight fillérs per litere (one korona was 100 fillérs). This price is nearly equivalent with the conditions in contemporary Budapest, where producers received 40 percent of the retail price, which was 21 fillérs shortly after the turn of the century.55 The members of the cooperative received slightly more than the price of the milk. This was possible because the cooperative also sold fodder on the market. In 1907, the price fell to 7.7 fillérs, but cooperative members continued to receive as much as they would have had the price remained at eight fillérs. In these two years, the butter factory paid an additional 589 and 629 koronas, respectively, for low-fat milk it sold consumers. Yearly profits were meager, and it clearly made sense to join the cooperative because it guaranteed a flow of income and not simply for the money received after shares at the end of the financial year. Regarding shares, we know that there were 166 shares for 79 members in 1906. In the first year, 104 members joined the cooperative and four left. In the second year, seven new members joined and five left. In the course of these changes of membership, every member had one or two shares. These figures also mean that one cow provided 860 liters of milk per year on average. If we take 270 as the figure for the number of days in a year when the cows were milked, this means hardly more than three liters per day per cow. Unfortunately, very few records were kept or have survived after these relatively detailed accounts.56

Although the cooperative in Acsád continued its activities for some time in the 1920s, it had to be reestablished in 1934. The total number of shareholders in the cooperative rose from 46 to 74 by the end of 1935. These members held 177 shares in total. The cooperative in Acsád was unusual because it had a respectable urban member who was also of Jewish origin. In 1934, the largest shareholder was Dr. Ernő Pető, a medical doctor known as the first director of the hospital in Szombathely and also for his experiments and efforts to rehabilitate disabled veterans of World War I.57 Dr. Pető registered as a member of the cooperative in Acsád because he married Georgina, the daughter of the aristocrat Count Szegedy family, which had their base in Acsád. Georgina had 10 shares in the cooperative,58 but a list prepared by the Cattle Breeders’ Association of Vas County shows that the Mrs. Ernő Pető’s herd was large: it was the eighth largest in the county, and she had 69 livestock in total.59 In 1936, the cooperative sold 182,240 liters of milk and produced only 48 pengős of profit. (On January 1, 1927, the pengő replaced the korona as the currency in Hungary. In 1936, 1 US dollar was worth 5.2 pengős. The korona was exchanged at a rate of 1 pengő for 12,500 korona.) Although there is not enough data to calculate milk prices for the latter period, the basic formula does not seem to have changed: a relatively continuous flow of income and cash were the main advantages of being a member of the Acsád milk cooperative.

Overall, taking the example of the Acsád milk cooperative, these types of entities do not look as frightening as the inhabitants of Szombathely probably imagined them to be. Although we do not have data for the immediate interwar years, neither in the years around 1905 nor in the 1930s does the cooperative seem to have been tremendously profitable. As an institution, the cooperative simply added a new way of ensuring milk-producing households with a relatively steady flow of cash as well as some experience with the rule of law, cooperation, decision making, and the nature of markets.

Conclusions

In this essay, I have examined the political role of the sciences, commodities, and the idea of cooperatives in the local forms of the modern food economy and its supply chain in the interwar period in Hungary. I highlighted the importance of dense networks of both local and central institutions and rules in the milk market. In Vas County, a combination of these networks and the pressures of a shortage economy changed the social and political meanings of milk and dairy products in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Milk became a necessity for those perceived as the most vulnerable groups within the local society, such as mothers and children, and it also became a sign of dysfunctional rural-urban relations, individual behaviors, markets, and administration.

The news reports related to milk that were published in dailies reflect the ways in which a local urban community perceived the shortages and entertained ideas concerning their root causes and possible remedies. The persistence of shortages shows the inability of the post-World War I Hungarian state to intervene effectively and the impact of the behavior of businesses operating in the region, as well as the relevance of popular expectations faced by the municipality to provide a solution locally. In this situation, concerns regarding the stability of the milk market in the interwar years exerted an influence on ideas related to the design of markets and the physical spaces in which milk was produced and sold and even on the international (transboundary) political situation. In these spaces, bottom-up responses proved more significant than the efforts of the state and municipal administrations in determining the local conditions surrounding the supply of milk.

While many news reports suggested that the aggressive business strategy of milk cooperatives were at the heart of milk shortages, in fact these cooperatives were rather humble entities with very limited scope for profit both before World War I and in the years when the state-owned cooperative network began its expansion at the cost of the autonomy of milk cooperatives. Nonetheless, milk cooperatives provided a way to engage rural communities in the emerging milk market, allowing them to experience aspects of modern production and democratic forms of decision making and collaboration.

By the time of the outbreak of World War I, laboratories were junctures which brought top-down and bottom-up notions of modern food production together. They contributed to the emergence of the national economy in the interwar period by bringing the idea of scientific measurement and quality testing to rural areas and by inducing firms to experiment with new tastes. The introduction of scientific knowledge and expertise had the potential to modify local hierarchies, such as the hierarchies in labor and gender relations. Moreover, quality testing was important in redrawing boundaries and channels between localities. However, as the sources concerning laboratory analyses revealed, despite decades of research and practice, there remained uncertainties concerning the quality of the testing processes used to prove dilution.

In terms of its contribution to the secondary literature, this paper offers a case study applying Peter Atkins’ notion of milk as material and Timothy Mitchell’s thesis concerning the relevance of hybridity. While milk defied engineering and scientific expertise, the attention given to the viruses that milk might carry dwindled, while sensitivity to the sale of diluted milk increased in the interwar period as a consequence of food shortages. Milk shortages were a cause and vehicle of public dissatisfaction. In line with Tiago Saraiva’s point, starting from the early 1930s, the expansion of state control over the food economy was intertwined with the expansion of the supply chain of milk.

Archival Sources

Állatorvostudományi Egyetem Hutyra Ferenc Könyvtár, Levéltár és Múzeum [University of Veterinary Medicine Ferenc Hutyra Library, Archives and Museum], HU-ÁOTKLM

III.075.a Élelmiszerhigiéniai Tanszék [Department of Food Hygiene]

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archives] (MNL OL)

Archives of the Ministry of Agriculture (1885–1945)

K 184 Általános iratok [General holdings]

16. t Tejgazdasági ügyek [Issues related to the milk economy]

32. t. Élelmiszerek és mezőgazdasági termények vegyvizsgálata

[Chemical analysis of food items and agricultural products]

K 208 Tejpropaganda Bizottság iratai [Papers of the Milk Propaganda Committee]

K 551 Országos Tejgazdasági Bizottság (1932–1935) [National Council of Milk Economy]

Gazdasági Levéltár [Economic Archives]

Z 41-10730.t. Pesti Magyar Kereskedelmi Bank Rt. Okmánytár [Papers of the Hungarian Commerical Bank of Pest Co.] Országos Magyar Tejszövetkezeti Központ és Butyryl Magyar Tejtermékkiviteli Szövetkezet (1933–1938) [National Hungarian Center of Milk Cooperatives and Butyryl Cooperative for the Export of Milk Products]

Z 839 Országos Magyar Tejszövetkezeti Központ [National Hungarian Center of Milk Cooperatives]

Z 1307 Gróf Eszterházy Pál Bakonyi Tejgazdasága (1935–1939) [Papers of the estate of Count Pál Eszterházy]

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Vas Megyei Levéltára [Hungarian National Archives Vas County Archives] (MNL VaML)

VII/1/h Szombathelyi Törvényszék iratai, Cégbírósági iratok [Papers of the Court of Szombathely, papers of the Court of Businesses]

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Vasvármegye

 

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* I am grateful to Krisztina Kelbert and Ferenc Pál for their help in locating sources about Szombathely and Vas County.

A World Lifted off Its Hinges: The Social Impact of World War I on Hungary

Zsombor Bódy
Eötvös Loránd University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):702–732 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.702

As was true virtually everywhere, World War I brought about significant social changes in Hungary. As a consequence of the wartime mobilization of the economy, the relationship between employers and workers in industry was transformed, as was the relationship between owners of different sizes of estates and farms and agricultural workers in rural areas. In both spheres, groups emerged which were much better organized than before. Some of them were capable of coordinated political action, and the balance of power between them changed rapidly over time. The wartime government tried to ensure continuous coordination and reconciliation of interests between the various ownership and labor groups in agriculture and industry, but it ultimately failed. Beyond the military defeat, this failure was the primary determining factor of the events of 1918–19 in Hungary. By analyzing the group dynamics of wartime society and the wartime economy in Hungary, this paper seeks to outline the social and historical background of the political struggles that came in the wake of the war. It ventures two core contentions. First, the emergence of various agricultural and industrial interest groups and their coordination with one another and with the government in the aftermath of the war constituted mechanisms of integration that had not existed before the war. As a result, the diverse socio-professional groups in Hungary became more integrated into one society within the framework of the state. The second finding contention is that the counterrevolutionary regime that took over in late 1919 was more successful than previous governments had been in establishing a balance between the different groups of owners and workers and learning from previous experience, and this was why it was able, ultimately, to consolidate its hold on power.

Keywords: World War I, Hungary, social history, labor history, history of rural society

Research on World War I and its immediate aftermath has gained new momentum in Hungary in the last half decade. Many works have been published on the specific processes and consequences of the territorial changes that occurred in the aftermath of the war, such as the refugee question.1 Works on the military-political situation at the end of the war have offered convincing and nuanced answers to old questions.2 Substantial volumes and studies have been published on the fluctuations of public opinion and events in 1918–1919 and on the politically motivated violence which came in the wake of the war.3 Much less attention has been paid, however, to the social consequences of the war, which were crucial to the events of the period from 1918 until roughly the mid-1920s.4 The concrete social effects of the war were not so much the result of military operations as they were of mobilization and, even more so, of the economic processes involved. Some understanding of the history of the war economy is crucial not only because the military strength of the powers that met on the battlefields depended to no small extent on the performance of their economies. According to international research, the mobilization of the war economy, intertwined with and interacting with cultural transformations, led to profound changes in all the European societies that were engaged in some way in the war.5 These changes altered the balance of power among social groups and political forces and also changed the relationship between employer and employee, the political system in some countries, and the position of women in society.6

The Effects of Wartime Mobilization on Social Groups in Industry and Agriculture and Their Political Consequences

World War I ignited or added kindling to several transformations within Hungarian society. The war and the mobilization of society and the economy radically increased the role of government institutions in the management of social conflicts as well as of everyday life (e.g., production, food supply, housing and workplace conditions). At the same time, it also restructured relations among social groups, which led to a dramatic transformation of political power relations in 1918. After the war had come to a close, it took many years and several political turnabouts for the administration to withdraw adequately from the management of everyday life in the hinterland and for the relative position of major social groups to stabilize. In the course of these processes, the situation of peasants, workers, employers, members of the middle class, and even women underwent radical changes.

This paper examines the impact that the social changes generated by the war exerted on the status and self-identification of the major social groups in Hungary and on their perception of one another. It also considers the ways in which the political behavior of these groups was determined by these transformations. I offer a dynamic tableau of the changes that occurred in the relationships among various social groups active in industry and agriculture, including changes that affected consequent access to power, as well as the ways in which party politics responded to and were shaped by these changes. The war also had a profound impact, of course, on the middle classes and on the situation of women, but for reasons of space and to maintain the focus of the study, these issues are not discussed here. I concentrate on the (re)emergence of groups and conflicts in industry and agriculture, which were the most decisive factors in setting the framework conditions for the political processes of the early interwar period.

Industrial Society in Hungary during and after Wartime Mobilization

The war placed industrial labor in an entirely new context. As was true in the other countries involved in the war, in Hungary, wartime production demanded centralized management of the labor force. In the relatively liberal labor market that had dominated Hungarian industry until then, there were two operational strategies for advocating the interests of workers: the individual and the collective. On the individual level, workers could change their workplace on a daily basis, since this practice was not substantially restricted by labor legislation. Collective advocacy was assured by the trade unions. Although they operated in a legally deregulated zone, the authorities did not effectively prevent them from organizing strikes. As a result of this, collective agreements were introduced in more and more branches of industry to regulate labor relations, at least in the urban agglomeration of Budapest and in some of the larger cities and towns. Although they did not have any legal weight, the compromises between the trade unions and the employers’ associations often worked because the strength of the organization on the opposing side made the other party and the individual stakeholders in the market comply with the agreement.7

The war, however, put an end to this liberal order of labor relations. Strikes were banned, and the labor force was tied to factories connected to the war industry. Individuals were no longer allowed to quit their jobs. This quickly led to friction, which the Hungarian government attempted to handle in a manner very similar to efforts in Germany and Austria. So-called “complaint committees” were established during the war, which were supposed to manage the conflicts arising in industry. These committees were trilateral bodies composed of the delegates of the state (civil servants and soldiers) and representatives of both employers and employees. However, there was an essential difference between Hungary and the abovementioned countries and the countries of the Entente: the Social Democratic Party of Hungary was not present in the National Assembly due to significant restrictions on suffrage.8 In this situation, the fact that the trade unions (related to the party) were involved in the management of labor conflict was especially significant. It signaled acknowledgement on behalf of the government, i.e., a drastic improvement compared to the earlier situation, and it was by all means a more significant step than something similar would have been in the countries in which the social democratic parties were already active parliamentary political forces.

The government made a strategic and deliberate decision to involve the institutions of the social democratic workers’ movement in the management of war mobilization, and this was manifest not only in the domain of labor issues in a strict sense. The other area was public food supply, with regard to which the government was obliged to take into account the consumer cooperatives organized on the basis of the trade unions. This institution was quintessential in the context of centralized food management because there was no other entity that would have been able to manage distribution based on the ration system in the districts inhabited by workers. Organizations related to the Social Democratic Party were also given a role in the administration of housing issues. The liberal tenement-markets that had functioned in Hungarian municipalities until 1914 had collapsed at the beginning of the war. First, the families of soldiers who had been drafted were exempted from paying rent, and since this measure had numerous additional implications that generated conflict, rents in general were regulated by the authorities. During the second half of the war, housing authorities were set up that were supposed to assign apartments under private ownership to those who applied to live in them. This measure was also necessary because industrial cities and towns were under increasing migratory pressure as a result of the wartime boom. At the housing authorities, litigation was decided by parity bodies that were usually presided over by a retired jurist and composed of representatives from the association of real estate owners and the association of tenants. The latter association was a satellite organization of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary.

It followed from the above that, as a result of the war, the Social Democratic Party was treated by the government in a way that would have been previously inconceivable. From the beginning of the war, the party itself demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with the government (like its sister parties with parliamentary representation in other countries), and when the war broke out, the party prompted its press to support the war (the party’s press had struck a pacifist tone in the period of diplomatic crisis prior to the declaration of war).9 The most important element of the pro-war position was that until the 1918 collapse, the social democratic leadership tried to prevent all strike initiatives and suppress all strikes that did break out, which was not unusual during the second half of the war. In exchange for this cooperative attitude, the Social Democratic Party hoped that it would gain the expansion of voting rights from the government and would thus win its place in the National Assembly. The party tried to take advantage of war conditions to keep the government under pressure so that it would be rewarded for its cooperative stance. For instance, workers employed in a whole series of war factories sent a telegram to the government demanding the expansion of voting rights.10 Their demands were repeated several times in the form of petitions addressed to the government. Below is the text of one such petition:

The workers of this factory can declare with a clear conscience that they have honestly and completely performed the duties imposed upon them by the war from the outset until now. They have been aware of the great significance and value of their work; they know that even though they have no weapons other than the tools in their hands, they have still been standing in the trenches; they know that with every strike of the hammer, they have been forging the weapons of national defense: they have defended their homeland with every breath.

This conviction boosted their sense of duty and their readiness to make sacrifices. It was this conviction that made them capable of putting up with the suffering and want that the war imposed on them particularly. It was this conviction—and only this!—that persuaded them as well as workers employed at all other factories that they should tolerate political disenfranchisement and the humiliating status of being excluded from suffrage. [...] The war cannot end without the homeland that they helped save and preserve with their lives and labor granting the most elementary yet most important right to them as citizens.11

The government appreciated the activities of the Social Democratic Party and the organizational network connected to it, and as noted above, the party was accorded a role in the management of everyday life in society, from the housing issue through public food supply and labor affairs.

At the same time, the changes affecting the workers’ organizations had an impact on the middle strata of society as well as employers. For the latter, the recognition of the trade unions represented a shock-like overturn of earlier power relations. The secretary of the National Association of Metallurgy and Machine Factories—the biggest employers’ organization in all sectors of the economy—made the following declaration with regard to this transformation:

It is enough to consider what it would mean if the trade union secretary whom hooligans would have driven away from even the neighborhood of a factory were to roll onto the premises through its wide-open gates in the four-horse carriage of the lofty factory owner as the supreme judge [...] so that he could pass judgment against the owner after having studied the most confidential books of the latter, interrogated him as the accused, and confronted him with workers whom he had previously treated with disdain. No momentous editorial or fiery agitation could measure up to its propagative effect.12

Membership in trade unions grew during World War I, and by the end of the war, they had established organizational networks among people working in the most important occupations in Budapest and some industrial cities. Parallel to this, membership in the associations and consumer cooperatives connected to the trade unions also increased significantly. The latter grew into a presence that was influential in multiple branches of business.13 The trade union treasuries were full due to rises in membership and membership fees, which were paid according to higher wages, and the trade unions continued to develop their infrastructure during the third and fourth years of the war as well, purchasing or building new headquarters, etc.

In contrast to this strengthening of the organizations of the workers, employers were on the defensive. They felt that the complaint committees were unable to make decisions that were unfavorable to workers because the authorities feared that such decisions would be unenforceable or would even provoke riots. In their view, the incompetent interventions by the civil and military authorities disrupted the internal balance at the factories and the previously healthy functioning of the labor market. As a matter of fact, their frequent complaints were not unfounded, because the military authorities overseeing the war economy were often inclined to support the interests of workers and wanted to avoid even the appearance of taking sides with “capital.”14

All in all, employers often contended that the government was trying to buy the loyalty of workers at the expense of employers. In certain areas, they tried to resist these efforts. In the war economy, food distribution became an issue of power, so employers did not want it to be turned over entirely to the social democratic cooperative. The National Federation of Industrialists established its own public supply cooperative and managed to have the government create a special body to coordinate food supply for workers. Representatives of each side served on this body on a parity basis, and the body managed the issue of food supply for workers through the two cooperatives. As far as this this organization was concerned, workers should always occupy a position of priority with regard to food supply: in other words, workers had to receive at least their official food quotas, even if the authorities were unable to ensure the originally planned food supply for the municipalities.15 This stood in stark contrast to the food scarcities suffered by the urban middle-class, which were alleviated only if a given family had relatives in the countryside who could provide them with agricultural produce.

Although the Social Democratic Party of Hungary struggled to keep workers under its control during the last year of the war, and the party had to walk a thin line between the increasingly radical demands of the workers and its policy of cooperation with the government, it finally managed to tackle the problem. The party was able to prevent the government from banning the trade unions and extending its direct control over its other institutions. And while numerous sources indicate that there were dissatisfied voices within the ranks of the workers regarding the leadership of the Social Democratic Party, the scope of the social authority of the institutions and organizations it ran still continued to grow. Although during the second half of the war the government elaborated plans regarding measures that would be necessary were it to switch to a hardline and oppressive policy toward the workers, these plans remained in the drawer.16 Certain politicians suggested—particularly after the big strikes in March 1918—that previously exempted trade union leaders and officials should be drafted into the military and that discipline should be restored by organizing the workers into military units. However, the government disregarded these proposals. It feared that these measures, which would also have included the closure of printing presses so that workers would not be able to disseminate their message on leaflets, would generate unmanageable resistance. It is quite remarkable that these sorts of ideas were supported mostly by bourgeois politicians, and the representatives of the army were more cautious in this respect. Thus, although the government realized that the social democratic organizations could not completely control the workers as it would have liked to have controlled them, it upheld its integrative policy to the end of the war. As a consequence of the above, by the end of the war, the position of workers employed in major industries was significantly strengthened (mostly as a result of their concentrated location in the urban agglomeration of Budapest).17 This was equally true with regard to changes in real wages: the situation of members of the middle class who earned fixed salaries deteriorated dramatically in comparison to workers, as did their political weight. Employers believed that certain trades, as “beneficiaries of the war boom,” had become excessively assertive, especially when the workers realized that the authorities did not dare curb their demands.18

The situation outlined above was neither peculiar nor unique in the European context. The war economy and the mobilization of society created a plethora of new forums of control elsewhere as well, and representatives of the working class played a role in all of them. Due to the boom in the military industry, the standard of living among workers often rose elsewhere too, while that of the middle class became relatively worse.19 At the same time, the level of organization of the working class grew to an immense degree throughout Europe, and employers became more organized in opposition to them. In most belligerent countries, the war entailed the recognition of workers’ parties as partners in the political arena, which also meant that they could become part of the expanding institutional network of organs representing labor and welfare issues and offering more and more services. The creation of ministries for social and labor issues in several countries was one symptom of this process.20 The idea of creating such a ministry in Hungary was entertained in 1917–1918, but it was implemented only after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Hungary within it.

Changing Social Power Relations in Industry in the Immediate Aftermath of the War

When Hungary collapsed at the end of the war, political power fell almost automatically into the hands of the Social Democratic Party as a result of the earlier widening of the party’s base. Thanks to a political transformation that changed Hungary’s form of government from a monarchy to a republic, a coalition government came to power during the winter of 1918–1919 in which the Social Democratic Party was the strongest member.21 However, more important than power relations within the government coalition was the fact that social democratic organizations could reach out to society more effectively than ever, especially in Budapest and the communities in its vicinity. While the key ministries pertaining to industry were all in the hands of social democratic parties, the trade unions managed to sign extremely favorable collective agreements for workers and at the same time made trade union membership compulsory for every worker, because the factories were not allowed to employ workers outside the organization.22 Moreover, the consumer cooperative linked to them could procure goods under especially good conditions, which was a valuable advantage in light of the general scarcity of food and fuel. Meanwhile, the middle-class consumer cooperatives complained about the difficulties they faced when trying to obtain such things.23

At the beginning of 1919, workers began to exercise control over certain factories beyond the scope of the collective agreements, including the management of production. The owners and the company boards felt that the factories were simply slipping out of their control. At that point, the leadership of the trade unions did not even attempt to go against the radicalizing workers, but rather took the lead concerning the initiatives aimed at getting rid of the employers altogether. Then, with the rise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in March 1919, the social democratic institutional network did try to take over the management of everyday life in every domain. The factories were nationalized. The representatives of employers were simply ousted from the national social security institutions that previously had functioned on a parity basis. In theory, the trade unions’ consumer cooperative was supposed to assume control over the administration of trade throughout Budapest, and its leader was appointed people’s commissioner for public supply.24

This extension of the institutional network organized around the workers’ party was a unique occurrence in the wave of European social and political crises following World War I. Although parties that had espoused Bolshevik ideology tried (at times successfully) to seize power in other countries as well, the social democratic workers’ parties and trade union movements made no attempt to extend the system of institutions related to the social democratic parties and the trade unions in the realm of social and political power on such a scale. Elsewhere in Central Europe and especially in Germany and Austria, the workers’ organizations encompassed and integrated the industrial workers as a counter-society vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie. And the functioning of this organizational network was assured by the presence of the workers’ parties in the political arena. However, in those countries, the organizational network connecting the workers did not try to eliminate the market economy or exclude the representatives of the non-worker social groups from the economic and political decision-making processes.25

In Hungary, the organizational network that had originally been built around the workers overstepped its boundaries with this attempt. When it became possible in the aftermath of the war, the Social Democratic Party tried to improve the situation of its base, not through labor legislation or social policy regulations, as was the case in European countries at the time, but by reinforcing the power position of its organizations. This, however, did not prove enduring, and the excessive attempts of the party to enhance its power led to failure.26 When the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed in the second half of 1919, the institutional system that had originally underpinned working-class society took some heavy blows. Although at the time of the Great War, workers had represented a considerable weight in the urban agglomeration of Budapest, Hungary was still an agrarian country, and this made it impossible to stabilize the political rule of the organizations connected to industrial workers.

Rural Society during and after War Mobilization

The war led to new trends in rural society too, the nature of which was significantly different from the predominant trends in industry. The war and attendant mobilization contributed massively to the decay of the earlier peasant way of life (which had already been undergoing a dramatic process of transformation). A distinguishing characteristic of Hungarian agrarian society was that, due to the small size of their farms, relatively few of the many people who earned their living via agriculture could sustain themselves and their families on the bases of their own farming. There were many penniless day laborers and manorial servants, as well as farmers with only one or two hectares of land. The tensions arising from this situation had been evident for more than 25 years before the war. The root of the problem was of a demographic nature: with the broadening of the demographic transition, the village population began to grow, while the amount of arable land and the number of employment opportunities in agriculture did not increase in the first half of the twentieth century. On the contrary, ambitious infrastructural developments, railway construction, and flood relief work that had provided employment for the redundant agricultural labor force came to an end by the end of the nineteenth century. The so-called agrarian socialist movements—harvest strikes, local riots, etc.—had preoccupied state authorities for more than two decades before 1914. These authorities attempted to subdue these actions partly through social policy measures and partly by force.27

War mobilization had an ambivalent effect on the circumstances of the agrarian population. This group was heavily affected by the draft, since industrial workers, as a result of the interests of war production, were frequently exempted from military service (or they were ordered to work in their original factory). The lack of men caused serious disturbances to farming and family life in village society. At the same time, food requisitions—which were, in fact, the reverse side of the urban ration system—undermined the prospects of farmers.28 The shortage of labor, the military use of draught animals, and the reduction in manure application led to drops in average yields.29 Nonetheless, the war was still profitable for agriculture. The sale of produce in addition to the requisitions provided both big and small landowners additional revenues, and many contemporary articles reported on the high earnings made on the black market.30 At the end of the war and in the period following it, many farmers were able to pay back their earlier debts in the devalued currency. This all gave the landowning peasantry greater self-confidence and room for maneuver, and it also motivated them to assert their interests independently, an act that had been previously unknown to them. As a result of this, the Smallholders’ Party, the roots of which had extended to the period before the war, grew increasingly strong and became an important player by the end of the war.31 Much as workers and employees were flocking to the organizations of the Social Democratic Party, the peasants lined up behind the Smallholders’ Party.

However, the Smallholders’ Party and, behind it, the peasantry and rural intellectuals were certainly not the only important strata within rural society. The broad spectrum of landless social groups, which included servants and day laborers, faced a different situation than that of the independent farmers, and they were able to profit much less from the agricultural boom during the war. At the same time, they were hit severely by the loss of human lives in the cataclysm. Moreover, the big landowners tried to counterbalance the expansion of the organizations of the Smallholders’ Party in order to preserve their influence over the rural population. It was with that purpose in mind that they created the Farmers’ Party, which attempted to establish organizations to rival those of the Smallholders’ Party.32

However, the broad masses of the agrarian population that had only modest means or were poverty-stricken and sustained themselves from day labor could not automatically join either party. They constituted the most discontented group of the rural population.33 The soldiers in their ranks, who poured back into Hungary in November 1918 and were often armed and accustomed to violence, would regularly instigate the acts of unrest that were breaking out all over the country.34 These uprisings targeted the local administration, which had lost the sympathy of the locals—including the middle and big landowners—due to the requisitions and the draft. War losses, forms of the war economy that were seen as dubious, and the crumbling of the power hierarchy in rural society fed a strong sense of discontent that found expression not exclusively in diffuse movements, but sometimes also in more organized forms as well. As a result of the propaganda spread by the agitators associated with the Social Democratic Party, those involved in the uprisings tried to take over big estates as a whole and run them without redistributing the land. An especially acute conflict developed in Somogy County, where this movement was aimed specifically at the Smallholders’ Party.35

A long series of negotiations was held in the winter of 1918–1919 in an attempt to settle the conflicts connected to the problems of agrarian society. The talks were initiated by the government and held with the involvement of all the interested parties that had a politically meaningful structure. The intention was to arrive at acceptable and realistic land reform legislation and a comprehensive agricultural policy for the postwar period.36 The success of these negotiations and of the settlement of the land question as a whole would have contributed greatly to the stabilization of the republican government of November 1918.

The meeting, which was unprecedented in the twentieth century, brought together all the actors in the field of agricultural policy, including representatives of various organizations and agricultural experts with a diverse array of orientations, as well as several former and future ministers of agriculture. The necessity of implementing a large-scale transformation of the existing estate structure that would take into consideration the social status quo and the given political situation was acknowledged by all the participants, including those that stood to lose through such reform. However, the scale and the manner of the reform were subject to debate. Advocating the interests of the landed peasantry, the Smallholders’ Party sought to strengthen the peasant-owned small estates at the expense of the bigger estates in order to create as many stable and viable small estates in the country as possible. Their most important argument was that the peasants should pay compensation to the landowners who needed to be remunerated for lost land, and they had the financial means to make such payments. This was an indirect admission of the fact that the peasantry had also been among the beneficiaries of the wartime boom. In contrast, the representatives of the large estates spoke about the economic advantages of large estates, stressing that in some sectors, they are more productive than small estates, a fact which, they insisted, should not be underestimated, given the need to supply food to cities and the need for exports. But they also recognized that for social peace, a more equal distribution of land ownership was needed. The representatives of the Social Democratic Party agreed with the economic arguments put forward by the large landowners. They agreed that the big estates should be preserved in an integral form because they were advantageous from an economic perspective. The Social Democratic Party members were afraid that with the introduction of universal suffrage, they would become a minority in the next elections, and the representatives of the peasantry would prevail in the new National Assembly. They were therefore quite opposed to the further strengthening of this social group. One of their representatives said what the others had only implied, namely that the parceling out of land would only make the people concerned “reactionaries,” and that as much land as possible should be kept in public ownership.37 Although the debate formally ended with a compromise law—while bigger estates were the sites of violent clashes in numerous parts of the country—it was never implemented.

With the establishment of the communist dictatorship in March 1919, it was the ideas of the radical groups of the Social Democratic Party—and a handful of communists—that were temporarily adopted. This meant the expropriation of the big and middle-sized estates, but strictly without dividing them up: they still needed to be managed as single estates. In addition, as had been done by previous governments in earlier years, the government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic tried to requisition food in the villages at a fixed price so that it could feed the urban population. This, however, made the animosity that had existed between cities and villages since the war years worse than ever. Already during the war, the image of the peasant hiding food and exploiting the vulnerability of the middle class and the working class became widespread. This image was countered by the image of urban power exploiting the producers through requisitions that the peasants felt to be unjust. The Hungarian Soviet Republic only aggravated this conflict when it attempted to pay for the requisitioned food with so-called “white money.” The peasants did not consider these banknotes, which were printed only on one side (thus leaving the other side blank), to be of any value, although the value of the earlier currency (the crown) was rapidly plummeting. In a certain respect, the Hungarian Soviet Republic could also be interpreted as the dictatorship of the towns over the countryside or as the dictatorship of the organized urban food-consumers over the agricultural producers. This opposition—augmented by several other religious and political conflicts—was expressed in the form of local armed clashes and contributed significantly to the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was, of course, accelerated by other external factors as well. The lack of land reform in the months of the dictatorship ensured that the issue would remain on the political agenda after the fall of the Soviet Republic, as tensions in rural society did not ease.

Managing Social Tensions during Consolidation after 1919

The downfall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic signified a turning point in the social dynamics triggered by the war. From that point on, the organizations which represented the working class, which had become strong enough during the war to serve as the base of a dictatorship, began to wither. It was not clear, however, how a stable equilibrium could be established between the workers, the middle classes, the peasants, and other smaller social groups in the towns and in rural society. For the most part, the elections of January 1920 propelled into the National Assembly representatives who bore the desires and fears of the middle classes and the peasantry—representatives who regarded the workers’ organizations, big industry, and often Jews with hostility, albeit to varying degrees. It was questionable how the slowly consolidating new state power would handle social conflicts, how it could strike a more or less reasonable balance between the bigger groups of society, and at what point the pendulum would swing back following the marked rise to (and then fall from) excessive power by the workers’ organizations. In addition to the loss of the earlier state framework, the sentiment of general uncertainty characterizing all of Hungarian society was heightened by the weakening of the currency as a measurement of value, which had far-reaching consequences in the midst of continuous inflation.

Inflation as Solution

In retrospect, the devaluation of the currency in the second half of 1919 and the first half of 1920 had numerous economic advantages. In fact, until the end of the war, inflation had been reined in. In October 1918, one golden crown was worth 2.32 paper crowns, though it should be noted that there was a bigger rise in the prices of primary commodities.38 Inflation began to accelerate in the spring of 1919, and from then on—with a brief pause and at a varying pace—it continued in two-digit monthly figures (and sometimes even higher) until April 1924.

For contemporaries, this inflation resulted in shifts in relations among the various elements of society: their circumstances became uncertain relative to one another. Most people questioned the value-measuring function of money that they had previously used to identify the relative worth of different products and social positions. All elements of society longed for inflation to come to a halt, because they saw it as a moral issue.39 The various urban groups wanted to stop “food usury,” while village society demanded the stability of the prices of goods. In the midst of continuously increasing prices, commerce became a scapegoat (a phenomenon which corresponded closely to the spread of anti-Semitism). Paying heed to general demand, the legislative body passed a law in 1920 against usury and profiteering, but this law did little more than expand the authority and duties of the Price Examination Committee, which had been created during the war. The law was intended to allow only “justified prices,” and it entrusted committees with the task of price monitoring.40 This system was in operation for some time, but it was extremely cumbersome and bureaucratic, and it generated constant tension because it was unable to keep up with the rapidly changing inflation and market trends.

The general plea for the stabilization of prices derived from the frustration that characterized several groups of society. Those who lived off their wages or fixed salaries were worried about the value of their earnings, while agricultural producers were anxious about the real price of their produce, and those who had savings feared that their savings would lose all their value. The members of the middle class were traumatized by the fact that they had to exchange their family “silverware” (jewelry, tableware, etc.) for food due to the unpredictability of cash flow.41 This explains the extremely austere proposals with regard to price monitoring.42 Within the context of the existing inflation, there was a general demand for the authorities to provide a steady supply of basic commodities—especially food—and to ensure that the most important living expenses, such as rent would not be subject to market price changes. Thus, the food supply allocated through the ratio system was maintained for industrial workers and public employees (the latter included a significant proportion of the middle class), as well as for war invalids and war widows, for a long period of time.43 The representatives of the trade unions and the manufacturing industry also made this demand. They feared that if food prices were deregulated, they would be forced to raise wages dramatically. And they were joined in this effort by members of the middle class who were affected by the continuous rise in prices.44 In 1920, bread prices in Hungary were a fraction of the prices in the neighboring countries. At the same time, agricultural producers demanded the free circulation of the food supply. This was gradually put into practice by the Bethlen government, and by September 1921, the free market circulation of foodstuffs was restored, although the workers were still guaranteed a cheap supply of flour by the authorities for another year, for obvious political reasons. The subsidized official supply of flour for war invalids, war widows, and civil servants continued until the summer of 1924.

With the free market of foodstuffs, the government induced agricultural producers—primarily the owners of the bigger estates who were producing for the markets (and not only to feed themselves)—to feel that their situation was tolerable under the new social conditions of the country within its new, significantly smaller borders. The gradual reestablishment of a free domestic food market remained bearable for social groups that did not produce food. Paradoxically, the reinstatement of the free circulation of food could be attributed to the inflation boom that most social groups considered almost unbearable.

For industrial companies, the free circulation of foodstuffs was made bearable by the fact that the government attempted to expand the internal market by squeezing out foreign consumer goods and created, through inflationary policy, resources for new investment.45 Representatives of big industry enjoyed a moment of symbolic recognition when Prime Minister István Bethlen attended their banquet organized in 1922 on the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the National Federation of Industrialists. Bethlen reassured them that the government’s customs policy would support industry. The prime minister also made it clear that they could count on the government’s support against the far-fetched initiatives of the workers

Balance between Workers and Industrials

One of the cardinal points in the restructuring of social power relations was how to fit the industrial workers and their organizations into the new order after the war. The middle-class associations and political movements that sprouted up in 1919, which were meant to provide a kind of national and middle-class self-defense, attempted to build their own network of consumer cooperatives, and they sought to extend their control over the General Consumption Cooperative connected to the trade unions. They considered this necessary in order to break the power of the workers, reduce trade that was taking place on a non-cooperative basis (primarily identified with Jews), and, finally, to protect their interests from agricultural producers. These efforts were crowned with only partial success. The membership in middle-class consumer cooperatives rose sharply, but this was only temporary, as membership had declined significantly by the second half of the 1920s. There were several attempts by extreme right-wing middle-class movements to take over management of the General Consumption Cooperative, and these attempts enjoyed the support, to some extent, of the government. However, the General Consumer Cooperative remained under the social authority of the trade unions. The only thing to which the trade unions had to agree was that the board of the General Consumer Cooperative would also include representatives from the relevant ministry, which would make it possible for the government to supervise its activities. Following the agreement concerning cooperatives, the Bethlen government managed to reach a general settlement with the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party. According to the compromise concluded at the end of 1921, the so-called Bethlen-Peyer Pact, the trade unions could work freely in the domain of private industry, but they had to stay away from agriculture, state factories, and railways. Strikes again became an approved tool with which to negotiate labor conflicts if they revolved only around economic issues (such as wages, work hours, etc.) and not party politics.

Initially, this agreement, the details of which were not made public for a long time, caused a minor panic among the leaders of the manufacturing industry. They were afraid that it would trigger a tide of strikes which would enable the trade unions again to gain at least partial control over the factories, as had happened at the beginning of 1919, before the declaration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. They feared that, just as during the war, the government was trying to pay for the support of the workers with their money.46 The government, however, managed to calm the industrialists. At the abovementioned banquet, Bethlen personally reassured the industrialists regarding the protection of private property, and he explained that, in his opinion, the lure of socialist thought had already been shattered, and socialism no longer carried the promise of radical changes, even in the eyes of its adherents: it was no longer seen as a solution to the ills of society.47 Its appeal had dimmed compared to what it had been before 1918. The fact that Bethlen was sitting between the two best-known Jewish businessmen in Hungary, Manfréd Weiss and Ferenc Chorin Senior, at the banquet held by the National Federation of Industrialists carried symbolic meaning with respect to the status of Hungarian Jewry: it signaled that from then on, the government would not pursue anti-Semitic policies. With these agreements, the government has managed to strike a balance between trade unions and the representatives of employers and at the same time to situate itself as the mediating party that would arbitrate between the two sides.

Consolidation in Rural Hungary: Land Reform and the Organization of Chambers of Agriculture

It was not only with regard to the conflicts between industry and agriculture and urban society and rural society that a balance somehow had to be struck. The internal power relations of rural society, which had been disturbed by the war, also cried for consolidation. However, by 1920, the question of how this should be accomplished was being examined in a different light than in the winter of 1918–1919. The leadership of the Smallholders’ Party, which had a substantial voice in the National Assembly after the elections, advocated the same ideas it had at the end of 1918; namely, that the land reform should serve to enhance the viability of the peasant-owned farms. Their opponents in 1920, however, were no longer the social democrats, who in the winter of 1918 had spoken on behalf of the landless agrarian laborers and had partly mobilized them for action. Rather, they now found themselves facing the representatives of big estates, who were fundamentally against land reform.48 They did not, however, deny the necessary of land reform, but they also did not hide their conviction that they considered land reform economically harmful and not necessarily reasonable even from a social point of view. It was unavoidable, in their eyes, only as a result of political pressure and as a means of mitigating internal conflicts within rural society and managing expectations and demands regarding land redistribution.49 Therefore, they wanted to make sure that landless agrarian laborers would be made the beneficiaries of the land redistribution. Of course, the latter could not be turned into peasants who would be able to sustain themselves from farming, as mere land redistribution would not have been enough to have achieved this goal. These landless agrarian laborers lacked both the expertise and the capital necessary to begin farming. This was precisely the argument in favor of the position of the smallholders, i.e., that the latter had both the necessary expertise and capital. However, the conception of land redistribution that corresponded to the interests of the big estates did not advocate the creation of viable farms. The act of giving a few acres of land to a pauper in the form of a small plot and a vegetable garden, for instance, was of great significance even if it did not provide a livelihood, because for those who had not owned any property before, this act already signified a radical transformation of their way of life and increased their prestige within rural society.

With these considerations in mind, a law was passed regarding the redistribution of plots as an urgent task to be completed before a more complex land reform would be elaborated. This, however, determined the direction for the planning of the land reform. The position of the landed peasantry was barely represented at the meeting at which the text of the law was discussed in detail. According to the overwhelming majority of those present, the law had to allow only for minor allocations. Archbishop of Esztergom János Csernoch, who represented the hundreds of thousands of acres of land belonging to the Roman Catholic Church (although he himself was born to a penniless family), specified that the maximum size of land allocated should be big enough to graze one or two goats, i.e., domestic animals of modest needs and proportions. Thus, they did not intend to create farms that would have cattle, which would have required the growing of fodder as well. The representatives at the meeting also deemed it important that the law should not precisely define who would be entitled to receive a plot. They feared that if they tried to stipulate this in a legal text, it would spark an endless debate that would serve only to increase tension among those concerned. Therefore, they put the decision regarding whose lands should be included in the land redistribution and who should receive land in the hands of the so-called “land re-allocation committees.” When the law was drafted, they muffled all opposition to the idea that only the chambers of agriculture should delegate members to the land redistribution committees. They wanted to avoid disputes regarding which organizations of the parties involved would be entitled to take part in the land redistribution through their delegates.50

The chambers of agriculture were created parallel to this as brand-new organizations. They were established with the specific objective of ensuring oversight for the bigger landowners and members of the middle-class and not leaving any room for the initiatives of the smallholders or day laborers. Membership in the chambers established via legislation was mandatory for the landowners and all groups of agricultural workers. The internal structure of the chambers was made up of various categories, and it was crucial where the boundaries of the categories would be drawn. The legislators made sure that “demagogue, revolutionary tendencies” could not become dominant within the chambers. They thought that the “conservative, state-preserving course” would not have a secure majority even in the category of landowners with 10 to 20 acres of land, because the latter had not opposed the land redistribution initiatives in 1918–1919 and had even supported them. Therefore, the categories were finally established within the chambers so as to ensure that the “reliable” strata would hold a majority in the landowners’ categories, and the agricultural workers were all put into a single category. Thus, the landowners’ categories—though much fewer in number—could force the former into a minority position because the law stipulated that each category had one vote on at each level of the chamber hierarchy.51

By setting up the chambers of agriculture in this manner and by granting them a role in the management of the redistribution of land, the government managed to restore the authority and influence of the middle and big landowning class in rural society. During the implementation of the land reform, it managed to determine quite precisely the smallest area of land to be redistributed, which could be sacrificed to satisfy the demands of the agricultural laborers. Thanks to the allocation, the position of the local élites was firmly reinforced, as they were the ones who could make decisions regarding the size of the lands distributed to individuals. While no self-subsistent farms were created, the possession of land still signified a much higher degree of integration for agricultural laborers in local society than they had previously enjoyed. As a result of this, there were no agrarian socialist movements in Hungary between the two World Wars of the kind that had existed in the period of slightly more than two decades preceding World War I, despite the fact that, due to natural population growth in the villages and the unfavorable international food market, living conditions in rural areas were worse than before. This change was one of the paradoxical outcomes of the social trends triggered by World War I. The so-called counterrevolutionary regime was thus able to stabilize the political balance of power in rural society in a way that was favorable to itself and which showed little change until the outbreak of World War II.52

Conclusion

During World War I, in Hungary, as in many other European states involved in the war, the existing social balances were upset and the scope of state activity in the economy and society was greatly expanded. The change in the balance of power was reflected in social policy and labor law measures in England, France, and Germany, where the Stinnes-Legien agreement between employers and trade unions was concluded at the end of 1918.53 These measures enabled industrial workers and, in many cases, the lower social strata in rural areas not only to achieve a formal extension of their political rights but also to attain a relative elevation of their social status and emancipation from the classical bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. At the same time, their political representation, usually through left-wing parties (social democratic or socialist) was consolidated, which guaranteed their social advancement and facilitated the further development of social rights. In Hungary, however, although the war also upset the balance of social power and contributed primarily to the increase in power of the industrial workers, there was nothing resembling the waves of institutionalization of social rights in the Western countries.54 The political elite groups that had benefited from the shift in the balance of power resulting from the war did not seek to establish social rights or to entrench extended political rights in late 1918 and the first half of 1919. Rather, they sought simply to gain raw power. The transitional dictatorship in the Soviet republic was made possible by the strengthening of workers’ organizations, thanks to economic mobilization, and it rose and fell without bringing about any substantial social transformation through, for instance, the institutionalization of social rights or changes to the prevailing conditions in rural society.

After the fall of the dictatorship, the workers’ organizations lost their positions of power because they were no longer backed by the wartime economic mobilization which had given them so much room for maneuver. This allowed the government to return, to a significant extent, to pre-war liberal practices in the treatment of trade unions by European standards. It was also the reason why the old-new political establishment in 1920 was able to restore the previous order of rural society and to preserve the previous estate structure against all claims for change. Paradoxically, the social order of the counterrevolutionary regime, which was anti-liberal in its political language, remained much closer to the liberal social model of the nineteenth century in both rural and industrial terms in the early 1920s than was the practice in countries where the social impact of World War I had led to greater steps towards the development of the modern welfare state and labor law. 55

The Ministry for Public Welfare and Labor (the creation of which had been envisaged during the war) coordinated relations between the trade unions and employers in the 1920s. This development conformed completely to the situation in Austria.56 In 1927, Albert Thomas, the head of the International Labor Office, described the status of the Hungarian trade unions as follows:

The Hungarian cyndicalists seem to me to be in a similar situation to the German trade unionists before the war. Of course, they are not officially recognized by the state, I mean, they exist legally, but one doesn’t deal with them under any circumstances. And yet my comparison is imprecise: They were invited to two or three lunches or dinners by the ministers who received me. They were invited to the reception of the House. [...] One can compare their situation to that of the German trade unions before 1914. Let us say more, they are in the process of conquering those possibilities of contact with the government, those official receptions, which the German trade unions demanded in vain at the time.57

 

Although the operations of the trade unions were not legally regulated, the unions were allowed to work freely, as long as their efforts were not aimed directly at political objectives but rather focused on achieving economic goals concerning the employers. The government regarded them as partners in this task. Overall, Hungarian society became much more integrated after the war in the sense that under the expanding scope of government management, coordination among interest organizations of the most diverse social groups (owners and workers from the spheres of industry and agriculture) became permanent. The conditions for this were not equal, of course, because the mechanisms of interest coordination favored groups of a higher social status and limited room for maneuver of those who were interested in changing the social status quo. At the same time, this system, which emerged in the aftermath of World War I, proved surprisingly stable. It withstood the social tensions of the Great Depression around 1930, unlike the social and political systems of many other Central and Eastern European countries.

Archival Sources

Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest [Archives of Military History] (HIM HL)

I. 28. M. Kir. Honvédelmi Minisztérium iratai [Documents of the Ministry of Defence]

L’Archives de B.I.T. [Bureau International du Travail] Geneva

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian State Archives] (MNL OL)

K 148 Belügyminisztérium elnöki iratok [Ministry of the Interior Presidential Papers]

K 184 Földművelésügyi Minisztérium [Ministry of Agriculture]

K 578 Igazságügyminisztérium [Ministry of Justice]

Z 435 Vas- és Gépgyárak Országos Egyesülete [National Association of Metallurgy and Machine Factories]

Z 816 Háztartás Szövetkezet [Household Cooperative]

Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára [Archives of Political History and Trade Unions] (PIL)

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World War I as a Historical Divide

Béla Tomka
University of Szeged
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):675–701 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.675

While World War I certainly represents a historical rupture in Europe and many parts of the world, there are diverging views in scholarly literature and broader historical discourse regarding its character as a dividing line between historical periods. The essay identifies three main positions within the debate and elaborates on the broader consequences of these interpretations. Several scholars consider World War I as the end of an earlier, longer historical era. According to another periodization, the two World Wars and the two decades separating them make up an era together, which is distinct from the pre-1914 and post-1945 periods. Finally, a third major current interprets World War I as the overture to a new epoch. Each of the three approaches can be relevant to research on World War I and the twentieth century, but there are considerable divergences between the interpretations thus produced. If we regard World War I as the endpoint of the previous era, then great emphasis should be placed on the road leading up to the war. If we conceive of the two World Wars and the decades between them as a single unit, then we should focus on violence as a defining feature of the periodization, and short-term factors should be highlighted. Finally, if we understand the Great War as the beginning of a new period which lasted until the end of the twentieth century or beyond, World War I will be seen as the Urkatastrophe (primordial catastrophe) that set the stage for World War II and, indirectly, for the Cold War, while also generating seminal long-term processes in politics, society, and the economy.

Keywords: twentieth century, Europe, World War I, historiography, periodization

From the 1880s onwards, well before the actual outbreak of World War I, several leading personalities of the age began expressing their views on the character of a future war to be fought by the European great powers. Helmuth von Moltke Senior, the victorious German commander-in-chief of the Prussian-French war, warned the Reichstag in 1890 that if a war were to break out in Europe, neither its duration, nor its end could be foreseen. The losing great powers would not accept defeat or the peace terms. This situation would soon generate another, prolonged conflict, Moltke Senior predicted, which could last for seven years or even 30.1

Other predictions were made in a similar vein, but it would be highly misleading to consider these seemingly prophetic insights as universally shared. In fact, many contemporaries, although they feared a potential war, hardly shared anything resembling the aforementioned Moltke’s views, nor were they in any way able to foretell the specificities or significance of any impending conflagration. Quite symptomatically, instead of heeding Moltke’s admonition, the German military leadership relied on the somewhat modified version of Alfred von Schlieffen’s notorious plan, which anticipated a brief conflict. This plan entirely miscalculated the importance and the limits of contemporary innovations in the field of transport and military technology, which provided a much wider range of options for the defenders against the attackers than in earlier or subsequent wars. But Germany was not the only country to cherish such unrealistic ideas about the war. Ferdinand Foch, who eventually became the commander-in-chief of the Allied troops in France in 1918, published books in 1903 and 1904 that were reprinted several times over the course of the following years. In these works, Foch voiced his conviction that the future war would be a tremendous clash that could and would be decided swiftly, i.e., in a single gigantic battle.2

When the war broke out, it quickly became evident to contemporaries that it was a conflict of special intensity and significance corresponding much more to the vision of Moltke Senior than to the ideas of Schlieffen or Foch. This dawning realization turned out to be all the more valid when it came to the consequences of the war.3 Although Europe and the world were affected by numerous other major events throughout the twentieth century, the Great War constituted a significant caesura in European history. The present study explores the specificities as well as the long-term effects of World War I to determine the place occupied by the war in historical periodization.4

World War I can be regarded as a global conflict for several reasons. The origins of the war can be traced back to the unparalleled surge of globalization in the last third of the mid-nineteenth century. Europe was in the center of this process, and the European colonial powers controlled massive overseas territories, which made it nearly inevitable that a conflict involving them would reach a global scale. Thus, the actual hostilities stretched well beyond Europe, with crucial battles taking place in the Atlantic, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Moreover, during the war, the mobilization of human, natural, and other resources took place in a global dimension. In particular, the Allies relied on their overseas colonies in that respect, but other nations, such as the United States, also marshalled overseas resources. In addition, the war had an impact on international trade and other global connections even in areas such as Latin America, which did not take part in the actual struggle. Finally, the war was a series of global events that were intensively covered, debated, and analyzed by the media all over the world.5 Admittedly, this paper mainly focuses on the war and the historiography of the war in Europe, and thus it cannot do full justice to the global dimension of the war. Since there is no full congruence between national, continental, and global chronologies, and in Africa and the Far East, World War I constituted a less important rupture than it did in Europe, I cannot claim global validity for the results presented here, even if Europe was epicenter of the conflicts leading to the war and the major theater of warfare.6

While World War I undoubtedly represents a historical rupture in Europe and many parts of the world, there are diverging views in scholarly literature and broader historical discourse regarding its character as a dividing line between historical periods. There are three main currents within the debate. According to the first school of thought, World War I meant the end of an earlier, longer historical era. This interpretation prevailed, for instance, in the interwar French and British historiography, while today, some authors regard World War I as the end point of the “long nineteenth century.”7 According to another periodization practice, the two World Wars and the two decades separating them make up a single period which is distinct from the pre-1914 and post-1945 periods.8 Finally, a third major current interprets World War I as the overture to a new era.9 One idea that is frequently ventured is that the latter historical epoch came to an end in 1991, i.e., with the fall of the European Communist regimes. This notion is also captured by the concept of the “short twentieth century,” but there are some who would argue that we still live in the age that began with World War I.

Drawing distinctions between these periodization efforts and their analyses is not a self-serving exercise. As I shall show, a preference for one over another has serious implications for an interpretation of the entire twentieth century, as proponents of the varying periodizations lay emphasis on different elements of the period.

End of an Era

The first periodization, according to which the war was the end of a historical era, recognizes the extraordinary importance of World War I because it brought about new dimensions of violence in both qualitative and quantitative terms. However, changes of such historical significance usually do not result from a single event or series of events, i.e. they are not determined by short-term factors. According to this approach, the roots of the violence seen in the war went back to distant times.10

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europe was the stage for comprehensive structural and ideological transformations which triggered changes in the nature of political violence manifested in a spectacular form during World War I. New forms of state power emerged, and this power began to penetrate geographical and social spheres where, earlier, it had had only moderate influence. In other words, governments exercised more and more control over their citizens and their citizens’ everyday lives. There were substantial shifts in the power relations of the individual European states, especially in the eastern and southeastern part of the continent. The Ottoman Empire was dwindling, and its place was taken over by new, virulent nation states in the Balkans. This launched a new wave of ethnic and diplomatic conflicts that had a strong impact on Central and Western Europe. Forms of mass politics also began to evolve in Western and Central Europe. As a result of this, the masses ceased to be an occasional force in political processes and started to be a major determinant.11

These political changes were accompanied by economic and social trans­formations. Industrialization strengthened the abovementioned administrative and military capacities of the state everywhere, and the organization of industrial workers into a social class also posed a threat to the ruling elites. Urbanization also facilitated the emergence of mass politics. The uneven pace of economic development decisively contributed to shifts of power among the European states.12

As researchers of political violence have pointed out, the general attitude toward violence had begun to change well before the war in Europe and elsewhere. The American Civil War was a totalizing war, as it blurred the borderlines between the military and the civilian population, warfare and the home front, and it also advanced the concept of unconditional surrender.13 A conspicuous sign of this change was the widespread conceptualization of war as a desirable and noble activity, a phenomenon also referred to as the glorification of violence. The intensification of political violence in the first decades of the twentieth century can be put down to numerous sources. In particular, three major political-ideological currents of the nineteenth century contributed to the explosion of political violence: nationalism, colonial imperialism, and communism.14

The most significant factor was the linkage of popular sovereignty and nationalist ideology.15 This became a quintessential force primarily in contested regions with heavily mixed ethnic compositions, most notably the Balkans and East Central Europe. As the emancipatory character of nationalism began to fade, the subordination of ethnic minorities increasingly came to be coupled with aggression at the end of the nineteenth century.16 The primary catalyst of violence was the Eastern Crisis, which began to flare up in the mid-1870s and which involved an intricate web of international, imperial, and ethnic conflicts. It was followed by outbreaks of brutal ethnic violence in the Balkans up until 1914. These bursts of violence were not entirely new, but the arsenal of the opposing parties became more powerful and the actors more intransigent. As has been noted by scholars of late nineteenth century political violence, “[t]he pattern of state oppression, terrorism, revolt, ethnic conflict, international intervention, forced resettlement of populations and ethnic cleansing and genocide was one that had already been established in Europe long before 1914.”17

From the end of the nineteenth century, radical national groups gained ground in Western and Central and Eastern European states as well. They not only put pressure on their own governments to force them to take more aggressive stances in international politics, they also intimidated foreign governments and public opinion in other countries. The diplomats closely monitored the radical nationalist demands and the xenophobic articles published in the press. The French and the Russians feared the Pan-German movements, while the Germans were alarmed by the Pan-Slav initiatives. The activism of the nationalist agitators produced arguments for similar groups in other countries and contributed to the development of an atmosphere of distrust in international politics.18

Another important political-ideological current which influenced the dynamics of political violence was colonial imperialism.19 The governments of colonizing countries could be relatively nonviolent when it came to domestic affairs but repressive and even brutal when it came to colonized populations. Clearly, several factors were at play, including racism, the effort to spread Christianity, and the pursuit of imperial territorial expansion. Material interests played a secondary role in colonization efforts. Most the colonies, with India being the most important exception, demanded more investment from the colonizing country than the revenues produced. This was true even when the balance was positive for certain business groups which tried to drive imperialist policy forward. Richard Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke also emphasize that in the globalizing world economy at the end of the nineteenth century, there were no antagonistic conflicts between the great powers that would have demanded a military solution.20 Therefore, colonial imperialism can be traced back primarily to ideological and political factors. Nonetheless, the imperialist attitudes were quite clearly detectable in the European escalation of violence after World War I, too. It was with reference to the British and Belgian colonies that the Nazis demanded similar territories outside Europe and on the old continent as part of their project to create a so-called “living space” for themselves, one that would clearly be based on racial discrimination.21

Finally, communism and bolshevism can also be classified among the key ideological sources of violence.22 Where authoritarian regimes blocked the gradual emancipation of the working class (particularly in Russia), revolutionary ideas in the labor movement became dominant. Long before the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin and other Bolsheviks were of the view that profound social change could be achieved in Russia only by unrelenting terror.23 The Russian revolution, which broke out after three bloody years of war, turned into a brutal civil war which soon exported revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence beyond Russia’s borders.24

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard the pre-1914 period as a mere prelude to World War I. The war was not inevitable. International relations of the time were not characterized exclusively by conflict, and significant efforts were made to maintain peace. It is no accident that after 1871, Europe experienced one of the longest periods in its history without wars between the great powers. There were several factors that prevented the outbreak of major armed conflicts. Most of the statesmen knew that a war would cause social upheaval and revolutions, and they were also aware of the additional political, financial, and economic risks. Although the military leaders of the great powers had called for an armed solution on several occasions before the World War, they were always restrained by the politicians, who knew that wars needed justification and that waging a comprehensive modern war was only possible with broad social support. The biggest political parties in Europe, the German Social Democratic Party and the British Labour Party, were unambiguously anti-militarist. Radical nationalism was an important factor, but it was hardly the only factor that influenced foreign policy in the countries of Europe.25

Era of World Wars

Moving on to the other periodizations of the twentieth century, works that consider World War I not as the endpoint of one era but rather as the beginning of a new one are in fact more common in the historical literature. As noted above, the decades between 1914 and 1945 were a period which was referred to as “another Thirty Years’ War” (Winston Churchill), the “Thirty Years’ War in the 20th century” (Raymond Aron), “the age of the European civil war” (Ernst Nolte), or simply “the era of violence” (Ian Kershaw).26 These decades were connected by the explosion of violence: well over 100 million people perished in wars, civil wars, Nazi extermination camps, and Soviet labor camps.27 According to the advocates of this type of periodization, this era differed fundamentally, at least in Europe, from the previous decades and especially the second half of the century, which brought a longer period of peace again.

Within the immense literature dealing with the causes of World War I, the revisionist approach that evolved around the turn of the millennium calls into question the idea that the outbreak of the war was somehow inevitable or highly likely because of the prewar tensions, crises, and pressures created by nationalist agitation. Instead, this approach assigns a greater role to the contingent incidents or unfavorable coincidence of specific events, especially during the July crisis. It accepts, however, the crucial role of World War I in the long-term escalation of political violence.28

World War I not only increased the number of the victims of political violence, it also signaled the beginning of a new quality of violence. This novel quality was the result of the combination of modern industrial technologies with the new conception of war, one that was reminiscent of the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century wars of religion. Such clashes were conceptualized as battles between “good” and “evil.” Unlike the conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had comparatively limited aims (for instance, the preservation or fall of a given dynasty), the aim of the major powers in World War I was to destroy the enemy utterly.

The new culture of war involved, first, the cultural mobilization of the population for violence and, second, the changing practice of war.29 On all sides, the dehumanization of the enemy was a primary tool of cultural mobilization (some refer to this as psychological mobilization).30 This was greatly facilitated by the fact that, in the age of mass media, the governments had efficient tools at their disposal to distort information and widely disseminate such news reports. Initially, they exercised censorship only over news directly related to the military situation.31 Later, however, information regarding prevailing general sentiment and especially views of the war and also critical remarks made by politicians and politically exposed persons were also considered relevant from the perspective of military considerations, so they too were submitted to censorship. Accordingly, while in 1914, there was only one press officer in the German army, there were more than 1,000 of them by 1916.32 The expansion and modernization of the propaganda activities are demonstrated by the fact that, in early 1917, a Photo und Film Office (Bild- und Filmamt, BUFA) was set up within the military department of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in early 1918, Great Britain set up a Ministry of Information.33 Priority was accorded to the presentation of sexual violence perpetrated by the enemy.34 Serbian newspapers contained reports concerning rapes allegedly committed by members of the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Austrian press provided broad coverage of the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Russian troops against women in Galicia. The aim was not simply to report on the assaults committed against women. The propaganda suggested that if men were unable to defend their women (and by implication their country), their masculinity itself would be endangered.35

However, the demonization of the enemy was not simply the product of censorship and propaganda. As recent research on World War I has pointed out, civil society also took an active part in this campaign.36 In October 1914, 93 prominent German intellectuals, including Max Weber and Albert Einstein, published a manifesto entitled “Appeal to the Civilized World.” In it, they rebuffed all accusations against the German army, from the violation of Belgium’s neutrality to the cruelties allegedly committed by German troops, and insisted that the German army was, in fact, the defender of German culture and, hence, the culture of the world. Attacks on the German army, they contended, were also attacks on German culture. In response, French scholars published a manifesto in which they argued that German culture and military aggression were closely related: the former bred the latter. As Henri Bergson, perhaps the most renowned philosopher in France at the time, put it, war was “the fight of civilization against barbarism.”37

As these examples make clear, the basic function of the culture of war was the creation of an antagonistic opposition of collective identities. Although critical voices eventually became louder, a markedly antiwar attitude was characteristic only of a rather small fraction of intellectuals throughout the war. These opinions were expressed most noticeably in Russia, Great Britain, France, and to a lesser degree in Germany and Austria-Hungary.38

Two important elements of the other key component of the new war culture, the change in the practice of war, merit particular emphasis here. Over the course of the war, military actions against civilians and the destruction of the memorial sites crucial to the cultural identity of the enemy became an increasingly standard tool in the arsenals of the opposing armies.39 To cite one example, one might think of the act of arson committed in Leuven in the first weeks of the war. The University of Leuven Library, which held a collection of precious codices and incunabula, was set aflame by the German army, an act without military justification.40 The tremendous fire power in the battlefields was another major element of the new practice of war which, not surprisingly, shaped the culture of war.

As the above makes clear, the war was waged not only in the battlefields by soldiers but also on cultural fronts involving the civilian populations, which is why it has come to be referred to as a total war in the historical literature.41 Since the conflict was a war of nations and empires with the participation of entire societies, acts of violence could be perpetrated in the name of the people, and violence could be deployed against the civilian populations. In other words, the enemy was no longer states and their armies, but the entire populations of other countries.42 The totalization of the war led to brutalization both in the ranks of the military and within the wider society, because it made ever increasing levels of aggression socially acceptable, arguably preparing the way for World War II.43 This process can be described not only as a transformation of the culture of war but also as a change in the prevailing political culture.

The use of physical violence evolved into an intrinsic instrument of partisan actors in the new order of the interwar decades, in which physical assaults were considered a legitimate means of political struggle. Therefore, the formal end of World War I did not mean an end to political violence. On the contrary, between 1917 and 1923, revolutions, counterrevolutions, civil wars, and violent ethnic conflicts shattered many parts of Europe.44 The process of brutalization was especially striking in Russia during the revolution and civil war and in Germany in the revolutionary period and during the moments of diffuse political violence of the 1920s and 1930s.45 In Russia, World War I was instrumental in the brutalization of politics, but often in a more indirect way. Violence did not simply originate on the battlefield. Rather, it had a more complex genealogy. The institutional weakness of the state had permitted cultures of violence to flourish before the Great War. The war destroyed the old state structures and state authority, releasing the preexisting propensities for violence, which started to feed on themselves. Many instances of violence (White, Green, criminal, and mob violence) were devastating but were employed mostly tactically. In contrast, the Bolsheviks practiced violence and the threat of brutality in a strategic way to transform society and create a new state. The strategic use of force helped them defeat their opponents, and it also led to the institutionalization of violence in the newly established communist state.46 Central and Eastern Europe was also highly affected by political violence after the war. In Hungary, the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary terror and the intense everyday violence that evolved in the early 1920s (which included, for instance, the beating of Jews at universities) were all manifestations of the above. However, compared to Russia or Germany, the situation was consolidated relatively soon, within a few years.47

The revolutions, counterrevolutions, and paramilitary violence showed that although Europe was exhausted by 1918, there was no general cultural demobilization after World War I.48 Not even the Paris Peace Treaties managed to lay down the foundations of an enduring peace or an era without violence on the continent. This failure should be put down less to a lack of wisdom among the diplomats and more to the fact that “the war in people’s heads” continued, i.e., wartime attitudes continued to live on in broad spectrums of European societies, even if significant differences could be observed across Europe. Mobilization for political violence began to decline in the 1920s, especially in the victorious countries (such as Great Britain and France), but demobilization was hardly complete there either.49 The change is well illustrated by the transformation of depictions of war in France. While before 1914, images of war were dominated by heroic cavalry attacks and the figure of the noble and self-sacrificing soldier, after the mid-1920s, heroism disappeared for the most part from these depictions, and war was often presented as a filthy and vile act. Thus, it has been suggested that the increase in political violence as a formative experience of the post-World War I order depended less on the experiences of the war and more on how a specific country had fared in the peacemaking processes after the war. Accordingly, recent studies underline the confusion and humiliation brought about by defeat, which played a key role in the eruption of violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Here, a “culture of defeat” emerged which, as a symptom of enduring cultural mobilization, prevented many war veterans and civilians from coming to terms with the war’s outcome and demobilizing themselves internally.50 However, even in the “cultures of victory,” political violence was an essential constituent of the interwar order. The task of securing the new borders in the context of ethnically and religiously diverse societies created considerable conflicts and violent excesses in countries as such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland.51

In addition to this absence of cultural demobilization, the two World Wars were also connected to each other by the armed conflicts that broke out shortly after the end of World War I. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Italy launched an attack against Abyssinia in 1935, the Germans and the Italians intervened in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and war broke out between Japan and China in 1937.

Beginning of a New Era

There is another widespread position concerning World War I as a historical divide which considers the Great War as the overture to a new era that lasted not simply until the end of World War II, but much longer than that. Reference has already been made to the well-known concept of the “short twentieth century,”52 meaning the period between 1914 and 1991, but several works have chosen World War I (its beginning or its end) as the starting point, and they trace historical trends which lasted until the turn of the millennium or up to the present day.53 According to these works, the twentieth century was essentially a period of historical continuity, as the historical trends sparked or ignited by World War I were decisive even after World War II.54

According to historians who see World War I as the beginning of a new period stretching until 1991 or beyond, this continuity can be detected with regard to violence as well. Once the war culture and other characteristics of World War I have been acknowledged, and in particular the practices of demonizing the enemy and committing acts of violence against civilians (such as shelling and aerial bombardment, U-Boat attacks, requisition of food and labor, mistreatment and abuse of allegedly suspicious members of minority communities, etc.), these phenomena lose their distinct quality and become integral elements of war.55 The conscious application of this type of periodization to European history acknowledges the key importance of World War I and the extreme brutality of World War II, but it also points to widespread political aggression in the second half of the twentieth century. Globally, many wars were fought after 1945, and European powers were directly involved several of them. The colonial wars offer an obvious example, but the export of violence from Europe can be observed in other respects as well. The two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and their allies often instrumentalized local conflicts in the third world for their own purposes and clashed with each other in proxy wars.

Moreover, political violence, though it may have lost some influence and resources, never ceased to exist entirely in Europe itself. From the 1960s, terrorist movements repeatedly committed violent acts, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s involved mass violence and ethnic cleansing again, and recently, Russia has come into armed conflict with its neighbors on several occasions, disregarding international law time and again. In the decade after the turn of the millennium, nationalist mobilization took place in several other countries as well, such as Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.56

For decades after World War II, the threat of political violence was moderate. Underlying factors included the ethnic homogenization of the nation states resulting from large-scale forced resettlements and assimilation. The threat of mutual nuclear destruction as a deterrent during the Cold War and the process of European integration were even more important reasons for the absence of major wars in Europe. Today, however, tensions are no longer bottled up by the logic of Cold War, and European integration is affected by centrifugal forces more than ever. The reappearance of security issues invites interpretations that draw connections between the current era and the age of the World Wars and promotes the related historical periodization.

However, World War I ushered in a long-term transformation that stretched beyond the mid-twentieth century not only in terms of political violence, but in international politics, social and economic affairs and ideologies. A crucial international and geopolitical consequence of the war was the termination of the classic European pentarchy. The empires of Central and Eastern Europe disintegrated, and the borders drawn by the peace treaties stabilized for the most part in the long run. The colonial system was seemingly only restructured, but the imperial overstretch of the British and the French accelerated the emancipation of their colonies. The imperial state as a form of territorial governance came under attack and began to retreat as the concept of the nation state continued its advance across the globe. Several decades and another brutal war between 1939 and 1945 were necessary to accelerate the course of imperial decline, but World War I was the starting point of this process and, thus, a global watershed.57

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution kicked off the evolution of the communist world system, and the rivalry between communist and capitalist countries left its mark on international relations throughout the century.58

Among the economic changes, increased redistribution and state control of business stands out.59 Government agencies and other authorities appeared in each belligerent European country. These bodies oversaw the allocation of raw materials, controlling finances and distributing food and other everyday necessities. As the war progressed, they became more and more powerful, indicating that the government had acquired competencies that would have been inconceivable previously and that they had undertaken a degree of responsibility for the living standards of citizens that had been essentially unheard of. After the war, these authorities were only partially eliminated, as illustrated, for instance, by the continued operation of the Center of Financial Institutions (Pénzintézeti Központ) in Hungary.60

The use of war loans to finance the war and precipitous inflation caused by the manipulation of state finances devastated the economies of the belligerent countries, but a similar fate awaited pre-1914 international commercial and financial relations as well. In some areas, war damages already hindered economic performance, and reconstruction also demanded considerable resources. Overseas investments had to be sold to finance the war. The bulk of the wartime investments flowed into the armaments industry, which later became redundant. There were excess capacities in other branches, too, and the human capital suffered heavy losses. These factors contributed to the Great Depression and thus to the political instability of the 1930s.61

The economic weight of the United States and Japan grew in the west and in the east, respectively, with long-term consequences. This was clearly indicated by the fact that while before 1914, the key currency of the international capital markets had been the British pound sterling and Great Britain had been the leading international creditor, insurer, and investor, after 1918, these functions began to be filled by the United States and the US dollar.62

As far as the broader social implications are concerned, it deserves to be mentioned that World War I brought a breakthrough in the development of mass democracies. In the previous era, parliamentary systems existed all over Western Europe, but only a small percent of the population had voting rights. However, during the war, the biggest sacrifices were made by the excluded groups, so they demanded their political rights. The introduction of women’s suffrage also picked up speed. This was due in no small part to the ever-larger presence of women in the workforce and, notably, in positions requiring forms of skilled labor. This process accelerated over the course of the twentieth century, becoming perhaps the single most important factor in women’s growing political and economic emancipation.63 However, the large-scale extension of the right to vote and the simultaneous spread of parliamentary systems also created some measure of political turmoil in the short run. While Great Britain managed to stabilize its democracy in the 1920s, most liberal democracies collapsed or had been overthrown by the early 1930s, and this contributed decisively to the escalation of international conflicts.64

With regards to long-term social processes, the war did not so much bring about a breakthrough as act as a catalyst which accelerated shifts already underway. The working class continued to grow during the war. In some countries, it increased by one third over the four years in question. Parallel to the expansion of the economic role of the state, social policy was also given greater emphasis. The war uprooted millions, thus contributing to the spread of new habits and attitudes. Relatively insulated peasant communities were increasingly exposed to urban values. The changes which took place to the roles that were played by women in society (particularly but not exclusively with regards to the presence of women in the workplace) are also a significant indication of changes in and challenges to social values. In the 1920s, the sight of a woman on her own in a cinema and another public place of entertainment became customary in European cities, while only a few decades earlier it would have constituted a rare incident.65

 

All in all, each of the three approaches presented above can be relevant for research on World War I and the history of the twentieth century, but there are considerable divergences between the interpretations they produce. If one regards World War I as the endpoint of the previous era, then strong emphasis should be placed on the road leading up to the war, or in other words the conflicts in Europe and the prevailing ideologies of the last third of the nineteenth century: how were the structural and cultural preconditions created that eventually led to the outburst of violence in 1914?

If one conceives of the two World Wars and the decades between them as a single unit, then the focus shifts to violence as a defining feature of the periodization, and emphasis falls on short-term factors. War is traced back to war in many respects, with World War II being seen as a consequence of World War I. This approach furthers an understanding of the dynamics of violence. It also highlights the relative peace prevailing in Europe for several decades after World War II and encourages one to explore the reasons for this peace. At the same time, this interpretation is Eurocentric and can barely account for long-term social and economic changes.

Finally, if we understand the Great War as the beginning of a new period lasting until the end of the twentieth century and even beyond, emphasis is placed on World War I as a defining watershed—even in comparison with World War II—which generated massive long-term political, social, and economic processes. Thus, World War I is to be seen not only as the prelude to World War II, but as an Urkatastrophe (primordial catastrophe) or “the great seminal catastrophe of this century,” (George F. Kennan) which triggered a series of conflicts.66 From the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, this approach is particularly relevant, as World War I initiated the breakup of empires in the region and the rise of a new system of nation sates, and the common thread of the ensuing short twentieth century for Central and Eastern Europe was the dominance of authoritarian systems.

In contrast with total war, total history is unfeasible, as historians cannot consider the all the existing sources and research findings in their works. The approaches discussed above cannot be merged into one seamless narrative either. Instead, we see changing foci in the historiography of World War I, and this affects the assessments of the place of World War I in any historical narrative of the time.

Between the two World Wars, historians paid greater attention to the events leading up to World War I than they did to its immediate consequences, but they usually focused on relatively narrow issues. They were intrigued by the question of war guilt, in particular the responsibility of governments, which corresponded to the traditional view that placed the nation at the center of its narratives.67

In the 1950s and 1960s, concern with the events of World War II among both historians and the general public largely overshadowed interest in the Great War. Still, several excellent scholarly works were written on World War I in which the focus shifted to the masses affected by the war on the front and in the hinterland. This contributed to discussions of the long-term effects of World War I and new considerations of how the war had arguably shaped the whole of the twentieth century (some of which have been presented above).

At the beginning of the 1990s, when the new Europe was born and the interpretations of international relations based on the nation state principle seemed narrow or even obsolete, the concept of a “European civil war” gained popularity. As we have seen above, this notion included World War I. One of the key promoters of this idea was the Museum of the Great War, which was opened in 1992 in the Château de Péronne in the town of Péronne, France (the site of the Somme battles).68

This proved to be a temporary change. The centenary of the outbreak of the Great War coincided with growing international instability, which once again encouraged a search for correspondences between the age of World War I and our own days and thereby placed emphasis on long-term perspectives. But the larger framework for understandings of past events has not changed: interpretations of World War I continue to be shaped by historians, members of the public, and their broader social contexts.69

 

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War and Revolutions: Trauma and Violence from a Socio-Psychological Approach*

Ferenc Erős (1946–2020†)
Janus Pannonius University of Pécs

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):733–763 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.733

World War I, which broke out more than 100 years ago, placed not only a tremendous material and physical burden on the citizens of the participating countries, military and civilians alike, but also a psychological one. The study of the psychological consequences of the war has been pushed somewhat into the background in comparison to the historical and political analyses, though the uses of psychology—and broadly speaking, of the so-called “psy” disciplines, i.e., psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, social psychology, psychotechnics, criminology, pedagogy, etc.—were a crucial part of the history of this war. However, a history of the “psy” disciplines would not be complete without some discussion of the fact that World War I and World War II (and subsequent conflicts) played a fundamental role in the development of these sciences. Arguably, World War led to the emergence—as a kind of “experimental laboratory”—of practices and methods of the application of violence, trauma management, intimidation, terror, manipulation, and propaganda which draw on (and contribute to) insights from these disciplines, not to mention new approaches to the management of subjectivity and the manipulation of sentiments, which proved effective both in times of war and peace.

Keywords: trauma, violence, socio-psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psycho­therapy, World War I

Introduction

The first modern war in world history—fought with new and formidable military technology, including machine guns, motorized vehicles, and poison gases—affected the lives of millions of people. The psychological consequences became the most clearly apparent in the case of soldiers doing armed service, who had to face challenges, constraints, threats, and perils that they had never or only rarely encountered before. In most cases, whether or not a soldier (who was reduced to machine responding to commands) survived depended far more on sheer luck rather than on personal heroism, courage, skill, or inventiveness. Soldiers were often subject to harsh physical punishment, humiliation, and aggression. The dehumanizing effects of the war and the experiences of violence and vulnerability created stressful conditions, giving rise to psychological disorders even in the cases of soldiers whose lives were not directly in danger or who were not subject to aggression, but who still witnessed the sufferings or deaths of their comrades and adversaries, not to mention soldiers who had perhaps participated, either as perpetrators or as eyewitnesses, in mass murders and reprisals. The psychological consequences of the war affected not only the soldiers fighting on the fronts, serving in the hinterland, or taken prisoner of war. They also affected families (both close and distant relatives) and a large segment of the civil population. The war, which involved the mobilization on a huge scale of material and human resources (and placed huge demands on people’s physical and mental strength), dehumanized relations among people to an unprecedented extent. It was a war of both physical and psychological resources: a war of “nerves.” War propaganda became an important military tool, which drew on modern mass-communication tools (print media, photography and film) and targeted not only enemy troops, but the entire civilian population of enemy countries, deploying the full array of hate speech rooted in conspiracy theories and cultural, national, ethnic, and religious prejudices and stereotypes. The psychological warfare used in World War I became a model for psychological wars and various forms of symbolic aggression which drew on mass emotions and urged the total annihilation of the enemy, and these forms of symbolic aggression were then used in later wars and even in times of peace.1

World War I and its immediate aftermath (revolutions and counterrevolutions, territorial and demographic reshuffling, political and economic crises) became the starting point for a series of additional collective traumas and mass psychological crises, especially in the defeated countries. These traumas played a substantial part in the preparations for and outbreak, evolution, and impact of an even more brutal conflict, World War II. More and more forms of collective aggression reared their ugly heads, and these forms of aggression, both real and symbolic, served to cause trauma to certain individuals or groups. Genocide, terrorism, forced relocations and deportations, ethnic cleansing, physical and psychological torture, etc., were all techniques of intentional traumatization that were already largely present during World War I.2

War Neurosis as a Subject of Historical Research

Among the “psy” disciplines, it was psychiatry that had the closest connection to battlefield events. World War I was the first war in which psychiatry as a discipline was exploited on a mass level. The experience thus gathered had a major influence on approaches and methodologies used in psychiatry in peace times and during later wars.3

In recent years, the study of the psychiatric practices used during World War I, especially the diagnosis and treatment of the syndrome collectively referred to as “war neurosis,” and the role of military psychiatry on the front and in the hinterland have become equally important areas of research. Whereas study of this topic formerly took place mainly within the confines of medical history, more specifically the history of psychiatry, nowadays, it has become an intriguing domain for historical research as well. For social historians, the unearthing and the analysis of the practices of military psychiatry shed light on daily life during the war, the multitude of mentalities regarding corporal and psychological suffering, the operational mechanisms of militarized healthcare and mental hygiene institutions and organizations, dominant power relations of supremacy within their walls, and the conflicts that doctors who had been mobilized in the army had to face as a result of the contradictions between their duty to live up to their Hippocratic oath on the one hand and to obey commands on the other.4 The topics of military psychiatry and war neuroses have lately kindled interest among gender researchers as well, as the diagnosis and qualification of war neuroses were intertwined with the issue of “masculinity” and “femininity,” a fact which sheds some light on an important moment in the history of modern discourses related to “masculinity.”5

The scope of psychiatry was not limited to the treatment of the psychologically wounded during the war. Psychiatry was an essential part of the wartime power apparatus, the mechanism of violence, offering a seemingly scientific ideological and political foundation that made it possible to decide who was suffering from some kind of illness acquired on the front and who was only “faking.” The mentality of psychiatrists and other experts regarding war neuroses was determined by their preliminary knowledge, the dominant scientific and theoretical paradigms and categories of diagnosis, and their conceptions of “normal” and “deviant.” However, the methods of treatment provided or recommended by them and the direction, purpose, technique, duration, and location were also influenced to a great extent by the overt commands or expectations of the military leadership. The whole topic of war neuroses, which stretches far beyond World War I, is a perfect illustration of the intertwining of “psy-knowledge” and power. At the same time, the national and local cultural and historical backgrounds all played an important part in this, since despite their common features, there were significant differences between the various “treatment cultures” and the mentalities and styles of military psychiatrists operating in the British, French, American, German, and Austro-Hungarian militaries.6

The foundations for the contemporary, historical-cultural approach to the issue of war neurosis were chiefly laid by the scholarship of Michel Foucault, partly through his works on the history of mental illness and partly by his exploration of how the development of human sciences was connected to the birth of the modern tools, practices, and sites (hospitals, asylums, armies, prisons, detention centers, etc.) of discipline, punishment, and violence.7 The Foucauldian notion of gouvernementalité proved essential, since it referred to the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) that were used to assert and maintain hegemony over subjectivity, or the “governance of the soul.”8

Numerous historical works have been published since the 1970s that examine the characteristics of the operation of military psychiatry in detail in different countries. These historical works rely first and foremost on archival sources, the records of military health-care authorities and organizations, the reports issued by military doctors and hospital commanders, patient files, etc., but they also use articles published in medical journals, diaries, letters written by soldiers on the frontline, and other personal documents, as well as medical records, memoirs, and contemporary photos and films made by amateurs or for scientific purposes.9 Literary works are also important sources, since the psychological torments, traumas, and post-traumatic effects of the war were subjects and themes in countless artistic creations, theater plays, and films created over the course of the past 100 years.10 The “Great War” and the psychological ordeals to which it led have left an indelible mark in the cultural remembrance of the countries involved.11

The most extensive historical research examines the military psychiatry performed in the British, German, and Austro-Hungarian armies. Paul Lerner’s seminal work12 on “hysterical men” explores the trauma policy of imperial Germany, and Hans-Georg Hofer’s monography13 scrutinizes the dominant psychiatric practices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s military. Several pieces of scholarly literature focus on the methods of treatment applied by psychiatrists working in the British army and their institutional background.14 These writings give an in-depth account of how the individual states tackled the problematics surrounding war reparations, also referred to as “pension war,” i.e., the socio-political and financial crisis provoked by the mass demands for compensation (benefits, pensions, and other forms of assistance) and special needs (medical treatment and reintegration into the labor market) of the psychological victims of the war.15 Historians have demonstrated a special interest in the role and importance of psychoanalysis in the military psychiatry of World War I.16 The psychoanalytic approach to war neuroses and the wartime activities of psychoanalysts will be discussed below.

The Gray Zone of Psychiatry

Neurology and psychiatry as scientific disciplines (the two had not yet really separated at the time) underwent a tremendous evolution from the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century. Their advancement was partly due to the radical transformation of the paradigms of the notions of mental disorder and changed social needs and partly to the latest neuroanatomical and neurophysiological discoveries and revelations, which heralded the solution to the classic philosophical problem of “the body and the soul” through the natural sciences. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the major psychiatric and psychopathological theoretical constructs were created, and diagnostic frameworks and categories were set up for the categorization of mental illnesses, such as the typology by Emil Kräpelin, which was considered the global standard for nearly a century up to the dissemination of the American classification system (The American Psychiatric Society’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM). That was when large—and by contemporary standards modern—institutes of neurology and psychiatry were founded throughout Europe. It was also in these times that special neurological education was organized, the centers of which were university clinics with a focus on research, alongside specialized medical care.17

However, psychiatry still had a vast “gray zone,” meaning symptoms that could not be definitively classified under any of the diagnostic categories. These phenomena included “abnormal” psychological and behavioral manifestations (considered deviant), ranging from “perverted” or “aberrant” forms of sexuality through antisocial and criminal forms of behavior to various physical reactions, conditions, and symptoms that could not be traced back to any physical cause. Of these “abnormal” manifestations, the most important and the most disputed one was hysteria, the history of which goes back to Antiquity, to Galenical and Hippocratic medicine. For many centuries, hysteria was regarded as a satanic and demonic phenomenon, or a “feminine trouble,” a mysterious manifestation of female sexuality, and it was linked to the functioning of the uterus and its movement within the body. In the Middle Ages, diverse superstitions, beliefs, and myths related to witchcraft and malefice were attached to hysteria. Its medicalization, scientific examination, and “demythification” began only in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially thanks to the scholarship of Jean-Martin Charcot, a Parisian professor of neurology.18

One of the major faults of contemporary psychiatry was connected to the dilemma of whether hysteria was an illness of organic or psychological origin. As Charcot repeatedly demonstrated, the various bodily symptoms of hysteria, such as paralysis of the limbs, could be overcome purely through psychological treatment (hypnosis), and they could equally be provoked in those individuals who were sensitive to this. Charcot hypothesized that unbearable external shocks may induce hypnosis-like mental conditions and dissociative symptoms in the patient. While Charcot continued to regard hysteria as a syndrome mostly typical of women and assumed that it could be ascribed to some kind of a physical or degenerative nervous disorder, one of his disciples, Sigmund Freud, universalized the concept of hysteria and extended it to men.19 He contended that behind the symptoms of hysteria there was some kind of latent massive suppression, subconscious fantasy, usually a sexual trauma or abuse suffered in childhood. Freud considered hysteria an illness, a genre of neurosis, and he distinguished between two symptomatic forms of hysteria: hysterical conversion (conversion disorder), in which the psychological conflict manifests itself in various corporal symptoms, and anxiety hysteria, in which the anxiety is related to some external object (like in the case of phobias). While Freud rejected the explanation of hysteria by suggestion and considered hysteria a genuine psychological disorder, Charcot’s most influential French disciple, Pierre Janet, and his disciples proclaimed that hysteria was generated mostly by auto-suggestion, i.e., “simulation,” although external causes could also contribute to its onset and evolution.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become generally accepted that the symptoms of hysteria were motivated by some kind of earlier or current trauma, though there was no agreement concerning the classification of these symptoms. The Greek term trauma (“wound,” “injury”) had been used in the medical literature since the middle of the seventeenth century, especially in traumatology. Its primary meaning denotes specific physical injuries that can be seen with the eye or detected by various diagnostic tools (see “traumatology”). The modern concept of psychological trauma transposed this meaning from the corporal sphere to the phenomena of the psyche, but it has maintained its place in the medical discourse to this day. A more specialized form of scientific interest in psychological trauma took shape in the 1870s, and it was nourished by two major sources: experiences and observations regarding, first, the psychological consequences manifested in the victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse and, second, the mental condition of survivors of disasters, military campaigns, and wars.20 This was all closely related first to the fact that the contemporary power regimes and institutions (modern educational systems, health care institutions, bodies of public administration and justice, etc.) demanded much deeper insight into the privacy of individuals and families than before, or as Jean-Martin Charcot would have said it, into “the secrets of the alcove,” and they extended their control over this sphere as well. Second, it was inseparable from the rapid transformation of modernizing societies, urbanization, the development of transportation, industrialization, and the appearance of modern machines, police, and military tools, which meant a new and grave source of danger for masses of people both in times of peace and war and from a corporal and psychological perspective.21 The wars of the nineteenth century, such as the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Balkan wars, and equally importantly the growing number of industrial and transportation accidents and disasters demonstrated that serious traumas could provoke certain bodily symptoms that somatic injuries could not explain or at least which could not be detected by the tools of contemporary medicine. Patients afflicted with such conditions were often classified as suffering from “traumatic neurosis” or “neurasthenia,” another term originally suggested by an American physician, George Bernard Beard. Although the terminology was extremely varied, neurotic women “with weak nerves” were mostly regarded as hysterical, whereas men were considered neurasthenic.22

The recognition of such disorders as illnesses became a crucial issue not only as a medical issue but also from the perspective of social politics and insurance. The phenomenon of the so-called “railway spine,” a syndrome of particular corporal and mental disorders typical of survivors of train accidents, was first described by British doctor Eric Erichsen in 1866. This diagnosis allowed such patients to claim damages from railway and insurance companies. Germany introduced general sickness and personal accident insurance in the 1880s. The aim of these socio-political measures for Chancellor Bismarck was to take the wind out of the sails of the Social Democratic Party and the growing trade unions. At the end of the 1880s, the scope of social security was extended to traumatic neuroses caused by workplace and traffic accidents. This measure generated a huge debate and gave rise to conflicts among German doctors. One of the poles of the dispute was represented by neurologist and psychiatrist Hermann Oppenheim (1858–1919), who was one of the most distinguished German psychiatrists and head physician of the Charité Clinic in Berlin. As early as the 1880s, Oppenheim was of the opinion that it was somatic disorders in the nervous system that played a decisive role in the etiology of traumatic neuroses.23 Others believed that most of the patients were only feigning these symptoms in the hopes of receiving some kind of compensation, benefit, or pension so that they could be relieved from further labor obligations as qualified invalids. In other words, they allegedly suffered from “benefit neurosis” or “profit neurosis” (Begehrensneurose). A large proportion of German doctors, however, did not share Oppenheim’s views. (Their rejection of his ideas was influenced in part by the fact that Oppenheim was not considered “patriotic” enough due to his Jewish origins.) These debates are a perfect illustration of the two dominant and conflicting approaches of the age to hysterical or traumatic neuroses. According to one, the symptoms of these neuroses were the product of some kind of organic or genetic disorder, and thus, they were to be regarded as genuine illnesses “equivalent” to organic bodily disorders. According to the other, these symptoms were to be attributed to psychological processes that can be influenced with purely psychological means and hypnosis. In the latter case, one cannot talk about a real illness, but only faking or “hysteria” in the ordinary sense of the word. Freud’s great and innovative insight—i.e., his notion that hysterical or neurotic individuals were suffering as a result of their own memories, life stories, and internal subconscious conflicts and not because of some organic ailment, and that they were not merely “faking” their suffering—did not, however, substantially break through the wall of opposition to psychoanalysis.

Shell Shock and Traumatic Neurosis

Although cases of traumatic neurosis caused by wars, mass catastrophes, and workplace accidents were well-known, World War I “produced” psychologically wounded individuals in unprecedented numbers. However, what the term “psychological damage” should denote was not as self-evident (nor is it today) as the kinds of injuries the human body might suffer in times of war, which ranged from milder wounds to debilitating injuries causing invalidity and long-term combat and work disability and various serious infections and contagious diseases (tuberculosis, sexual diseases, cholera, typhus, the Spanish flu at the end of the war, etc.) that exacted a death toll that was nearly as high as that of combat injuries. Despite the spectacular development of certain branches of psychiatry and neurology, the treatment of psychological disorders was still in its infancy at the time of World War I, at least in comparison to somatic medicine, which had a multitude of modern diagnostic and medical devices already. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was in the lead in this respect thanks to the medical school of Vienna, which had begun acquiring a remarkable international reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century.24

The most frequent and most characteristic symptoms of psychological injuries caused by the war were quite diverse and diffuse: uncontrollable tremors, an abnormal gait, spasms, stomach and intestinal disorders, paralysis of the limbs or their insensitivity to pain, chronic depression, glassy, blank eyes, occasionally loss of speech, dullness, and even temporal loss of hearing or sight. English psychiatrist Charles Samuel Myers first described this syndrome, which he called “shell shock,” in a medical article in 1915. This designation was then adopted by German physicians.25 The term “shock is caused by the exploding shells” captured the paralyzed, cramped body position which people suffering from this condition got into at the moment of the shock caused by the explosions: through their symptoms, they virtually relived the past trauma in the present.26 These symptoms were especially severe in the case of soldiers who spent weeks or months in the trenches, where nothing meaningful would happen for a long time, and then the sounds of exploding grenades would catch them completely off guard. According to British data, by December 1914, the proportion of those suffering from shell shock out of all those wounded on the front was seven to ten percent among officers and three to four percent among soldiers of lower rank. During the war, about 200,000 people were allowed to leave the army due to shell shock, and 65,000 were receiving pension as invalids in 1921.27 The frequent occurrence of shell shock went against certain initial expectations already at the beginning of the war. Numerous psychiatrists, neurologists, and other physicians on both sides believed that the “storm of steel” of the war (Ernst Jünger) would teach even the weak-nerved, weak-willed, and unmanly youth the importance of discipline, virile behavior, and self-sacrifice.28 In Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, war was supposed to “coerce” masculinity from the protagonist Hans Castorp, a “humanist bel esprit” and a “simple, spoiled child of life.”

Military doctors who encountered such cases early on in the war first attributed these symptoms to mere exhaustion, and they thought that a few days of rest would help. However, as the war progressed, the doctors serving on the front were less and less able to cope with the problem of “neurasthenics” in this way. Thus, the medical and health-care authorities of the Monarchy, Germany, England, and France were forced to make war-related psychological damage a priority issue. When World War I broke out, most belligerent countries, hence Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, and Great Britain, possessed a relatively advanced and organized health-care infrastructure offering treatment for injuries and illnesses of the body—infrastructure that could be mobilized quickly for war purposes as well. They had everything from military doctors on the front offering direct treatment through squads accompanying ambulance units, hospital trains, temporary camp hospitals, barrack hospitals, and garrison and war hospitals to specialized hospitals, university clinics, and post-treatment institutions and sanatoriums.29 Germany alone mobilized 24,000 doctors, while the western Entente Powers mobilized 29,000.30 Since Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire recognized the strategic importance of this area and the possibilities to apply the health-care and organizational experience thus acquired in the post-war period, the Ministries of War in these countries set up a carefully constructed hierarchy of bureaucratic institutions for health-care management. The latter was also facilitated by the fact that in these countries, the health care system had been run in a semi-military style based on a strict hierarchy even prior to the war.

Dealing with illnesses of psychological or neurological origin was also one of the general tasks of military health services. However, special neurological or psychiatric treatment was only provided on higher levels, i.e., at the neurological departments at certain hospitals and neurological clinics. Most of the psychiatrists and neurologists who had been enlisted in the army (among them several qualified psychoanalysts and registrars) were on duty as general practitioners with troops or in war hospitals, and only a few of them were later admitted to neurological departments.

Oppenheim and his Opponents: The 1916 debate in Munich

How can the symptoms of combat neurosis be integrated into the system of the existing medical/psychiatric knowledge and diagnostic categories? In December 1914, at the beginning of the war, the abovementioned Hermann Oppenheim was commissioned to direct the 200-bed neurological department at the temporary military hospital set up at the Museum of Anthropology in Berlin. The experiences he acquired on the job seemed to confirm his earlier views about traumatic neurosis. His opinion, however, was not shared by most of his fellow neurologists and psychiatrists. Rekindling the debate that had already been on the agenda in German medical circles in the 1880s and 1890s regarding the entitlement to compensation and so-called “benefit neuroses,” Oppenheim’s opponents insisted again that the vast majority of combat neurotics—intentionally or subconsciously—were producing these symptoms in order to evade their obligations, receive some kind of temporary or permanent exemption from military service, and claim some form of compensation, disability pension, etc. Accordingly, those suffering from traumatic neurosis were “hysterical” in the ordinary, non-Freudian sense of the word, which in contemporary medical jargon was the equivalent of hypochondria, cowardice, lack of moral fiber and will, and even treason, not to mention an allegedly weak, unmanly, “effeminate” character.31 The stigmatization of hysterical patients also included the idea of “racial supremacy.” Alois Alzheimer, a professor of medicine from Breslau, for instance, attributed hysterical behavior, which he claimed was unworthy of German soldiers, to so-called psychopathia gallica, i.e., to “French psychopathy.”32 The victims of “war hysteria” were increasingly treated as scapegoats, and they were stigmatized even if they had earlier been recognized for their heroic acts. Already at that time, proposals were made to filter out the handicapped, the mentally handicapped, the homosexual, and so on, which then turned into brutal reality within the framework of the Nazi “euthanasia program.”33

The German Association for Psychiatry conference on war neurosis was held in Munich in September 1916 and was attended by 241 doctors, among them the leading authorities of psychiatry in Germany and Austria-Hungary.34 Oppenheim and his followers were in the minority compared to Professor Robert Gaupp from Tübingen, Professor Max Nonne from Hamburg, and other influential psychiatrists. One of the Hungarian participants, Artúr Sarbó,35 supported Oppenheim, but most of those present, who considered war neuroses simply a form of hysteria—not only questioned Oppenheim’s approach but also proposed new strategies of treatment. One of the methods was hypnosis and suggestion, the effects of which Nonne had already demonstrated in his presentation given in Hamburg in 1915, but at that time, this form of treatment was rejected with the argument that “such methods are unworthy of German soldiers” because they resuscitated “medieval mysticism.”36 However, after the 1916 conference, hypnosis also came widely into use, though it was combined with other methods. Thus, they tried the administration of drugs, isolation, keeping patients in a dark chamber, and various physical methods of “active therapy”—e.g., electric shock, hot or cold water cures, etc.—which were clearly punitive, humiliating, and painful. The proponent and best-known user of the electric shock treatment was German military doctor Fritz Kaufmann, who termed his procedure a “surprise cure,” during which faradic currents were briefly fed into the body of the patient-victim, causing tremendous pain.37 The different varieties of electric shock treatment became widespread not only in Germany and in Austria-Hungary. They were generally used on the other side as well in the French, British, and American armies.38

Some neurologists attributed the disappearance of symptoms—at least seemingly—in the majority of the cases of war neurosis after a few electric shocks exclusively to the direct physical effect of these shocks, while others ascribed this to the suggestive force of the doctor’s person and the therapy or the combination of physical and psychological effects. The use of these methods was justified as a necessary means to combat the plague-like spread of war neurosis, and the physicians were expected to make the patients thus treated able to return in short order to the battlefield or at least to restore their ability to work, thus relieving the state budget of any potential obligation to pay them a pension. That was what both the Austro-Hungarian and the German military leadership expected of psychiatrists, especially because, after the enormous losses suffered beginning in 1916, there was an increased demand for the maximum exploitation of human and financial resources. As the German Association for Psychiatry officially declared, “we must never forget that we as doctors have to put our work in the service of a single mission: the service of the army and our homeland.”39 Erwin Stransky, the president of the Association for Psychiatry in Vienna, affirmed that “in these times of hardship, our main focus should be the glory of our armies fighting in tight alliance, and not the wellbeing of the individual.”40 Thus, those affected by war neurosis, who were regarded as malingerers and deserters, were more and more frequently faced with a court martial. In many cases, such soldiers received a death sentence as a deterrent, and not only in the Austro-Hungarian and German armies, but also in the French and British armed forces.

The Centralization of Psychiatric Care

In order to increase the speed and efficiency of the methods of treatment, special neurological departments, so-called “nerve stations” (Nervenstationen), were established in the territory of Germany and the Monarchy beginning in 1916. In its ordinance41 of July 10, 1916, the Ministry of Defense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ordered that members of the military who were suffering from neurological conditions were to be treated only in special neurological institutions or other medical institutions with experienced and qualified neurologists. At the same time, it urged the regional commands located on the territory of Austria-Hungary to designate those institutions that satisfied these conditions. Furthermore, the ministerial decree stipulated that the internal order in the neurological departments and institutions be made stricter, that the personal freedoms of the patients be limited, that previously issued exemptions be reviewed, and that recidivists be taken back to the same institution where they had been originally treated. The military command in Budapest reported on August 29 that there was no separate neurological institute for the treatment of war neurotics for the time being, and that the existing health-care establishments were not suitable for admitting further neurological patients. Thus, they requested authorization from the ministry to open a special medical facility planned in Újpest that would allow for “modern electric shock treatment” as well.42 In its ordinance43 of October 3, the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Defense approved the creation of the facility in Újpest. At the same time, the ministerial decree concentrated the treatment of the neurologically wounded in the following institutions on the territory of Hungary at the time: in the region of the military command of Budapest, the facility in Újpest; in the region of the command of Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia), the supplementary hospital in Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) and the state hospital in Pozsony; in the region of the command of Kassa (Košice, Slovakia), the medical institution of Rózsahegy (Ružomberok, Slovakia) of the Hungarian Royal Authority for Invalid Affairs; in the region of the command of Temesvár (Timișoara, Romania), the university clinic of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

“The Ice Age of Perils”: Psychoanalysis in World War I

The war affected the careers of the individual members of the psychoanalytic movement just as dramatically as the movement itself. It encumbered or severed international relations, destroyed the majority of the barely formed networks, limited organizational life, and most of all, compelled the practitioners of psychoanalysis to confront their own assumptions, theoretical conceptions, and therapeutic practice with crude reality, which included the immeasurable sufferings and losses caused by the war and all the social and historical traumas that led to the disintegration and annihilation of the “world of yesteryear” (to borrow from Stefan Zweig). At the same time, war as a large-scale “natural experiment” offered new opportunities for the application and scientific and official legitimation of the results of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud reflected on the socio-psychological problems raised by the war at the beginning of World War I in his essay “Reflections on War and Death.”44 As Freud put it,

It is obvious that the war must brush aside this conventional treatment of death. Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it. People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance.45

Similar thoughts were put forward by Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in his article published in the periodical Nyugat under the title “The Ice Age of Perils”:

There might be a perspective from which even horrible and thrilling events seem only large-scale experiments of experimental psychology. A kind of “Naturexperiment” that a scholar cannot conduct in his study, or in the atelier of his mind at the most. War is such a cosmic laboratory experiment [...] In times of peace, it can be shown only by scrutinizing the dreams, nervous symptoms, artistic creations, and religion of the individual with an intricate method (and even then one’s findings are scarcely given credit) that the human psyche has multiple layers and that culture is just a nicely ornamented showcase while more primitive goods are stocked in the back of the shop. The war has stripped off this masque with one tug, and revealed man in his inner, more genuine nature; it has shown the child, the savage and the caveman in man. [...] The war has catapulted us back into the Ice Age, or to be more precise: it has disclosed those deep traces which that age had left imprinted in the psyche of humanity.46

Ferenczi was detailed to the Hungarian hussars as an assistant doctor at the beginning of the war. He joined the 7th Hussar Regiment on October 26, 1914, in Pápa, and on January 4, 1916, he became the head of the neurological department of the Imperial and Royal Mária Valéria Barracks Hospital of Budapest.47 He served in the army until the end of the war, along with several fellow Hungarian and foreign psychoanalyst doctors. It was in the barracks hospital of Budapest that he came across masses of physical and psychological victims of the war. On January 24, 1916, he gave an account to Freud of his first case of psychotherapy:

I analyzed [...] a sufferer from war trauma for an hour. Unfortunately, it turned out that the year before the shock of the war he had lost a father, two brothers (through the war), and a wife through unfaithfulness. When such a man then has to lie for twenty-four hours underneath a corpse, it is difficult to say how much of his neurosis is due to war trauma. (He trembles and speaks in a mumble.)48

Ferenczi also wrote of his experiences in the barracks hospital in his article published in the medical journal Gyógyászat (Therapeutics).49 As he writes, he observed approximately 200 cases of war neurosis. According to Ferenczi, the symptoms (general tremors, abnormal gait, spastic paralysis, etc.) of such illnesses are caused by psychological traumas; and traumatic neuroses can be fundamentally classified into two groups—hysterical conversion (conversion disorder) and anxiety hysteria. This conception added a new alternative to the debate sparked at the time among military psychiatrists (Oppenheim and his opponents) at the psychiatric congress in Munich, where, as noted above, one of the camps attributed such neuroses to an organic (especially degenerative, neurasthenic) background, while the other camp qualified those suffering from traumatic neurosis as “hysterical” in the pre-Freudian, ordinary sense of the word, that is, as malingerers and “effeminate.”

Ferenczi was not the only one to have experimented with psychoanalytical methods in the medical treatment of war neurotics. Karl Abraham, his fellow psychoanalyst from Berlin, also founded a department dealing with war neurosis and other mental disorders in 1916 in Eastern Prussia at the military hospital in Allenstein (Olsztyn, Poland).50 Another German analyst, Ernst Simmel, the head physician at the “nervous station” of Posen (Poznań, Poland), combined psychoanalysis with hypnosis (as opposed to Abraham and Ferenczi, who disapproved of suggestive methods). He published a book of great interest about his achievements.51 On the other side, in England, experiments were also conducted using dynamic methods with a psychoanalytical orientation that were focused on exposing and understanding the suppressed mental conflicts and subconscious psychological contents of the patients without coercive interventions. The instigator of this treatment was British anthropologist and physician W.H.R. Rivers, who was working in cooperation with his colleagues C. S. Myers and William McDougall at Maghull Military Hospital near Liverpool.52 They elaborated group methods that allowed for the development of solidarity, assistance, shared responsibility, and empathy instead of blind obedience. Similar initiatives were launched by Wilfried Bion, John Rickman, Donald W. Winnicott, and other British psychoanalysts, who elaborated new group psychotherapeutic methods within the British army during World War II. These methods were introduced at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the 1950s and became known as the “Tavistock model.” Similar methods were experimented with in the United States as well, especially at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.53

Torture or Treatment?

Electric shock was also the prevailing procedure at the Mária Valéria Barrack Hospital. It was even more typical of the abovementioned medical institution in Újpest to which Ferenczi was unexpectedly detailed by his superiors in May 1917. There, he met one of the renowned Hungarian practitioners and enthusiasts of electric shock treatment, Dr. Viktor Gonda, whose method had attracted a great deal of attention all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire in military health circles and among the general public.54 As Ferenczi wrote to Freud in one of his letters in 1917, “[Dr. Gonda] is spreading himself around more and more here, is having column-length articles written about his miracle cures (in daily newspapers), and all the naive folk, from archduke to university professors on down, are coming to our hospital to observe the miracle together.” 55

What Gonda’s method consisted of is described in one of his articles from 1916: he placed electrodes on the legs of the patient, who “cries out in pain, my assistant holds down his arms because the patient would automatically try to defend himself and would push off the electrodes. I do not turn off the electricity at the first cries, but only after about half a minute.” Gonda’s article continued as follows:

By turning the electricity on and off, I repeat this procedure eight to ten times, accompanied by verbal suggestion. One or two attempts suffice for the patient suffering from the pain to become utterly willing to obey my command and properly express his will to try to walk. However, I do not satisfy his wish, but usually with the excuse that his little finger is not moving properly yet, I continue the administration of electricity, which becomes more and more painful for one or two minutes. In the meantime, I even turn up the current, and in order to increase the pain, I turn the electricity on and off. Under the effect of the latter, I have the patient bend and stretch his legs repeatedly. If this motion is carried out perfectly, I make the patient sit on the edge of the bed: he has to stand up upon my command uttered in a strong voice (after some pause when his panting and pulse have gone back to normal), and do that without any external help. After standing briefly, the patient has to take some steps while counting. Again, there is a short pause, then comes the walking and running exercise, when it is especially important that the motion be perfect and exempt from all trembling.56

Similar procedures and results were reported by medical Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. Taussig from the sanatorium on Rózsahegy57 and by Dr. Ignác Kemény, the medical director of patient department I/b of the Hungarian Royal Garrison Hospital of Budapest.58 Nonetheless, the views of doctors were divided over Gonda’s cure and similar treatments: they did not have the unanimous approval of old-school neurologists either. There is a letter, for instance, in the Vienna Archives of Military History that was written by Professor Károly Hoór, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the Royal Hungarian University of Budapest, to the K. u. K. Militärsanitätkomite (the chief military health care authority of the Monarchy), in which Hoór harshly criticizes Gonda’s methods. Professor Hoór pointed out that there was nothing new in Gonda’s therapy: similar methods had been in use for a long time at the University Neurological Clinic in Budapest, where thousands of war neurotics (allegedly) had been successfully treated since the breakout of the war. Gonda’s method was well-known and applied by German and French military doctors as well. The method, however, was far from safe: increasing the current dramatically led to a pulse of 180 and even death in several instances, including among Gonda’s patients. The dean also explained that the treatment was primarily based on a highly intensive suggestive effect.59

On the other hand, the effort of the health authorities of Austria-Hungary (also represented by Dr. Gonda) to get the treatment of war neurotics over with so that the patients could be sent back to the front as soon as possible was met with fervent protests. The Vienna Archives also contain a letter dated December 5, 1916 and written by the national medical superintendent of handicapped affairs of the Kingdom of Hungary (Baron Sándor Korányi) in which Korányi protests against the customary treatment of traumatic neuroses:

The treatment of traumatic neurosis is a psychological treatment that can only be successful in a supportive milieu. Anyone who has ever visited hospitals behind the frontline must know very well that their restless atmosphere, the rigid military régime which reigns inside them as well as their proximity to the place of acquiring the illness will present barely surmountable obstacles to the creation of this milieu. It is also undoubtable that after the psychological trauma having caused the illness, a certain time period will be needed until healing can take place so that the impression having provoked the illness could be dimmed enough to allow for the success of the treatment. It is a misconception of the essence of traumatic neurosis that gives ground to the exaggerated hope vested in healing and the suggestion that patients having recovered should not be given leave, but should be sent back to serve on the frontline.60

“In Cold Blood and with Calm Nerves”

By 1917, the penultimate year of the war, war neurotics constituted an increasingly serious problem for the Austro-Hungarian military leadership. As Austrian Prime Minister Count Czernin declared in a speech delivered in Budapest on October 2, 1917, the war must be continued “in cold blood and with calm nerves,” and victory must be secured.61 A few days later, the Austro-Hungarian military leadership—under the pretext of a German-Austrian-Hungarian fraternal reunion—convened a meeting in Baden near Vienna in order to discuss the most important measures to take regarding war neuroses. Some of the military doctors who spoke at the conference reported on the “tremendous successes” of electric shock treatment. Viktor Gonda cited 4,000 patients who allegedly had been successfully treated, and Ernst Jellinek, a psychiatrist from Vienna, reported as many as 56,000 successful therapies.62 However, this “success propaganda” could not conceal the fact that the soldiers (and civilians) who had suffered battle neurosis or other psychological damage as a result of the senseless war constituted a growing and increasingly unmanageable crowd.

Military neurology and psychiatry, which had a fundamental role in the mo­bilization, preparation, rehabilitation, and replacement of the “human resources” of the modern war, were less and less able to cope with the traumatic neuroses massively affecting the armies of the Central Powers, and protests were becoming increasingly vehement against the conditions reigning at the neurological departments of military hospitals, the violence to which they had recourse, the harsh treatment to which patients were subjected, and the often cruel and inhumane methods that were used. With the collapse just around the corner, the question of the treatment and rehabilitation of the psychologically wounded who were engulfing the military hospitals became completely unsolvable. The Austro-Hungarian, Hungarian, and Prussian military leadership had every reason to fear that war neurotics who were reentering civil life and inundating the streets of the big cities would prove fertile ground for pacifist, revolutionary, and anti-militarist propaganda. Military leaders were also increasingly concerned that soldiers would disobey their superiors, even by “overperforming” commands (cf. the “Švejk phenomenon”).

According to Emil Kraepelin, one of the most renowned German psychiatrists, the reasons for defeat in the war were the “psychopathic leaders of the revolution” who turned the mass hysteria prevailing among the population to their profit.63 The criminalization and stigmatization of war neurotics appeared not only in psychiatry but also in politics. Shell-shocked and psychologically wounded soldiers or so-called “war hysterics,” whom, as seen above, the majority of psychiatrists stigmatized as cowardly malingers, were made the scapegoats of the military defeat and accomplices responsible for the “stab in the back” of Germany. Women, spouses and mothers, and the “feminine pacifism” of the hinterland were also rebuked. As a consequence, most war neurotics were stripped of their old-age or disability pension after the war, and they were, again, labelled “benefit neurotics.”64

The War Is Over?

According to some estimates, by autumn 1918, the number of “war neurotics” reached 180,000 in Vienna alone, and revolutionary agitation thus fell on fertile ground. The general atmosphere was precisely described by Karl Kraus’ observations concerning military doctors. In The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus portrayed the military doctor as a diabolic figure who becomes “less fit for service the more people he declares fit to fight, so securing a greater chance of survival for himself. [...] they secure the survival of the wounded—to be sent back to the front, where they won’t survive.”65

The failure of the therapeutic methods espoused and used by Gonda, Kaufmann, and others and the vacuum thus created also contributed to the fact that the military health authorities of the Central Powers began to look for new approaches and alternative treatments, especially towards the end of 1917, after the conference in Baden. Ferenczi, Abraham, and other psychoanalyst military doctors recognized that the moment had come when military health authorities or their individual representatives could perhaps be convinced about the applicability of psychoanalysis as an alternative cure. They stressed that psychoanalysis promised, in the words of Karl Abraham, “to go deeper in understanding the structure of war neuroses than any of the methods so far.”66

The Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress was convened in that spirit in Breslau (Wrocław, Poland) at the beginning of September 1918, and the representatives of the military health authorities were also invited. However, the plans for the conference quickly went up in smoke because, due to the war chaos and travel difficulties, the Silesian town could no longer be approached. Nonetheless, at Ferenczi’s initiative, the conference was still held. The date and place of the event were moved to September 28–29 in Budapest. The Austro-Hungarian, Hungarian, and Prussian ministries of defense sent their delegates to the congress in the persons of some military doctors of higher rank.67 The high point of the congress, which Freud attended, was the debate on war neuroses, the keynote speech for which was delivered by Ferenczi himself (Ferenczi 1919),68 who had developed and completed his earlier study from 1916 on “Two Types of War Neurosis.” Ferenczi’s two discussants—Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel—represented the Berlin Association for Psychoanalysis.69 In his presentation, Ferenczi drew a parallel between the materialist view of history and the organic-mechanistic neurological explanations. The latter, which according to him corresponded to the materialist view in sociology, failed completely: “The mass-experiment of the war has produced various severe neuroses, including neuroses in which there could be no question of a mechanical influence, and the neurologists have likewise been forced to recognize that something was missing in their calculations, and this something was again—the psyche.” 70 After that, Ferenczi reproached neurologists for having needed the horrendous experiences of the war to recognize the significance of psychoanalysis.

However, Ferenczi, Freud, and the other participants in the congress were also concerned about the future of psychoanalysis and its postwar perspectives, as they looked for a new, civilian role for psychoanalysts returning to civilian life. They formulated proposals and plans about how to use their experiences regarding war neuroses in peace times with a view to the mass healing of neurotics (whose number obviously would be increased by the masses of psychologically wounded victims of the war returning to their civilian lives). In accordance with these proposals, free psychoanalytical clinics were set up, first in Berlin (1920) and then in Vienna (1922), as well as training institutions.71

For the moment, however, they were forced to cooperate with the disintegrating ancien régime, which was able to run its bureaucracy to the last breath. In the shadow of impending defeat, the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War was still planning additional measures for a more efficient management of the problem of war neurotics. In this spirit, further neurological departments were organized so that, in accordance with total mobilization, war neurotics could at least be put to productive work, even if they were unfit to serve on the front.72 It was with this objective in mind that the joint Ministry of War issued its decree on October 9, 1918 regarding “further construction of nerve stations and treatment of war neurotics.”73 In accordance with the therapies applied until that time, the decree recommended “electric, hydriatic, and mechanotherapeutical treatments,” as well as suggestive hypnosis. It prescribed, among other things, bedrest, isolation and a ban on hospital visits, an “arousing diet,” and smoking. It also put strong emphasis on work therapy. Physicians needed to do all of the above in a manner that ensured that “the patient never get the impression of being pointlessly tortured.” The decree also stipulated that “those patients who have already resisted the doctor’s efforts at several neurological stations should be transferred to such stations where healing is attempted through psychoanalysis.” A few weeks before the collapse of the Monarchy, this prescription had little practical significance. However, it was all the more significant symbolically, for it constituted an acknowledgment of psychoanalysis—if only as a last resort—as the treatment of war neurotics who had shown resistance to all other therapies. Plans were also made by the Prussian Ministry of War to set up similar neurological departments that would be open to psychoanalytic treatment, but obviously there was no time for their implementation.74

The medical treatment of soldiers affected by war neurosis is one of the most controversial chapters in the history of modern warfare and modern psychiatry. In this history, psychoanalysis undoubtedly played a humanizing role, under circumstances in which the majority of psychiatrists regarded the psychologically wounded of the war as “hysterical” and “malingerers” and considered it their principal duty to restore as swiftly as possible the ability of the soldiers to fight. The early initiatives pertaining to psychoanalytical theory and therapy connected to war neuroses aimed to understand symptoms and interpret the connections within the patient’s life story. Thus, they became precursors to the modern approach to individual and collective psychological traumas, though also sources of eventual heated debates and conflicts.75 At the same time, the bulk of psychoanalysts did not question the political and military goals of the war. Although they often voiced their reservations and fears in their private correspondence, as is clearly reflected in the letters exchanged by Freud and Ferenczi,76 they nonetheless identified with the powers that sent millions of soldiers into the trenches. Their efforts and involvement were primarily aimed at proposing new tools that seemed more efficient and more humane than the existing ones—which proved to be insufficient and caused unnecessary suffering to the patient—and to restore the mental health of soldiers suffering from psychological traumas for the sake of their “normalization.”

The famous Viennese professor of neurology Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who later received a Nobel Prize, was accused based on a complaint filed by one of his former patients affected by war neurosis of overseeing the harsh and even cruel treatment of war neurotics and regarding them as mere hypochondriacs or deserters at the institution that he directed. A committee of inquiry was set up in which Freud, serving as an expert member, expressed his professional disapproval of these methods of treating war neuroses. He thought that these procedures were brutal and merciless, yet he did not unequivocally condemn them. He even spoke highly of the professional and human qualities of Professor Wagner-Jauregg. As Freud explained to the committee, each neurotic was, in fact, a malingerer, but they were so without being aware of it, and this was precisely the core of their illness.77 Thus the psychoanalytical treatment did not offer a way out of the Catch-22 situation of stigmatization in which war neurotics found themselves: “If you heal my symptoms, you send me back into death, to the battlefield. If you do not, I will be mentally handicapped all my life.” This paradox has always characterized the basic condition of people suffering from combat fatigue, war neurosis, or trauma caused by other shocking events—from World War I through World War II to the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the wars in the Middle East, and other conflicts.

In any case, psychoanalysis was the current that first tried to systematize and embed the experiences related to war neuroses in a theoretical framework, setting the tone for the discourse that would have a decisive impact on subsequent conceptions and research orientations regarding the phenomena of psychological trauma and post-trauma stress conditions. However, more specific research on traumas due to war and other severe shocks started only in the 1940s, after World War II had broken out. The pioneer of this more complex approach was American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, a former disciple of Freud.78 Kardiner emphasized that traumatic neurosis was a “stand-by state of mind” that served the defense of the ego by trying to eliminate and ward off potential dangers, and it was fixed to these situations as if the stimuli which triggered it were still present. The traumatized person may exclude these recollections from his or her memory or suppress them, but they continue to live on in his or her dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and anxieties. Detailed examination of the latter conditions began only after the end of World War II, especially in relation to the traumatic experiences of Holocaust survivors. This was not independent of the question concerning the extent to which Holocaust survivors who suffered psychological damage and the relatives of the victims were entitled to compensation; and in general, to what extent their psychological torments would be recognized as a reality equal to physical suffering. The examination of the long-term traumatogenetic effects of World War II, which still has resonance today, would go beyond the scope of this study. The professional and also social debate concerning the status of psychological disorders caused by war acts, the antecedents of which—as seen above—date back to pre–World War I times, continued. Post-trauma neurosis or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) gained full recognition as a legitimate psychiatric diagnostic category only after the Vietnam War, and it was first included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. PTSD as a diagnostic category continued to generate debates, as a result of which the symptoms and limits of the disorder have been defined over and over again in the subsequent editions of the manual as part of the attempt to strike a delicate balance between treatment and stigmatization.79

Archival Sources

Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest [Museum and Archives of Military History] (HIM HL)

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Kriegsarchiv (KA)

KM Präs Nr. 13. 756 /14.Abt. 15–25/155

The Archives of the British Psychoanalytic Society, London

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* This study was prepared with the support of a Klebelsberg Kunó Scholarship from the Balassi Institute (September–October 2013, Vienna) within the framework of Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) project no. 109148 (Psi Knowledge as Social Discourses – Humanities in the Context of Power Relations). An earlier version of this paper was published in the electronic journal of medical and cultural history Kaleidoscope 8 (2014): 33–58 (http://www.kaleidoscopehistory.hu) with the title “Kínzás vagy gyógyítás? Pszichiátria és pszichoanalízis az első világháborúban” [Torture or healing? Psychiatry and psychoanalysis in World War I]. The majority of the cited archival sources were found at the Military History Archives of Vienna (Kriegsarchiv, or KA). I would like to express my gratitude to Gábor Kiss, the staff member of the Hungarian representation at the Kriegsarchiv, for his help.

Diverging Language Uses: Political Discourse in Hungary after World War I

József Takáts
University of Pécs
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):764–788 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.764

Following some introductory notes on methodology, this study analyzes the process of the intensifying militarization, polarization, brutalization, sacralization, saturation with extreme appeals to emotions, and apocalyptic tone of Hungarian political texts after 1918. It also examines the ways in which the National Darwinist political vocabulary, which evolved originally in the last third of the nineteenth century, survived after the World War, and how it created the double languages of nationalist discourse: the historicizing one and the racist one.

Keywords: Political discourses, brutalization, extreme political emotions, apocalyptic tone, National Darwinism

Although when reading historiographical works, I prefer fine-grained contextual analyses working with a synchronic sample to large-scale canonical ones based on a diachronic linguistic set,1 in this discussion, I adopt the latter methodology in the introductory part to demonstrate the obstacles one encounters when attempting an examination of the conclusions of the Hungarian political-intellectual history of World War I. The perspective and questions of political-intellectual historians differ, in my assessment, from those of political historians. The latter are primarily interested in political acts and purposes and the course and causes of events, while the former focus on the ways in which language is used and the linguistic means by which political identities are created, reinforced, and weakened; in other words, on the linguistic arena of politics as one of the preconditions of acts and purposes. Researchers who follow a methodology similar to mine concentrate mostly on the “order of statement” to which the individual statement of the political writing in question belongs.2 This will be my focus in the following analysis of various Hungarian writings from the years following World War I.

When analyzing early modern texts from the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century, one can rely on the great academic achievements (mainly in English) that have been realized in the examination of political discourses. However, when interpreting writings from the twentieth century, we have to get by without the support of Pocock and Skinner. As is well-known, the major historians of political discourses who published their works in English ended the range of their research at the end of the eighteenth century, while their contemporary fellow researchers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (excellent intellectual historians such as Stefan Collini and Michael Freeden, for example) followed a different methodology. The major, influential and chiseled, long-standing political discourses of early modernism that drew partly on antique pre-texts and partly on newly emerged disciplines, the discourses of republicanism, raison d’état, the ancient constitution, cultivation, political economy and (later discovered) company were gradually dissolved in the standardizing language and dialects of modern politics from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, the archetextual conventions in the political texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are different from the early modern ones: such “order of statement,” which although differing from the characteristics of the former great political discourses, still ensures the meaningfulness of the individual statements.

This methodological difficulty is topped with the uncertainty of the canonical place of World War I in the narratives of Hungarian history. In my opinion, the experiences of 1918–1919 (or 1918–1921), which were, of course, different for each social group, isolated or overshadowed the experiences of World War I in the memory of the political community. They pushed the latter into familial remembrance, thus severing from cause from and consequence: defeat in the war and the Treaty of Trianon with which it came to a formal close. This explains the curious phenomenon that, as has been pointed out recently by a scholar of the social history of the Great War, “in the Hungarian historical conscience,” in contrast with other countries, there is meager interest in World War I and its implications, even though “the number of Hungarian soldiers who died in the war exceeded by far half a million.”3

The canonical place of World War I is fundamentally determined by its borderline character: whatever happened in or to Hungary before 1918 has become a thing of the past, and it no longer generates any heated or contradictory emotions in the members of the political community. However, whatever happened in 1918 and afterwards (or whatever did not happen, though we think it did) is history that cannot sink into the past.4 World War I has become a thing of the past, as did the history of the Principality of Transylvania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, whereas its direct temporal (political-historical) implications are unable to do the same. To put it differently, today’s political agents can use World War I only with minimal efficacy, while they can very effectively use history in or after 1918. In the introduction to his seminal work The Identity of France, Fernand Braudel protested against the idea according to which “France ‘began’ in the eighteenth century with the Age of Enlightenment, that France was born of the dramatic ordeal to which it was subjected during the violence of the Revolution.” For him, the history of France dated back to the mist of times, to the third millenary BCE.5 Hungarian historians could similarly protest against the notion that Hungary “was born of the dramatic ordeals” of the civil wars of 1918–1921. Yet this opinion has its own revelatory force, as did the French view criticized by Braudel.

The great French historian expressed his unease when he stated that “what irks me even more is the drastic curtailing of chronology it implies: the ancien régime and the French Revolution are near to us in time, almost contemporary.”6 He was quite right about that. Likewise, Hungarian historians would also be well-advised not to let the events and texts of 1918–1921 become events and texts of the immediate past, “virtual parts of contemporaneity.” They should not let them lose their historical specificity as a result of a closing in of chronological proportions. Naturally, this methodological norm does not override the epistemological recognition that we cannot step outside our perspective of the present in our historiographical works. The past reproduced and narrated by us usually in writing is a peculiar construct: the past is always the past of the present, and the question is always: how so? And vice versa, our epistemological recognition does not redeem us from the (historical and not canonical or historical-political) obligation of a historian’s job to hear and make heard (in spite of the obvious challenges) the voice of the past in a form that is unassimilated to the present, but which can be reconstructed only in a construed manner. This expectation, like so many other expectations in life, is, of course, hard to meet.

Many of the scholars of World War I (contemporaries and later historiographers) depicted the Great War as a beginning: as an alpha. In his book-length essay entitled Világos pillanat (Clear Moment), dated summer 1941, Imre Csécsy wrote that the World War had been, in fact, going on for a quarter of a century, and that “the old war was simply started over.”7 This pattern is found in many other works, i.e., the notion that World War II was a continuation of World War I. “How long has this night been?” Csécsy asked in 1943. “Four years? Ten years? No, thirty years or so by now. / At the beginning of the century we thought the Age of Reason was dawning on us. [...] And then came the senseless canon fire.”8 The aufklarist metaphors of Világos pillanat made the year 1914 a kind of boundary, the origin of what was the present at the time, as opposed to the efforts of the Hungarian left and right in their policy on the past, the latter drawing the line at the year of 1918. In 1943, the experience of World War II made the experience of World War I live and contemporary. This is a prime example of the narrowing of chronological proportions mentioned by Braudel.

Another example (this one related to a historian) of a presentation of the Great War as a beginning is François Furet’s work The Passing of an Illusion, one of the main, oft-cited theses of which claimed that the three major totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the twentieth century (communism, fascism, and national socialism) “shared the same source—the war,”9 and they inherited their essential characteristics from the latter. As a continuation to war and war propaganda, a new political culture was formed according to Furet, which was characterized by a political discourse seeking immediate effect and losing any connection with morality, characterized also by mass manipulation, scorn for legitimacy, the veneration of power, the (deliberate) changing of political views into beliefs, “the former made up of noble intentions and ideas, the latter of expedience.”10

I also find these statements important, and I will rely on them, but I see more of an intellectual-historical relation between the political texts known from before 1914 and those produced after 1918 than that for which the birth metaphor and the concept of the new political culture of the French historian would allow. To put it differently and to borrow Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s metaphor, from an epistemological perspective, I perceive the Great War rather as a “giant transformer,”11 and not as an instigator

Likewise, Hannah Arendt sought the roots of totalitarianism not in World War I, but in the decades preceding it. I agree that the “transformation of nations into races,” that is, the conception of a more elementary, more original, naturalist political community behind the conventional one, which was partly made possible by the influence of Social Darwinism,12 was a decisive factor in the intellectual history between the two wars. For me, however, the key notion of the explanation is not racism but national Darwinism. Béla Németh G. wrote his fundamental study on national Darwinism several decades ago;13 it does not bode well for the Hungarian historical scholars of the racial narrative that they ignore this piece of work. There are also some authors connected to the international literature of nationalism research who emphasized the significance of the Darwinian motivation in the transformation of the concept of nation at the end of the nineteenth century.14 The Hungarian nationalist narrative was filled with concepts, arguments, and narratives taken from the Darwinian description of biological evolution in the 1870s,15 and this vocabulary was still in use in the 1920s, as I will shortly demonstrate with some relevant examples. For the moment, I only sought to highlight the continuity in intellectual history, although the “giant transformer” of war changed this vocabulary as well.

I do not intend, however, to diminish the undeniable intellectual-historical impact of the Great War. After 1918, the war was displaced onto the civil war between the political left and right, as the above-cited German historian Wehler observed.16 As I was trying to come up with a title for this paper, I considered “The Languages of the Civil War.” I decided to go for a more attenuated phrasing simply because not every political player spoke a civil-war language after 1918. Later analysts are often impressed by the radical speakers of yesteryear, and they often lose sight of thoughtful argumentation. I wanted to avoid this trap. It is not only the literature that I follow when I refer to the Hungarian period from 1918 to 1921 as the years of civil war. There were some contemporary analysts who also approached the subject form this perspective.17 The title of this paper (“Diverging Language Uses”) implies that the processes of homogenization and divergence are simultaneously present in the modern language of politics. There are times when the processes of homogenization become more visible, and there are times in which divergence is more conspicuous. The years following World War I belong to the latter category.

The mushrooming of military metaphors and narratives in political writings can be regarded as the most direct consequence of the war. Metaphors and narratives play a crucial role in the creation and understanding of the “universes” of political texts. Not only do they direct the perception of the “world,” they also make it possible to imagine the forms of action in it: “Metaphor, therefore, defines the pattern of perception to which people respond,” Murray Edelman noted many years ago.18 Literary historian János Horváth’s 1921 booklet Aranytól Adyig (From Arany to Ady) contains in its title the names of two major poets in the Hungarian canon, nineteenth-century poet János Arany and early twentieth-century poet Endre Ady. Thus, we could hardly be blamed for assuming that it is a work of literary history, but it is just as much a political pamphlet. In this writing, Horváth describes the relationship of so-called conservative literature to the modernist school as follows: “There are two camps facing each other, but out of shooting range. Years have gone by since they first lined up. We have been waiting to see what will happen. In fact, nothing happened: a bit of shaking of the fists on the ramparts and constant clamor in the other camp.”19 Horváth thus conceptualizes literary life in terms of the movements of troops and sieges.

Military metaphors also abound in György Lukács’s article published in 1920 about Ottó Korvin. Lukács writes about outposts, vanguards, self-sacrificing heroism, enemies, mercenaries, and being on guard. He offers the following characterization of Korvin, the people’s commissar of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic: “As a true revolutionary, he did not undertake to carry out whatever duty was entrusted to him, but he performed his task with ardor and with all his might, a task that he did not seek and which profoundly contradicted his personal inclinations.”20 If we exchange the word “revolutionary” for “soldier” in the above sentence, we get the ideal portrait of the good soldier. Lukács’s text partly created the “true revolutionary” on the analogy of the “true soldier.” Zoltán Szász’s ambitious essay about Octobrism (the politics of the Hungarian revolution of 1918 was called by that name at the time) relates the whole history of humanity through war metaphors. In his first paragraph, he writes about fronts, frontlines, sudden advances, captured posts, and combat victories (although he abandons these metaphors later).21 Gyula Gömbös, a key figure in the counterrevolutionary actions of 1919 and future racialist party leader and prime minister, was described by the historian József Vonyó, who had studied him, as follows: “it is perceptible until the end of his career that he judged even the most complicated social problems from the angle of the soldier, and he wanted to solve them with soldierly simplicity. In his speeches, he would often refer to society as an army of disciplined soldiers following orders.”22

In Gömbös’s case, this is perhaps not so surprising. He was a military officer, after all. One of the reasons for the militarization of political texts could be that, as of 1918, there appeared in politics a legion of former military officers whose behavior and speech was quite different from the political patterns of the previous era. Some historians went so far as to call the members of the radical rightwing war generations who came on the stage after the war “a new political entrepreneurial class.”23 One of the consequences of the militarization of political writings was the dichotomization and polarization of the political arena construed by the texts. Political scientists usually argue, often referring to Carl Schmitt, that the dynamics of politics tends to create ab ovo a bipolar “universe” based on the logic of friend-enemy. That is not true. In reality, there are many kinds of linguistic constructions concerning the political space that differ from this. Even when presenting conflicting social situations, there have been such narrative types available that do not create an extremely polarized space. In his 1907 book Uj Magyarország felé (Toward a new Hungary), the “free socialist” Oszkár Jászi depicted the essential social conflict as a dialogue of generations in which one party is able to convince the other.24 Arguing for the importance of securing Hungarian cultural supremacy, Kuno Klebelsberg, the Christian-nationalist minister of culture, used a car-race simile in his parliamentary speech in 1928, conceiving of the political space given for the nation as a multi-player race course where one is competing against the neighboring nations.25

In the bipolar space of the political texts written after World War I, we find players in combat: Jews versus Hungarians, e.g., in János Horváth’s above-cited booklet, or bourgeoisie versus proletariat in György Lukács’s abovementioned article. We could mention innumerable writings as examples of both cases. And since many texts construed the “universe” of politics in similar ways, certain political speakers were given an opportunity to build their own positions in the space between the two previously created poles. In an editorial written for the newspaper Népszava in 1929, Ernő Garami, a proletarian leader returning from exile in Vienna, urged the social democratic working class to conduct a dual struggle: fight against bolshevism on the left and fascism on the right because both “are aiming for dictatorship, and because the biggest enemy of the working class is any type of dictatorship.”26 In his critique of Jászi’s memoirs in 1921, the liberal writer and businessman Miksa Fenyő found a different arrangement for more or less the same players in the political space construed in his text: when returning to the old political discourse, he put the dichotomy of “fanatics vs. skeptical minds” in the focus of his argumentation,27 as a result of which the “fanatic” revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries found themselves in the same compartment, while the other pole was occupied by the “skeptic” speaker himself, who was a “sworn enemy of all kinds of revolutions and even of counterrevolution.”28

Furthermore, the language of politics underwent an extreme “sentimentalization” in post-World War I political texts. One of the key domains of the latter was the irredentist narrative, which appealed to the emotions of pain, mourning, solidarity, devotion, etc., of its readers and listeners. In his 2009 book on the revisionist idea (which aimed to restore the borders of the Hungarian state, which had been modified after 1918), historian Miklós Zeidler quotes a speech held by Nándor Urmánczy, a speaker from one of the irredentist organizations, the Alliance of Protective Leagues (Védő Ligák Szövetsége), in 1920: “At the end of his speech [given for the inauguration of the statue], he expressed the intention of the Alliance—in accordance with the agenda of revenge—that the irredentist group of statues ‘become a place of pilgrimage for the nation, [...] a furnace of hate and vengeance.’”29 Hate and vengeance became fundamental political sentiments in communist texts as well. In his diary, émigré writer Béla Balázs described the communist commemoration of Ottó Korvin held in Vienna in January 1921: “The day before yesterday [there was] a Korvin commemoration in the underground room of Café Neue Wiener Bühne. The paper was a piece of black wallpaper with red stars, a big red gallows above the rostrum. Heated and fervent speeches: revenge! revenge! Then Gyuri [György Lukács] spoke beautifully, with pale ecstasy...”30 I do not know whether Lukács delivered his previously cited Korvin article or a version of it at the commemoration. In any case, the emotional economy of the article relied heavily on the polarizing distribution of love and hate: “The gauge of the revolutionary significance of vanguards of the proletariat is love for the proletariat and hatred for the bourgeoisie.”31

14–18: Understanding the Great War, a 2000 book by French historians Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker which offers an impressive discussion of the roles of violence, nationalism, and racism in and after World War I, contrasts the theses of Norbert Elias and George L. Mosse regarding the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century (in my view, a bit categorically), agreeing with Mosse. Elias, as is well-known, interpreted the German National Socialist system as a halt and a regression in the long process of civilization. By contrast, the French authors believe that “[t]he specific, momentary ‘decline of civilisation’ that Elias later thought he perceived in National Socialist totalitarianism actually took place in 1914–1918.”32 They supported Mosse’s thesis, according to which World War I had signified a genuine cultural turnabout: the brutalization of forms of conduct and uses of language, which then led to fascism and Nazism. As Mosse wrote in his book Fallen Soldiers, “during the First World War, in contrast, inspired by a sense of universal mission, each side dehumanized the enemy and called for his unconditional surrender,” as opposed to the practice of justification of the previous wars.33 This new war mentality lived on after 1918. Let me quote Mosse again: “The vocabulary of political battle, the desire to utterly destroy [sic!] the political enemy, and the way in which these adversaries were pictured, all seemed to continue the First World War mostly against a set of different, internal foes.”34

Brutalization is also detectable in post-World War I Hungarian political texts. In the preface to his book A harmadik Magyarország (The Third Hungary), written in 1921 (and in many other articles of his from 1919–1921), Christian-nationalist poet and ideologist István Lendvai called the revolutions of 1918–1919 “rat riots” and classified them as attempts by the Jewry to get into power, the only aim of which was “to step over our dead bodies and proclaim the victorious dominion of the one and only rat-dom.”35 In his reply to a survey conducted by the rightwing newspaper Gondolat around Christmas 1919, the Lendvai depicted Hungary as a sick human body infected by “Syrian [i.e., Jewish] microbes” and the “swarming multiplication and evil pillaging” of pathogens that “had to be removed both physically and spiritually” from the body so that the country could be healed by the medicine of the “Christian-national mentality.”36 The metaphorical conceptualization of the political community as a human body and of politics as medicine had been used frequently for several centuries. However, the metaphorization of the political opponent as a bloodthirsty rat or a lethal pathogen was a relatively novel linguistic creation.

After 1918, a multitude of political writings became imbued with an apocalyptic tone. In the closing chapter of his anti-Marxist book Marxizmus vagy liberális szocializmus (Marxism or liberal socialism), which was written in exile in Vienna during the autumn of 1919, the aforementioned Oszkár Jászi felt that only religious reform could show the way for humanity “out of the awful crisis […] of the entire culture.” As he put it, “The cleverest political objective is worth nothing in itself unless accompanied by a review of our fundamental intellectual values. Love instead of hatred, solidarity instead of class struggle, individuality and freedom instead of mass dictatorship ... (etc.).”37 Only if such new virtues were to replace the current ones could a “new world” be created, Jászi concludes. The joint idea of the all-encompassing “horrible crisis” of the political community under examination (humanity, the race) and the “new world” dearly longed for but accessible only through some kind of “renewal” that often imbued politics with goals of a religious or quasi-religious nature also emerged in the writings of authors far from Jászi’s universe. In Lendvai’s previously cited book, we witness a catastrophism that is characterized as desirable. “Devastation was unavoidable, necessary and salutary,” Lendvai announces in the first paragraph. He calls the collapse of the country “desirable” and “salutary” because it may release “the self-healing instincts of the race” and “its awesome health and heroic strength.” And this racial revolution could lead to a new life: “Then the Hungarian forest, with its burnt branches and torn-up trunks, will throb again with renewed blood and thick chlorophyll.”38

The apocalyptic tone often entails the sacralization of the political language used in post-World War I texts. The writings of the revisionist movement often presented Hungary’s territorial loss using the narrative and symbols of the Passion of Christ. I cite from the writings of Miklós Zeidler once again:

The minorities, having betrayed Hungary and having benefited from its territory, found themselves in the role of Judas and of the Roman soldiers casting lots for Christ’s mantle; Patrona Hungariae took the shape of Mary, who nourishes the Son, weeps for him, and takes his corpse down from the cross, while the great powers, which did not have the courage to make a fair decision and which shook off all responsibility, were likened to Pilate. This was how the revisionist concept broadened into a kind of religious movement that identified the dissolution of historical Hungary with the story of Christ’s suffering and revision with the good news of the Gospel.39

 In his biography of Béla Kun, György Borsányi cites several examples in order to demonstrate how the communist leader used Jesus analogies in various political situations. After he took a beating while in custody in February 1919, Kun was asked about those who had beaten him, and he replied with a sentence alluding to the words of Jesus’ sufferings on the cross (“they know not what they are doing”). At the Young Workers’ Congress in June, Kun cited verses from the Books of Moses, according to which a whole generation had to perish for the next one to enter the Promised Land.40 In Borsányi’s assessment, Kun made a huge impression with these gestures.

The sacralizing concept and (metaphors) of a new world and the advent of a new life played a fundamental role not only in communist and socialist idiomatic language, but also in the discourses of racialist ideologists. As Lajos Méhely put it in his 1933 criticism of the old-fashioned president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (who belonged to the elite of the Horthy régime but was still very much an old-school liberal) and his fellow scholars, “a new world is dawning on us. They do not believe that the false doctrine of liberalism has fallen once and for all and that a new form of life is spreading its wings. They do not see that the racial spirit has resurrected…”41 In Méhely’s phrasing, reference to the unquestionable truth of the natural sciences merged with sacralizing expressions from the Christian lexicon. In the 1920s and 1930s, the orators of rightwing veterans’ associations talked in their speeches about “Hungarians suffering for their own kind,”42 while communist speakers such as Lukács, who had written about Korvin, sanctified their own political intentions by glorifying the martyrs of the proletariat.43 The narratives of both veterans’ associations and the communist movement merged militarization and sacralization, military virtues and Jesus’ virtues in a continuation of the similar linguistic traditions of the war propaganda.

In his book on political religions, Emilio Gentile writes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was World War I that drove the sacralization of politics the most decisively and the most productively, partly through the intensification of the cult of the nation and partly through the politicization of historical religions.44 Gentile defines his understanding of the sacralization of politics and political religion as follows: “A religion of politics is created every time a political entity such as a nation, state, race, class, party or movement is transformed into a sacred entity, which means it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable, and intangible.”45 Political religions have existed since the end of the eighteenth century, Gentile writes, and they can imbue democracies just as they do totalitarian régimes. World War I played a key role in our twentieth-century history. War propaganda stressed in every country involved in the war that God was on their side; war was presented as an apocalyptic event, a combat between the good and the bad. Propaganda attempted to justify violence by presenting it as necessary for the victory of good, and it presented the enemy as the incarnation of evil. The speakers of the rightwing veterans’ movements and those of the communist movements tailored this sacralized war idiom to suit their own purposes.

The rising militarization, polarization, brutalization, and sacralization of language and the saturation of texts with words and tropes suggesting extreme emotions and an apocalyptic tone (i.e., the linguistic patterns some Hungarian examples of which I have cited above) can be regarded as the intellectual-historical consequences of World War I even if earlier writings had also relied on military metaphors, the dichotomization of space, intense appeals to emotion, and emphasis on an alleged distinction between the sacred and the profane. The influence of the World War is perhaps shown by the co-presence of these patterns in certain texts and the tendency to take them to the extreme. As seen above, these patterns occur in the texts by both leftwing and rightwing authors, but not in each and every one of them. One of the most common experiences of researchers working on political-intellectual history is the asymmetry between language use and political stance. There were some political writings produced after the war that did not contain any of these patterns. One could mention, for instance, Miksa Fenyő’s above-cited criticism of Jászi or the commemorative speech by old-school liberal historian Dávid Angyal for István Tisza (which I did not cite in the discussion above). In István Bethlen’s inaugural speech as prime minister in 1921, one hardly discerns any indications of this kind, similarly to the 1922 theoretical declaration by the Social Democratic Party of Hungary.

In his excellent book A nép lelke (Soul of the people), Balázs Trencsényi recently advanced the thesis that Hungarian political culture saw an ethno-cultural turn after 1919.46 I have several objections against this claim. I believe its validity does not extend to speakers who can be considered leftwing politicians and who scarcely used any ethno-nationalist vocabulary in those times. However, as I mentioned above, a pronounced ethno-nationalist discourse had been in use for several decades: the national Darwinist discourse. In the last third of the nineteenth century, it was already in parallel use or in symbiosis with the archaizing idiomatic language of nationalism—as was the case with plenty of texts after World War I. The irredentist movement, the objective of which was to restore Hungary’s prewar borders, could not abandon its archaizing discourse for the sake of an ethno-cultural one.47 At most, it mixed them. Thus, I would describe the transformation of Hungarian political culture after 1919 in the following way: the archaizing and ethno-nationalist doublespeak of the aristocracy came into a dominant position, while all other utterances that did not use this double language or some discursive variant of it were pushed to the periphery or semi-periphery of political discourse. László Péter, an excellent historian based in London, once gave the following title to an interview presenting his oeuvre: “I have always considered the state itself as the protagonist.”48 Personally, I consider the ruling class the protagonist of modern Hungarian history, so I will first have a look at the two languages spoken by the ruling class and then at one used by their linguistic rivals.

The national Darwinist past of the post-World War I racial narrative can be studied in many, many texts. The 1921 article “Két faj harca” (The struggle of two races) by Dezső Szabó, perhaps the most influential radical rightwing writer and ideologist, features not only the key notions of this half-century-old lexicon (fight for survival, the battle among races over life and death), but its consequences as well:

1. In this life-or-death battle, every member of the race is a potential source of solidarity and help for all the members of the race. 2. In the critical moments of the fight for survival, every member of the race can subordinate his own interests to those of the race. 3. The members of the race are capable of the most heroic acts of taking initiative and responsibility for the sake of the race.49

This three-point normative description is that of the Jewish race fighting a life-or-death battle with Hungarians, for according to Szabó, the Jewry is the kind of race whose example another race must imitate if it wants to come out victorious in the fight for survival. This vocabulary creates an extremely conflictual political universe in which the conflict cannot be resolved, the stakes could not be higher, and the essential struggle requires the continuous and intense attention of the players—huge, nondescript, homogeneous collectives that cannot be broken down into more original components. At the same time, this political universe has a certain moral beauty and heroism of its own (at least in Szabó’s version): it offers safety for the members of the collective and allows them to live a heroic life. However, the limits of morality stop at the boundaries of the race: there is no such thing as interracial ethics.

The national Darwinist discourse is both naturalist and will-based. Races are the way they have been shaped by fate because they are natural and not cultural communities. The concept of race does not imply a choice. “The Jews are compelled by an implacable force innate to their faith and blood to seek continuous conquest,” Szabó writes. At the same time, it does not suffice for races to survive. They must strive to comply with the normativity of the race so that they will be characterized by “a magnificent unity, a planned combat,” “a gigantic construction of the future.” According to Szabó, Jews satisfy this norm of the race, while Hungarians do not. The elements of national Darwinist reasoning listed above were not products of the war. Nearly all of them are found in László Arany’s ambitious 1872 poem “Hunok harca” (Battle of the Huns), in which Arany presents the fight for the survival of the German race and the Hun/Hungarian race. Some post-World War I writings applied the narrative of the fight among the races without using any of the national Darwinist core concepts. One such work is the previously mentioned booklet by János Horváth, Aranytól Adyig. In Lendvai’s aforementioned A harmadik Magyarország, national Darwinist reasoning is complemented with racist arguments: for Lendvai, the Jews constitute an inferior race with “a slavish soul,” and this is the dominant contention of the text. The anti-Semitic perspective could, indeed, be coupled with various languages in political texts after World War I.

The racial narrative did not replace the archaizing idiomatic language of nationalism after 1918. Rather, the two coexisted side by side. This is how racial biologist Lajos Méhely quite self-assertively began his article criticizing Albert Berzeviczy, the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences: “In the domain of the racial idea, I do not consider myself incompetent, for it is common knowledge that when the one-thousand-year-old Hungary was laid on the bier by her external and internal enemies, I was one of the first to recognize the true reasons for our collapse,” which was, Méhely contends, the “Jewish menace.”50 In this sentence, the expression “one-thousand-year-old Hungary” evokes the archaizing framework, while being “laid on the bier” is part of the irredentist narrative, which also used the archaizing framework. In fact, it was the same language that the other party, Berzeviczy, used when he uttered the following words criticized by Méhely: “The Hungarian land and the Hungarian nation dispose of an unparalleled assimilative force that imbues with every true virtue and turns into genuine Hungarians even those who did not originate from Hungarians.”51 It was not the language that Méhely was refuting, but its implications: he rejected assimilation, i.e., the view that assimilation could override ancestry.

In a clear-cut case, these two nationalist discourses would have a different community in the center: for the archaizing one, it would be the nation as a political community, whereas for the racial narrative, it would be race as a natural community before politics. When writing his article and faced with Berzevicky’s argument, Méhely must have been aware of this conflict, yet he maintained the tense coexistence of the two discourses in his text. Thus, if we suppose that he did this on purpose, then he must have proceeded in this way because it was the presence of the archaizing framework that linked his text to the linguistic milieu of the political-cultural elite of the Horthy regime or because the archaizing language would lend some patina to his reasoning. Perhaps he hoped to buttress the communicativeness and authority of his text by drawing on the archaizing framework. Lendvai might have been motivated by similar considerations when, in the preface to A harmadik Magyarország, which is thoroughly dominated by the racial narrative, coming to the vision of the racial future in his line of thought (in the very last sentence of the preface), he changed “faj” (race) to “nemzet” (nation), a word that he had not used before: “I believe, I wish, I hope: my nation [“nemzet”] and I myself will see the advent of more lasting, creative values, and national life will be able to continue with the unconscious, un-reflected self-expression of a strong organism.”52 While in Dezső Szabó’s article, conscious racial life was the norm, the goal envisioned by Lendvai was the unconscious and vitalist implementation of racial existence.

Historian Miklós Szabó offers the following explanation for the surge of racial discourse in the interwar period: given the territorial losses the country had experiences, the rightwing elite drew the conclusion that the “political mythology” of the nation as a historical community had proven weak in comparison to the elementary ethnic awareness of the minorities that were tearing the country apart. The historical state had not proven firm enough to maintain the political community, thus a more stable and more fundamental framework had to be found for the political community: i.e., race and ethnicity as a pre-political community of descent.53 This is probably how it all happened. But I think that the rightwing elite drew some conclusions not only from the territorial losses the country had faced, but also from having lost its own leading position in 1918–1919, which led to the spread of the racial narrative.54 Nonetheless, the archaizing nationalist discourse was still needed in order to justify the recovery of lost territories and the preservation of the traditional ruling position. This political language remained effective throughout the interwar era and World War II, it outlived the decades of the communist regime, and as has been shown in Gábor Zoltán Szűcs’s political science analysis, it played a fundamental role in the political reasoning at the time of the political transformation.55 The upswing of the racial narrative could also be explained as an effect of war propaganda, as the aforementioned Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker do in14–18: Understanding the Great War did.56

The notion of race meant not only a more elementary community than the nation: it staked a claim to a certain natural scientific legitimacy, and it was also imbued with a certain fatality and combativeness at the time. Miklós Szabó is discerning with his contention that, in the interwar period, race was an “anti-Semitic technical term,” though this conceals the other side of the concept as the carrier of a social promise. Authors who wrote about a racial revolution in 1919–1921, such as Endre Zsilinszky, a fellow party member of Gömbös’ at the time, were expecting to see a major overall spiritual transformation that “must reshape the mentality and morality of the Hungarian nation.”57 Analyzing a parallel German phenomenon in his book The Crisis of German Ideology, George L. Mosse points out that the supporters of the “German revolution” came from social classes that sought to maintain their privileged status above the working classes but were, at the same time, utterly dissatisfied with their world: “The tension between their desire to preserve their status and their equally fervent desire to radically alter society was resolved by the appeal to a spiritual revolution which would revitalize the nation without revolutionizing its structure.”58 This description could also be applied to the social promise of the Hungarian racial revolution.

As the militarization and sacralization of the postwar political texts demonstrate, part of the “discursive toolkit” at the disposal of speakers was used by political players who considered one another adversaries or enemies. There were, however, some key concepts, metaphors, narratives, and explanatory schemas that continued to be restricted to a given political subculture. Indeed, it was partly these linguistic patterns that engendered political subcultures. Class struggle, class oppression, and class exploitation were the notions common to the leftist discourses, while Jewish expansion, Christian renaissance, and racial instinct common to those of the right (which is not to say that the former cropped up in every leftwing writing, much as the latter were not necessarily found in every rightwing piece of discourse). The two sets of three expressions create radically different and decidedly fictive universes.59 There are often different political subcultures behind diverging language uses: fictive communities and institutions making it possible to imagine them.60 At the end of the century, the nineteenth-century process of the homogenization of the language of modern politics was broken by the separation of two political subcultures with different social backgrounds and different languages: the social democratic workers’ movement and the Catholic-Christian political community. The history of the languages of these two subcultures is the prehistory of the diverging postwar uses of language.

In my handbook on political-intellectual history, I treated the notion of “Hungarian” as understood and used on the right and the left: “These two sides can be characterized the most easily on the basis of their relation to the events of the recent past: the former rejected the initiatives of the two revolutions (and the socialist workers’ movement and ‘radical counterculture’ that preceded these revolutions), while the latter regarded one of them as its own tradition.”61 Today, I would say, rather, that in the interwar period, it was the continuous exegesis of the civil war years of 1918–1921 as an “arche-event” that shaped the political traditions of the left and the right. Historian Gergely Romsics, who offers a rich discussion of the narratives of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the memoirs of the members of the political elite, identifies “two grands récits with ramifications” in these Hungarian memoirs: leftist and rightist.62 Would we get the same result if we studied the exegesis of the civil war years in an extensive text corpus? Romsics arrives at the conclusion that, in the post-World War I years, there were several rightwing linguistic variants in the public discourse (pinned together by a common vision of the enemy) that could compete with the social democratic language (and its Marxist lexicon), but “a consistent democratic-liberal linguistic play was missing.”63

According to Giovanni Sartori, the secession of communists from the social democratic movement after 1918 tied the latter to Marxism more than ever. As Sartori writes, “From 1920 on, a rivalry developed between the brothers who parted for the title of the ‘true Marxist.’ [...] Between 1920 and 1940, the rivalry with Communists forced European Socialists almost unanimously into Marxist positions.”64 But this was only partially true of Hungarian social democrats, who remained Marxists,65 and their discourse remained partly Marxist as well. But only partly. The necessity of distancing themselves from the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the impact of the country’s territorial losses on the position of all political players, and the new situation in 1922 (the party making it into the National Assembly) forced the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary to open up from a linguistic point of view. The June 28, 1922 theoretical declaration of their first parliamentary faction is an interesting document because in its first sentence it adapts to the linguistic context of the utterance through the evocation of the archaizing nationalist discourse only later to use this linguistic gesture for the historical reinterpretation of its own political legitimacy. Below are the opening sentences of this theoretical declaration:

Upon first appearing in the legislative body of the Hungarian nation after a millennium of state existence to take part in legislative work and national administration on an equal footing with the other social classes within the framework of the state constitution, the representatives of the working class of Hungary wish to dedicate their first words to gratitude and acknowledgment. / We wish to remember our hardworking ancestors, who broke up the fallow land for a long, long time while enduring inconceivable hardships and sufferings … dripping in the sweat of their faces to make this land fertile and this country suitable for human civilization, and the inhabitants of this country capable of an organized existence as a state and as a society. / They lived in disenfranchisement. Their life and existence were always in the hands of the so-called upper classes of society, so today, when we enter here as their successors, we deem it our duty to place our wreath of gratitude on their unmarked graves and their dust, mixed with the soil of our motherland.66

Various elements of the phrasing in these passages cited above, such as “a millennium of state existence,” “the legislative body of the Hungarian nation,” “the framework of the state constitution,” “fertile land,” “dust mixed with the soil of our motherland,” “wreath of gratitude,” are linguistic elements that could occur in any speech using the archaizing language of nationalism, not to mention, of course, the allusion to Genesis 3:19. That such expressions were used here can be interpreted as a cooperative gesture: self-adjustment to the dominant linguistic schemas of official politics. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the choice of political language use is the message itself. At the same time, the passage cited above offers a (non-adaptive) interpretation of political representation in which their own (Marxist) language also looms in the background: the group of working-class representatives regarded itself as the leaders of a class and considered their fellow MPs class representatives as well. Moreover, the second and the third paragraphs offer an alternative historical narrative to the narrative of archaizing nationalism. This alternative narrative elevates the mute, unspoken millennial history of the disenfranchised lower classes to a position alongside the one-thousand-year history of the upper classes that had been written and told so many times, and it does so partly by appropriating some of the expressions of the language of archaizing nationalism.

The declaration also announces (also through its language use) the acceptance of the historical constitutional framework (which tacitly implies giving up Marxist objectives) and its plebeian reinterpretation. The alternative narrative of the second and the third paragraphs is a continuation of the earlier efforts of the movement (party) to create its own historical Pantheon and system of traditions.67 These paragraphs offer a characterization of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary not simply as the party of the working class but of the lower classes in general. By claiming to speak in the voice of the descendants of the disenfranchised, the party put itself in the position of the accuser leveling charges against the villains of history and the restorer of historical injustice, while its political opponents were shown as the successors to the disenfranchisers. The catchwords of archaizing nationalism provided a linguistic passage to communication with political adversaries, but their alternative use undermined the dominant discourse. Thus, the linguistic strategy of the declaration can be seen as both adaptive and offensive. This, however, cannot be regarded as an intellectual-historical consequence of the Great War. Rather, it was a consequence of the consequences of the war.

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