The Urban Space Through the Eyes of Women: The 1849 Siege of Buda in Women’s Ego-documents*

Emese Gyimesi
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):789–823 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.789

This study examines how female city dwellers experienced the siege of Buda Castle, a crucial event of the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–1849, and the image of the city in their writings. The analysis focuses on three women’s ego-documents: the autobiography of Emília Kánya, the first female editor in the Habsburg Empire, the letters written by a young actress, Lilla Bulyovszky, to her husband and a letter by Anna Glasz, a resident of Buda Castle. I explore the kinds of mental map that emerge in the ego-documents in which the authors reflect on the urban experiences during the siege and the emotions that dominate their writings.

Keywords: Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–1849, urban history, female use of space, city representations

In her 1903 autobiography, Emília Kánya, writing in Fiume, offers the following recollections of the bombardment of Pest in 1849:

Back in the first half of May—I don’t know the exact date when—Hentzi, the governor of Buda Castle, began to besiege our beautiful young city. I was a very ignorant and gullible little woman, and so I didn’t even think that this would turn into a siege of Pest, but with my childish mind I believed that these bullets were just misdirected shots sent from Svábhegy to Buda Castle by our soldiers and that they were just whistling in front of our windows in Zrínyi Street by chance. But then I was informed: this is the siege of Pest, a soulless, cruel siege, a testimony to the mindless and heartless fury that Hentzi wanted to unleash on the innocent capital. It was an ignoble revenge for the many defeats the Austrian army had suffered at the hands of our lads lately.1

Although the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–1849 has long been a focus of study as one of the most important topics of Hungarian historiography, the history of women’s experience in the event has so far been relegated to the background. Apart from the biographies of a few prominent female figures (such as Mária Lebstück, who fought in men’s uniform and was appointed lieutenant, and Lajos Kossuth’s sister, Zsuzsanna Kossuth, who is regarded as the first Hungarian nurse),2 this question has hardly been addressed, although many surviving ego-documents would allow us to examine it. While there have been studies on the involvement of women in public affairs, the first efforts to gain women’s suffrage, or the manifesto “To Patriots!” demanding equality for women, written in April 1848 by Blanka Teleki, head of the famous girls’ school in Pest,3 individual stories, the private sphere, and everyday experiences remain almost entirely unexplored. The literature on the relationship between the 1848 revolutions and women is also characterized by a focus on issues in the public sphere, such as women’s emancipation, and how these issues were reflected in the writings of the women writers of the time.4

There is also a lack of fundamental research on how female city dwellers saw Pest-Buda5 in the mid-nineteenth century and how their writings reflected on their uses of urban space.6 In my study, I link these two issues through an analysis of three women’s ego-documents. I look first at the autobiography of Emília Kánya, quoted above. I then consider the letters sent by Lilla Bulyovszky, an actress working at the National Theatre, to her husband. I conclude with an examination of a letter by Anna Glasz, a resident of Buda Castle, which Glasz wrote over the course of several weeks during the siege, thus transforming it into a kind of diary, even if it remained addressed to someone else. I will analyze, on the basis of these sources, how these women experienced the siege of Buda Castle, a crucial event of the Revolution and War of Independence. I also consider the image of the city in their writings, that is, how they create an impression of the war-struck city while recording their experiences.

The concept of the mental map is linked to the name of urban planner Kevin Lynch, who studied the interaction between the urban environment and the individuals living in the city. In his iconic book The Image of the City, he studied American cities (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) on the basis of the mental maps of their inhabitants.7 He distinguished five defining elements of the urban image (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks). The first category includes paths, streets, and promenades, that is, the transport channels that a city dweller follows, the second includes major borderlines (edges), and the third includes quarters or areas (districts).8 The fourth category is made up of important junctions (nodes), which can be strategic places, as they can be the centers of life in a neighborhood, and the fifth category consists of major mileposts and signposts (landmarks), which are external reference points that help orientation (mostly physical objects that are easy to identify and that are highlighted in a given context because of their specificity).

I focus primarily on the ways in which the authors of the aforementioned sources write about nodes and districts, as their narratives offer examples of the ways in which urban spaces were put to new uses by inhabitants of the city during the extraordinary circumstances of the siege of Buda in May 1849. I seek to identify the kinds of mental maps that emerge from the reflections in these ego-documents on the urban experiences during the siege. I also explore, on the basis of comments made in the three ego-documents, the ways in which the social status of the people fleeing the siege influenced their choices (and by implication, options) of mode and route of flight, and I consider the emotional tones of the three narratives of the events.

In recent decades, approaches to analyzing ego-documents have changed radically. With the foregrounding of the lives of common people and the increasing presence in the secondary literature of the perspectives of microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte, analyses of individual experiences and motivations have become more and more important in historiography.9 Since the 1960s, the term “experience” has become a key concept in social history, incorporating the processes by which individuals attribute meaning to and thereby essentially construct the events they experience.10 The case studies and the selected sources presented in this inquiry represent diverse modes of such meaning-making. Thus, they offer examples of how interpretations of events and perceptions of the city were influenced by the genre of the ego-document in question and the worldview of its author.

The Siege

The siege of Buda Castle from May 4 to 21 was an important stage in the 1848–1849 Revolution and War of Independence. Pest-Buda had been occupied on January 5, 1849 by the imperial commander-in-chief, Prince Alfred zu Windisch-Grätz. The Hungarian government and parliament retreated to Debrecen in the Trans-Tisza region, where on April 14, the dethronement of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine was proclaimed and Lajos Kossuth was elected governor. After the successes of the spring campaign, the Hungarian government considered the recapture of the capital of paramount importance, both in terms of foreign policy and because of the symbolic power of the liberation of Buda.11 Thus, after the victory at Komárom, one of the most important battles of the war, the Hungarian armies, led by Artúr Görgei, marched towards Buda instead of pursuing the fleeing imperial troops. This decision was criticized afterwards from both military and political points of view. In 1869, Mór Jókai reflected on this in his iconic novel, The Baron’s Sons (A kőszívű ember fiai), discussing why the recapture of Buda was so vitally important to the Hungarians: “What to the Punic people was Carthage, to Israel, Jerusalem, to Christianity, the Holy Land, to the French, Paris, to the Russians, Moscow, to the Italians, Rome—it was to us Buda Castle.”

The commander of Buda Castle was Major General Heinrich Hentzi von Arthurm.12 On May 4, Artúr Görgei demanded that he surrender the castle, and Görgei warned Hentzi to spare the Chain Bridge and the city of Pest on the left bank of the Danube. He also promised not to launch an attack from this direction.13 In his reply, however, Hentzi made it clear that he would not abandon the castle, and he warned that he would shell Pest.14 In the following weeks, the imperial army aimed artillery fire at the beautiful row of mansions on the banks of the Danube from Buda Castle, as well as many other buildings in the downtown area and the Lipótváros (Leopoldstadt), and Terézváros (Theresienstadt) districts.15 The unified neoclassical townscape of Pest, built in the Age of Reform (1825–1848),16 was severely damaged. The only purpose of Hentzi’s action was to instill fear. He had no legitimate military motives, as the castle was not under attack from the Pest side of the Danube. Given the main targets of the bombardment, Hentzi seems to have wanted to teach a lesson to the people of Pest, who had shown their devotion to the revolutionary cause. The National Theater, the Redoute (which had been home of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly in the second half of 1848), and the Hall of Commerce (in which István Széchenyi had established the National Casino) were among the buildings hit.17 Although the recapture of the capital was a great success for the Hungarian army, the inhabitants of Pest were shocked by the many deaths and injuries and the destruction of the architectural environment, which left many people homeless. Those who suffered Hentzi’s bombardment saw him as “the cannibal-hearted commander of Buda Castle.”18 The shock endured by the townspeople may have been exacerbated by the fact that they had not had to endure such a siege for as long as anyone could remember. The War of Independence, which began in the autumn of 1848, was the first truly significant conflict involving armed violence in the country since the end of Rákóczi’s War of Independence in 1711.

The Mental Map of Contemporary City Dwellers: Urban Architecture and the Perception of the City in Pest-Buda in the Age of Reform

Before analyzing the ego-documents and presenting Kánya’s, Bulyovszky’s. and Glasz’s experiences of the siege, it is worth providing some context by giving a description of the Age-of-Reform city that was so severely damaged by Hentzi’s artillery fire. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Pest was one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. Around 1800, it was still a predominantly German-speaking city, provincial and backward by European standards, but in the 1830s, it began to develop rapidly, and the Hungarian-speaking population grew dramatically.19 The neoclassical townscape and increasingly metropolitan physical environment were, curiously, the result of a disaster, as most of the buildings in the city center were built or rebuilt after the great flood of 1838.20 The inundation destroyed almost two-thirds of the buildings in Pest, so the building regulations that were adopted included strict criteria concerning the quality of building materials, wall thickness, façade design, and public health requirements.21 In the following years, fast-paced and massive construction projects led to the urbanization of the suburbs, which had previously had a rural atmosphere. The city began to shed its provincial character both in terms of architecture and transportation, and it began to resemble other European metropolises,22 emerging as a major European trade junction, political center, and cultural hub by 1900 (by which time it had become part of the city of Budapest, officially created in 1873 with the unification of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda).

The significant shifts in demographic figures left its mark on the cityscape. The proportion of housing areas increased, and the first planned district, Lipótváros, became Pest’s most elegant quarter, characterized by a uniform style of multi-story houses and linearly designed streets.23 These features were also noteworthy because in 1832, 80 percent of the buildings in Pest consisted only of a ground floor.24 In the 1840s, the first public transport vehicles, omnibuses, appeared in the streets, connecting the inner parts of the city with the popular excursion sites in Buda and Pest. This can also be seen as an indication that the city’s inhabitants no longer considered their city traversable on foot.25

The first urban planning concept had been drawn up in 1808, when the Pest Planning Committee was established under the chairmanship of Palatine Joseph von Habsburg of Pest. During the Commission’s term of office, the National Museum,26 the German Theater,27 the National Theater,28 the so-called Vigadó (Redoutensaal),29 and the Lloyd Palace, home of the National Casino, were built.30 In addition to the plans for public buildings, the Commission also gave approval for private construction projects, thus contributing to the development of a unified neoclassical urban landscape in Pest, mainly thanks to the work of two particularly outstanding architects, Mihály Pollack and József Hild.31 This cityscape was drastically altered (at some points of the city, virtually destroyed) by the bombardment ordered by Hentzi.

For some more decades, Terézváros, Józsefváros (Josephstadt), and Ferencváros (Franzstadt) would continue to count as suburbs with a rural atmosphere. According to Emőke Tomsics, even in the mid-nineteenth century, most of residents of the downtown area perceived the city as a closed unit encircled by the mediaeval city walls (which, however, no longer existed at the time), and many people thought of the areas beyond as rural or countryside.32 This peculiarity of the mental map of the city’s inhabitants is well illustrated by an anecdote according to which the German actors of the Deutsches Stadttheater of Pest in Theater Square (present-day Vörösmarty Square) often exchanged banter with and mockingly asked the members of the National Theater (located at the point corresponding to the southeast corner of present-day Astoria): “well, how are you faring—out there”?33

One of the prominent goals of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century was to make Pest-Buda the capital of the country. As part of this, the idea of uniting the twin cities was suggested as early as the 1830s, primarily as a vision of the most influential reformer of the era, Count István Széchenyi.34 In June 1849, the Hungarian government decreed the unification of Pest and Buda, but after the defeat of the War of Independence by the Habsburg dynasty, this was annulled.35 In the following decades, the grand visions of the Hungarian nationalist movement and urban development became closely intertwined.36 Nevertheless, Pest, Buda, and Óbuda would not be united until 1873 (six years after the 1867 Compromise establishing the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), when the city was officially renamed Budapest.

“What had become of our beautiful city!” The Autobiography of Emília Kánya

According to Pierre Bourdieu, the biography is merely a rhetorical illusion, since real life is always chaotic. Different events, emotions, and actions become a logical and coherent whole only in the mind of the individual writing the biography, who constructs a destiny out of a life, a coherence out of coincidences. In the case of Emília Kánya’s autobiography, this process of construction is emphatically and clearly perceptible in several respects. First, the text was written more than five decades after the events, by which time the memory of the Revolution and War of Independence had been transformed to a considerable extent and become cultic. Second, in her narrative, Kánya foregrounded her identity as a woman, portraying herself in a way that was as consistent as possible with the norms and social expectations of the time. Third, she wrote her autobiography primarily for her children and consequently seems, on the basis of the text, to have paid particular attention to crafting the image of the loving mother.

Emília Kánya’s autobiography is a treasure trove for researchers in many respects. Several studies and a doctoral dissertation have already been written about her career as the first female editor in the Habsburg Empire, her role as a female patriot,37 and her time spent in Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia),38 but her reflections on the War of Independence and the urban spaces of Pest-Buda at the time have never been analyzed. She led a life of norm transgression: as a mother of four, she divorced her husband, and in 1860, she founded Családi Kör (Family Circle), a journal that would be published successfully for the next twenty years. In her autobiography, however, she does not emphasize the unusual and norm-breaking nature of her career. On the contrary, she offers an exquisite balanced of the image of a dutiful, modest, norm-following woman in traditional female roles on the one hand and her pioneering enterprise on the other. Even in terms of the few weeks addressed by the present study, a traditional female role, that of the mother, is dominant in Kánya’s description of the siege in May 1849, alongside her personal experiences of Hentzi’s bombardment. Although Kánya was 21 years old at the time of the events, her memoir was written fifty-four years later, in 1903, so they must be treated as the recollections of a 75-year-old woman.

Born in Pest, Emília Kánya knew the city well and had followed its changes since her childhood. She had been barely ten years old at the time of the great flood of Pest in 1838, she had attended the opening of the National Theater, and she had witnessed the laying of the foundation stone of the Chain Bridge. Her father, Pál Kánya, was a prominent teacher at the Lutheran Grammar School. He was closely associated with many members of the contemporary intelligentsia in Pest and with the family of the then Palatine Archduke Joseph, who was very active in the development of the city. As a child of a Lutheran family, Emília Kánya grew up in the area of Kohl Markt Square, now Deák Square, known as “Insula Lutherana” because of its Lutheran institutions (church, grammar school, etc.). In 1847, she married Gottfried Feldinger, the son of an iron merchant from Temesvár (today Timişoara, Romania). Their first child, Irén, was born on October 23, 1848, so Kánya went through the siege of Buda Castle with her then barely seven-month-old daughter. The latter fact, which provided a way of focusing on the image of the mother fleeing with her daughter in the commemorative act, fundamentally determined the narrative of the parts of the autobiography that relate to the period of the War of Independence.

Kánya notes in her narrative that she is not writing with the intention of documenting military and political events, but rather to record her personal experiences: “I’m not going to talk about the facts, which are historical and which are now etched in the memory of generations, I just want to give an account of the prevailing mood a little.” At the onset of the siege, she was visiting her relatives in the Nákó House, on the site of present-day Gresham Palace, in the immediate vicinity of the Pest end of the Chain Bridge.39 She soon had to flee, as this area was particularly exposed to the artillery fire from Buda Castle. She was assisted in her escape by János Balassa, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, whose sister also lived nearby:

He had already arranged that we should not spend the night in this exposed house, we should pack the most necessary things and he would take us all to a safer place in the evening, but we should not go by carriage, which would be an easier safer target for the shooters, but should escape on foot, remaining near to the buildings.40

They went to the Medical University, confident that the building’s thick walls would provide enough protection. They holed themselves up in the vast halls of the university in Újvilág (now Semmelweis) Street in the city center, while outside, the volley of cannonballs was incessant. As even this area was considered an especially high-risk zone for shelling, the next day, they moved to the “then newly built and still uninhabited” Commercial Hospital in Hársfa Street in Terézváros.41

Due to the bombardment, most people were on the run from the city center. Those who could sought refuge in the suburbs or the surrounding villages. The mental map described above, centered literally on the narrow urban core, was transformed in a flash by the emergency. Suddenly, the outlying neighborhoods offering hope for refuge were given special attention. Although Terézváros already counted as a suburb, it was not a danger-free zone. Many of the people in the area perished in their beds or at their desks from the shells hitting the buildings. Almost all the ego-documents written during the siege or in retrospect recounted tragedies of this kind, either personally experienced or heard second-hand. Emília Kánya’s autobiography captured the constant stream of horrific news of burnt buildings and shells crushing the legs of people walking by or smashing their heads. She also made a special note of the tragedy suffered by the young son of an acquaintance, Lutheran minister János Melczer from Rákoskeresztúr. Melczer’s son’s legs were mangled by a shell.42

Hársfa Street was located in the outer part of Terézváros, closer to the City Park, bordered by gardens and grassy areas. However, Hentzi did not spare this part of the city either. Kánya vividly describes both the sight of the shells drilling into the ground nearby and the thick black smoke billowing from the roofs of the city buildings, as well as the terrible sounds of the “infernal whistling,” a more “hideous” noise than anything she had ever heard.43 One night, after the bullets had come so close to the hospital building in which they had taken shelter that the windows had cracked and shattered in the courtyard, she decided to leave Pest behind altogether. “Away from here, away from the city, to where the fiery embers of hell do not reach! I was haunted all the way by the fiery shreds of paper and bullet fragments. I ran all the way through the City Park and only stopped at the Hermina Chapel.44 There, I collapsed on the steps of the chapel, took my dear little Irén [her daughter] in my arms, and wept bitterly. I could hardly recover my senses.”45

The modes and destinations of the flight of the inhabitants were fundamentally determined by their social status. The poor and less well-off fled to the City Park to escape the danger, creating a kind of “tent city” or refugee town, as this area was out of the reach of the castle artillery. In 1903, Kánya, who did not flee to the City Park with her family but only passed through it, penned the following recollections: “Where there are buildings around the chapel now, there were trees and lawns then, and many thousands of poor people huddled under tents made of tarpaulins. All that misery! They were selling food, making noise, bargaining, crying, swearing. And the cannons just roared on and on!”46 In Kánya’s mental map of the city at the time of the siege, then, the City Park was, in Kevin Lynch’s terms, a landmark of sorts, an area sharply separated from its surroundings.

Wealthy citizens tried to leave the city behind them completely. This is how the Kőbánya railway became a particularly important node for them. Kánya’s family had only one goal in mind: no matter where they were going, they should be heading for the railway at all costs, and so they went to Kőbánya, where a multitude had already gathered, presumably following a similar strategy. In the crowd, Emília Kánya spotted the aforementioned author Jókai and his famous wife, actress Róza Laborfalvi. The importance of social status was also evident here. The Kánya family was having lunch in the garden of a tavern, as were many others waiting for the train. Emília Kánya was accompanied not only by her husband and child, but also by a nanny, who had tied some essential items of clothing into a large shawl before leaving Terézváros and who had carried the little girl in her arms during the journey.47 Some important attributes of the bourgeois mentality were thus retained even in the times of greatest emergency. The family finally managed to leave the city. They fled to the village of Pilis, near Pest, where Sámuel Sárkány, a good friend of Kánya’s husband, served as the Reformed pastor.48

Kánya’s narrative puts considerable emphasis on her role as a mother. The description of their flight contains numerous references to the presence of her daughter. With regard to the night spent at the Medical University, Kánya noted that the little girl had been the only one among who had been able to fall asleep. The adults had stayed awake on the hard benches at the university. References to the daughter remained prominent in the description of the subsequent “stations” of their flight. This may be related to the fact that, in contrast with many other ego-documents about the siege, fear is the most dominant emotion in the description of the events, more specifically, the fear of a mother concerned for the safety of her child. The decision to leave Terézváros is also presented along similar lines: “folding my husband’s arms in mine, I escaped from the hell that I could not possibly endure any longer, so overwhelmed was I by the horror, the danger threatening my child’s life.”49 Thus, Kánya’s recollections of the events, at least according to the autobiography, were fundamentally determined by the fact that she had experienced the threat of Hentzi’s bombardment as a mother. The presence of her infant daughter influenced her decisions (at least according to her autobiography) and greatly heightened her fears, but the girl also represents, in the narrative, the perfect counterpoint to the horrors. Recalling the lunch in the garden of the restaurant in Kőbánya, Kánya writes, “I reveled in the cooing of my dear little child: she cooed so sweetly as if there were nothing wrong with the world, with the sweet sun of God and the cloudless blue sky upon us.”50

If we consider the autobiography as a whole, it is striking that Kánya’s references to use of space in peacetime revolved around the downtown area of Pest, the Buda Hills (Svábhegy, Városmajor), and the city’s “green salons,” i.e. the parks that functioned as important catalysts for social life in the period. Thus, the mental map that emerges from her writing does not focus on the different districts so much as on nodes, such as the Insula Lutherana, which provided her with a family home during her childhood and after the breakup of her first marriage. During the siege of Buda, however, she was forced to flee into and move over urban spaces that had previously been and, for the most part, would also remain completely indifferent on her mental map. Such was the case with Hársfa Street in Outer Terézváros and Kőbánya, which provided an opportunity to leave the city by way of the railway network. The only station of their flight that she had known and loved since her childhood was the City Park. This may be why, in her memoir, she highlights the sad, strikingly unusual appearance of the park, which had become a refugee camp. Even more emotional and astonishing, however, is her description of the demolished city:

My God! What had become of our beautiful city! Danube Lane had become almost unrecognizable. The great Redout building had been ruined by shells, its great columns lay on the ground, its windows like the sockets of blinded giant eyes, staring darkly ahead. And Nagyhíd Street [present-day Deák Street], the streets and squares nearby! So moved was I by this horrible sight that I burst out crying, shedding hot tears, which were tears not merely of pain, but of unbridled disgust and contempt at such a barbarous display of revenge! What crime had that poor town and its peaceful inhabitants committed! How many people were made homeless, whose homes and property were now in ruins!51

The Redoute, or Vigadó, had played an important role in both the cultural life of the Age of Reform and the political life of the War of Independence. The building, considered a pinnacle of neoclassical architecture in Pest, was inaugurated in 1833. Its concert hall had hosted such notable musicians as Johann Strauss and Ferenc Liszt. In July 1848, the first National Assembly of the People was also held here, at which Lajos Kossuth asked for 200,000 soldiers to continue the fight for freedom. The destruction of the building was thus symbolic, as was its reconstruction in 1865, albeit in a different form.52

Most of the city’s inhabitants were confronted with the scale of the devastation of Hentzi’s bombardment when they returned to the areas of the city that had been deemed particularly dangerous during the siege and therefore had been abandoned by many. Kánya, who had fled to Pilis, returned to Pest on the second day after the Hungarian victory, but even during her absence she was preoccupied (at least according to her later recollections) with the losses suffered by the city and its inhabitants: “The bombardment of my dear native city continued on and on, and night after night we heard every single shot, destroying who knows whom and what that we loved!”53 It was upon her return that it became clear to her that many of the imposing buildings of Age-of-Reform Pest, which had flourished in her childhood, had been destroyed. The shocking sight of the Vigadó in ruins was also mentioned in the writings of many of her contemporaries and in the contemporary press. In her memoirs, Kánya emphasizes both the destruction of the city’s architectural environment and the desperate plight of the its homeless. In contrast with the impressions shared in the writings of many of her contemporaries, in her case, the strong emotions (“unbridled disgust,” “contempt”) aroused by the sight of the destruction were explained with reference to purely humanitarian considerations. Although in other parts of her autobiography the role of patriotism is also very prominent, she does not describe the siege of Buda from the perspective of a Hungarian citizen impassioned by nationalist sentiments, but rather as a mother fearing for the wellbeing of her family and her hometown.

According to Liz Stanley, a biography shows ever different elements of a life actually lived, so it can be interpreted as a kaleidoscope.54 From the same elements of a story, new configurations may emerge each time we look at them. In Kánya’s autobiography, the interpretative framework of events was determined by the maternal role above all else. She weaves her personal experiences of the siege of Buda into the narrative of an escape. This procedure had a fundamental impact on her mental map as well. As the inner city of Pest constituted a site of danger for and therefore threat to her family’s life, her primary goal was to search for a suitable escape route. All the while, she used a kind of biblical allusion. Her writing shaped the autobiographical self with the help of the Virgin Mary’s topos: the tone of the text is set with allusions to the plight of the prototype of the mother who is looking for safety and seeking accommodation for her child.55 Kánya is cast (casts herself) in the role of the mother fleeing in times of distress with her baby of only a few months of age.

“Not for all the treasures in the world would I trade having been present at the magnificent capture of Buda Castle”: Lilla Bulyovszky’s Letters

Lilla Bulyovszky, a sixteen-year-old actress of the National Theater,56 lived through the siege as a young wife. In November 1848, she married Gyula Bulyovszky, one of the chief protagonists of the revolutionary events of March 15 who worked in the Ministry of the Interior in the spring of 1849.57 Thus, the young couple did not go through the siege together, as Gyula had moved to Debrecen with the Hungarian government in January 1849, while Lilla was tied to her acting job in Pest.

When examining correspondences, it is worth bearing in mind one of the most important characteristics of this type of source; namely, that the person writing the letter formed their narrative and self-image for the addressee. Letters, which provide space for self-reflection, are a particularly important part of the narrative that the person has created about their own life.58 At the same time, the writer constructs an image not only of themselves but also of the addressee and their relationship.59 In Lilla Bulyovszky’s letters, the images of the devoted, bold woman patriot and the loving wife are prominent.

As Bulyovszky wrote her letters at the time of the events, they offer impressions of the excitement surrounding the siege, which had not yet been decided. She wrote the following lines at 9 o’clock on the morning on May 14:

Back on the ninth, the daily bombardment made me, like everyone else, move out of the city, although the suburbs are even more expensive than the city center on such occasions. … The city is bombarded every day, sometimes in the evening, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, countless houses have already burnt away, as they say, there was a fire in Sip Street, and even our belongings may have been burnt.60

In the above sentence, Bulyovszky is referring to their residence in Pest, Síp Street, which was close to her workplace, the National Theater. As for the location of her temporary accommodation, she wrote merely that it was “towards the small woods,”61 presumably referring to the area around the City Park, which her contemporaries would call the Stadtwäldchen (Városerdőcske, Small City Woods).62 In the weeks of the siege, the post office in the casern on Üllői Road was the most important node on her mental map because it was here that she was able to stay in touch with her husband. As she wrote at 6 p.m. on May 18, “At the moment, the post office is in the casern at Ülle, a good one hour’s walk from my present dwelling, but I still went twice a day until I finally received your two letters, to my great joy.”63 The Üllői Road casern was built between 1845 and 1848.64 It is entirely typical of the mental map of Pest in the Age of Reform that Lilla Bulyovszky did not consider this part of Pest part of the city. The following remark from the same letter testifies to this: “I cannot even read the newspapers, because there is no one to bring them to me, I dare not go into the city, because my life is very dear after reading your letter.”65

From the outset, the relationship between Lilla and Gyula was coupled with a zealous love of their homeland. Lilla initially explained her attraction to Gyula, for instance, as the fervor felt by a patriot girl long before she had become aware of her love. Her journal entries provide a detailed description of how they met and how their love developed.66 They met at several balls in early 1848 and danced together on each occasion. March 15, 1848 was important emotional milestone for Lilla, when she listened to Gyula’s speech in front of the Landerer printing house, a venue crucial for the Revolution: “many beautiful and true words had parted from his lips, at which I felt a special affection for him that I would decipher thus: who would not love and respect this enthusiastic patriot?”

In recent decades, the secondary literature has gradually stopped treating nationalism as mere ideology or discourse and has begun to consider it the sum total of lived feelings, experiences, and personal memories.67 Approaching the question of nationalism in everyday experience from an innovative perspective, Anthony P. Cohen began to use the term personal nationalism to refer to the active role played by members of a nation as individuals in their own right as they personalized their sense of nationhood and created their own meanings.68 Cohen’s concept was further elaborated by Raúl Moreno-Almendral, who focused on nation-building from a micro-historical perspective.69 As sources, ego-documents offer opportunities to examine how individuals experience their national identities, how they tailor these identities to their life situations, and how they use the concept of nation to make sense of their life experiences and life events. They thus offer insights into the ways in which national identity influences how people think, how they understand their destinies, and their perceptions of the world. This approach, as exemplified by Reetta Eiranen’s research, can be useful in examining the correspondence of engaged and married couples at the time, as it offers some grasp of why a commitment to the national ideal provided a fundamental bond between couples that cemented romantic feelings.70

In the letters written by Lilla Bulyovszky to her husband, the description of the besieged city is also tinged with national sentiments. In both Lilla’s letters and the letters written by her husband to her, the recapture of Buda Castle is presented as a great event which was an exceptional and sublime happening to experience personally. This perspective even overrode their sense of fear. Lilla offers the following description of her experience of the conclusion of the siege on May 24:

My Gyula, I am poor, but not for all the treasures in the world would I trade having been present at the magnificent capture of Buda Castle. From two o’clock until the morning I sat on the sandhills, listening to the constant sound of rifles, and with every shot a deep prayer flew from my bosom to heaven for the life of our honvéd [Hungarian soldiers] fighting for freedom; how my soul rejoiced when I spotted the first national flag! Later, I went to the banks of the Danube, I saw how the Croats were thrown down from the battlements, but, alas, I also saw how the soldiers, holding the Nádor-Kert [Palatine’s Garden], fighting for their fatherland and honor, were floating down, some dead, some wounded. I could not keep watching, I left the banks of the Danube and walked the streets of our shattered city with tears in my eyes. Only here and there are windows to be seen in the houses, the new market houses all stand mute, as if the inhabitants had died, some in Leopoldstadt look as if they were about to fall apart within a minute.71

The sixteen-year-old actress had such a strong desire to see the events from up close that she watched the siege unfold from the banks of the Danube. Her curiosity was not unique. In a letter written on May 21, the newspaper writer and editor Richard Noisser marveled that “people are so used to the shooting that thousands of curious people are standing on the Pest banks watching this history [sic].”72 Even more astonishing to him was the fact that three-quarters of the crowd were women, undeterred by the fact that shots were occasionally fired from the castle in the direction of the onlookers for “private amusement.”73 In this situation, the Danube constituted a borderline (or edge, to use one of Lynch’s terms) separating Buda and Pest and at the same time functioning as the “stage” for the events as seen from Pest and thus becoming an “auditorium.”

In an earlier letter, dated 18 May, Lilla Bulyovszky had already mentioned that her only “amusement”74 in her solitude was watching the artillery shells being launched at the castle and at Pest. However, it is clear from her writings that she did not watch the siege closely out of sheer curiosity, but rather out of patriotic fervor. She was aware of the symbolic significance of Buda, of the fact that the siege of this city was one of the most important events in Hungarian history. Nor can we overlook her remark that she had also watched “how the Croats were thrown down from the battlements,”75 and it was only the sight of the corpses of the defenders of the Hungarian cause that was so unbearable to her that she felt compelled to leave the scene.

In the couple’s correspondence, it is also worth noting how the husband, Gyula Bulyovszky reacted to his wife’s experiences of the siege at close quarters, while he himself was far away from the events. On May 6, when the news reached him that the imperial army was shelling Pest, he wrote the following lines:

The news is just beginning to spread here that Henzi [sic] is having Pest bombarded, believe me, my angel, if it is true, my Lord Henzi’s bullet shocks my heart no less than the windowpanes of the buildings on Danube Lane. My soul trembles at the knowledge that my only treasure, my wife, is so exposed to this terror, and I am, in turn, exalted in the knowledge that, if I have been kept from the glory of our fight, at least you, the better half of my soul, share in it, though not with a weapon that belongs in the hand of man, but with the secret fervor of your heart, which is the purest prayer before God, who watches over nations with His omnipotence.76

And at the end of the siege, he wrote the following:

Your trembling and the struggle between life and death since Buda was taken are now over, and you who have stood heroically near the danger will ever remain in the great memory of the days to come. You were witnesses of what centuries would not bring us, if we could live to see it. The more I trembled for you, the better it feels now that, beyond the horriblenesses [sic] of danger, you at least, my sweet Lilla, have been an eyewitness to this sublime event, and you shall tell me many a good and great tale among your kisses.77

Although Lilla, having experienced the events at first hand, frequently referred to the significance of the successful siege, the rhetoric in her letters contains less pathos than the writings of her husband, who observed the developments from Debrecen. Rather, her letters contain information that is interesting from the point of view of the history of lifestyles. She regularly wrote, for example, about the high prices in the city, both for accommodations and for food. During the siege, the suburbs became more expensive than the city center, which everyone was trying to flee. She described how much she paid for a bed in her temporary accommodation in the suburbs, where there were six people to a room, so there was constant chatter and noise, and in the next room “singing and shouting, as is customary in a public house.”78 Nevertheless, she stayed there even after the siege had ended because, as she wrote on May 24, there were no accommodations in the city “even at a good price.”79 Her letters show that the National Theater, which was closed during the siege and reopened on May 23, could not pay her wages that month. She had to deal with a significant rise in prices. In addition to rent, bread, pork, and beef were also, she writes, “super expensive,” and the price of shoes and clothing had also increased.80

In her description of the conditions following the recapture of Buda, Lilla Bulyovszky not only reflected on the physical environment of the city but also described how the citizens of Pest tried to get to Buda as quickly as possible to purchase possessions that had been looted from the destroyed buildings in Buda, which the soldiers sold for trifling amounts.81 Those who got from Pest to Buda as quickly as possible got the best prices, but transport between the twin cities was not easy:

Those who went to Buda in the morning, clinging on the Chain Bridge ledge, risking their lives, got everything cheap; in the afternoon, we too wanted to cross, my mother was already in the boat, the crowds were overflowing, I luckily could not go in, the boat turned upside down and only eight people who fell on their feet were able to escape, thank heavens my mother was among those eight…82

At the point of the siege when the Hungarian soldiers had broken into the castle, Hentzi ordered the Chain Bridge to be blown up, but the attempt made by his aide, Alois Alnoch von Edelstadt, failed. Although the bridge was not officially opened until after the defeat of the War of Independence in November 1849, it was used by the military on occasion from January that year, and on May 27, 1849, Pál Hajnik, the newly appointed police chief of the city, allowed civilian pedestrians to cross. According to Lilla Bulyovszky’s description dated May 24, the most determined inhabitants of Pest attempted the crossing immediately after the siege in the hopes of material gain. The young actress would not have rejected the chance to purchase stolen “goods” sold by the soldiers at low prices had her mother’s accident on the Danube, mentioned above, as well as a lack of funds, prevented her from crossing the river to “shop.” Thus, she could only report on her landlord’s acquisitions (silver cutlery, a pocket watch with a large chain, a gilded mirror, etc.).83 The joy of the siege, which ended in a Hungarian victory, the pain of wandering in a shattered city, the absence of her husband, and the problems of everyday life all feature prominently in Lilla Bulyovszky’s narrative. As a result, her letters paint a nuanced picture of the period of the siege and of everyday life in the weeks that followed, both in terms of emotional history and in terms of lifestyle and urban history.

“Our fortress is also heavily damaged”: Anna Glasz’s Letter from Buda Castle

A viewpoint radically different from the writings of Emília Kánya and Lilla Bulyovszky emerges from a letter written in German by Anna Glasz, during the siege, addressed to Mrs. Ignác Andrássy, née Mária Végh.84 The only certain information about the writer is that she was a resident of Buda Castle. In the press of the 1820s and 1830s, the name “Glasz Anna, született Anchély Aszszony [Anna Glasz, née Mrs. Anchély],” who “has been engaged in the education of adolescent maidens for several years” at Szervita Place, Pest, appeared several times.85 Although there is no clear evidence that this Anna Glasz was the same as the Anna Glasz who lived in the Buda Castle in 1849, the fact that at that time there was a daughter named Anna in the Anchely family (ennobled in 1801) suggests that she might well have been.86

The address on the inside page of the letter reads “Nach Martonvásár. St. Péter.” The latter may refer to Kajászószentpéter, located near Martonvásár, Fejér County, 36 kilometers from Budapest. The estate of Kajászószentpéter came into the possession of the Andrássy family around 1790. In the 1830s, Ignác Andrássy served as a Lieutenant Colonel (Oberstleutnant), a rank higher than major and lower than colonel.87 When he died in 1837, the estate passed through his wife to the gentry Végh family.88 The addressee of the letter, Mária Végh (1799–1876), had been a widow for twelve years at the time of the siege of Buda in 1849. She had turned fifty that year. She would die childless. In 1846, she established a foundation for the poor in Kajászószentpéter.89 In 1875, a year before her death, she donated the family’s valuable library of nearly 400 volumes to the National Library.90

Compared to the sources analyzed so far, Anna Glasz’s letter shows the perspective of the “other side,” both geographically and politically. As a resident of Buda Castle, she (unlike the previous two women) was afraid not of Hentzi’s bombardment but of the cannons of Artúr Görgei besieging the castle. Some of her comments also show that she was not exactly pleased with the Hungarian victory.

Of the city’s inhabitants, those living in the Buda Castle district were the most directly affected by the siege.91 Hentzi had warned them as early as April 23 that he would defend the castle to the last, and he advised them to leave their homes or to have enough food on hand for two months. Although this caused considerable alarm among the inhabitants of the district, very few people heeded his advice, as they did not want to leave their valuables behind, even though they could not afford to buy large quantities of food at short notice.92 During the siege, those who remained in the castle were plagued not only by food shortages, but also by fear of diseases, with epidemics of cholera and typhus both breaking out within the castle walls. On top of all this, they were forced to live in cellars, and even then they were not really safe, because shells would often break through the ceilings of the cellars.93

Anna Glasz started writing the letter on May 11 and finished it on May 26. In a sense, it thus became a diary of sorts (if addressed to someone else), because during the two weeks between the two dates, she repeatedly recorded current events along with her emotional responses to these events. A sentiment of uncertainty pervades her letter, and she hints several times that she cannot tell what the next minute will bring. The very first sentence of the letter alludes to this: “I am still alive.”94 Like Lilla Bulyovszky, Glasz dated the events to the hour. In the first section of her letter, dated May 11, she looks back on the first moments of the siege, which had begun a week earlier:

Eight days ago today, that is, at noon on the fourth, a dreadful shelling began, which continued uninterruptedly for 24 hours and lasted for a total of six days, with but a few quieter interludes; the most terrifying moment, however, was the night of the eight, when the Castle was bombarded with red-hot bullets, one of which set fire to a large building in Herrengasse, which burned to the ground. Earlier, several buildings, including the i[mperial] palace, caught fire, though fortunately the fire was put out.95

In the above passage, Glasz referrs to two significant features of Buda Castle: one of the key mediaeval streets in the area, Úri Street (Herrengasse / Gentlemen’s Street), which runs from Dísz Square to Kapisztrán Square and the royal palace at the southern end of Castle Hill in Buda. In the rest of the letter, she mentions other streets, squares, and buildings damaged by the shelling.

The description of Pest in her letter dwells on the destruction (or, rather, the incoming news of the destruction) in the areas affected by the bombardment. It is worth noting the buildings she highlights. First on the list were the Redoutengebäude and the Trattner-Károlyi House (which had burned to the ground). Emília Kánya also mentioned the Redoute of Pest, while the Trattner-Károlyi House was home to a major printing house of the Age of Reform, as well as the Hungarian Scientific Society.96 The two-story building, which had survived the great Pest flood of 1838, had been extended with the addition of a third story in 1846–1847. Its roof structure was completely burnt down in the bombing, but it was later restored.

Although the bombardment of Pest was portrayed as a terrible event in Anna Glasz’s letter, unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not interpret the act as a barbarous crime committed by Hentzi, but rather as a “terrible consequence” of the attacks launched by Artúr Görgei, who laid siege to the castle. She was referring shelling which took place on the night of May 8, which caused considerable damage to the castle buildings: “Even then, the commander here thought he would take revenge on Pesth if such events were repeated. This was done in the night [from the eighth to] the ninth with shells, which caused terrible destruction [in Pest].”97 Although the letter is rather imprecise in its timing (Hentzi had started shelling Pest on the fourth and had kept the barrage of shells going almost every day),98 it clearly shows that Anna Glasz accepted Hentzi’s justification for the retaliation. Thus, in her eyes, Hentzi was not “the cannibal-hearted commander of Buda Castle,” but a leader who acted to protect the castle and did exactly what he had threatened to do because his earlier warnings had been ignored. As far as her perspective is concerned, it is also worth noting that Glasz called it her “last joy” that Norbert Andrássy, a family member of the addressee, was appointed aide-de-camp to Ludwig von Welden, the commander-in-chief of the Imperial and Royal Hungarian Army.99 This remark suggests that Glasz was loyal to the imperial court, as does the fact that, unlike many other townspeople, she seems, on the basis of her letter at least, to have taken no joy in the end of the siege as a moment of liberation, but rather was only relieved that she was no longer in any direct danger.

Anna Glasz’s letter mentions the name of another person who remained loyal to the empire. Her entry of May 14, in which she recounts the events of the previous two days, again highlights the houses on fire in Úri Street and on Dísz Square, (to which she had referred in earlier passages), but she mentions other Buda districts (Víziváros / Water Town, Krisztinaváros / Christinenstadt), mainly in connection with acquaintances living there: “The night before yesterday, there was a fire in the Wasserstadt [Víziváros], in Landstrasse [Ország Road], and in two places in Christinenstadt very close to Wirozsil’s, with a rather violent wind; and yesterday at around 10 o’clock at night, several buildings in the fortress in Herrengasse and on Paradeplatz [Dísz Square / Parade Square] caught fire.”100 The name Wirozsil probably means the family of Antal Virozsil, a university professor and jurist who had been styled Rector of the University of Pest in 1841.101 In July 1848, he requested permission to retire, after which he moved to Krisztinaváros.102 When the siege of Buda Castle ended with the victory of the Hungarian troops on May 21, 1849, Anna Glasz fled to Virozsil’s family. This personal acquaintance is why Krisztinaváros occupied a prominent place on her mental map.103 Her address there is given at the end of the letter thus: “Aldásisches Haus, Nro. 227,” referring to the so-called Áldásy House, commissioned by master butcher Antal Áldásy in the early 1840s.104 In a refashioned form, this building still stands on Krisztina körút 57. It houses the Museum of Theater History.

Glasz’s letter not only gives us a bird’s-eye view of the twin cities, the descriptions of which are fundamentally influenced by the news of the destruction caused by shells and cannonballs, it also features a poignant, personal experience of the city, which affects the writer’s own home:

Our fortress has also been heavily damaged. In the square in front of my windows, some 40 shells fell; two of them broke through the roof of our house, two others ricocheted off and exploded in the courtyard, a glowing twelve-pounder grazed the window of my back room, where I had retreated and where I was still lying in bed at 3 o’clock in the morning half asleep, and fell down just in front of it. So far, however, God has protected me wonderfully! As I write this, a rather violent volley of cannon fire has just begun.105

These lines are found in the first entry of May 11, which describes the events of the night of May 8. The entry on the morning of May 14 begins thus:

Oh, Marie, what scenes of horror! The shelling of the fortress and the assault on the waterworks continue with short intervals almost all the time. (…) Altogether, yesterday was probably the most terrible day for the fortress; innumerable shells were fired in, so that we hardly pay attention to grenades or cannonballs anymore.106

The pumping station, the “waterworks” which supplied the castle with water from Víziváros, near the Buda end of the Chain Bridge, was of strategic importance to both Görgei and Hentzi, as there was no well inside the castle.107 Thus, Hentzi, thoroughly preparing for the siege, reinforced the weak points of Buda Castle, which had previously fallen into decline, and had a palisade built to protect the waterworks, which he connected to the Buda bridgehead of the Chain Bridge.108 Görgei hoped that by storming and destroying the waterworks, he would be able to force the surrender of the castle, since the garrison could hold out for no more than a few days without water. To his surprise, however, the first major assault on May 4 failed under fire from the castle cannons, and the siege was thus considerably delayed compared to his preliminary plans.109

Alongside the descriptions of her feelings of fear and uncertainty, Anna Glasz’s letter also contains accounts of everyday life in the besieged castle. When there was no cannon fire, she suffered from a lack of food. Food supplies were evidently not unlimited in the besieged castle. The rations ordered for civilians were limited, and meat ran out as early as roughly May 8, so they could only get supplies from the soldiers’ stocks. Glasz offers the following description of the “daily routine” of the inhabitants of the castle and those that chose to flee:

The morning is usually fairly quiet, but around noon, the shooting starts with increasing intensity and usually lasts until after midnight. From 6 to 7 o’clock in the evening, all those who want to leave the fortress may do so, but only at the Water Gate. Mostly, it is women and children who leave. They are escorted by an officer to the palisades at the waterworks, which the Croats occupy. Beyond them stand the Hungarians, and the fugitives are left to their fate.110

 The Water Gate (St John’s Gate in the Middle Ages), which made it possible to leave the castle, stood on the eastern side of the southern end of Dísz Square (towards the Danube). A week earlier, on May 7, a delegation from the city council had approached Hentzi with a request to permit elderly men, women, and children to leave the castle. Although he had allowed this, he had also tried to persuade those who wished to leave to stay in order to avoid demoralizing the soldiers defending the castle. He had promised to do his utmost to protect them and compensate them fully for any losses they might incur. Nevertheless, hundreds of Buda Castle denizens left their homes from May 8 onwards.

Only two days after the end of the siege, on May 23, did Glasz move to the residence of the aforementioned Virozsil family in Krisztinaváros. She did not write a word about May 21, the day on which the Hungarians triumphed and recaptured the castle and Hentzi was mortally wounded. For Glasz, the end of the siege did not bring liberation. Her last entry, dated May 26, begins with the same words as her first, on May 11: “I am still alive.”111 This similarity does not put what had happened into a reassuring framework. Rather, it reveals a state of anxiety that was still unabated. All the more, since, at the end of the letter, the repeated sentence no longer figures as a single, simple assertion, but rather is accompanied by the following explanation: “I am still alive; that is, I walk around, eat, drink, sleep; but my spirit is broken…”112 During the siege, her home was half destroyed, and many of her possessions were lost.113 The metaphor can refer both to the destruction of the belongings in the badly damaged buildings by the impact of the cannonballs and to the idea that those belongings fell prey to the soldiers who, as Lilla Bulyovszky’s letter indicated, sold the objects looted from the buildings in the castle at a low price after the siege had ended. The letter concludes with a condensed summary of events. Having lived through the siege and having spent seven days and nights in a cellar, Glasz considers it a miracle that she survived.114

Summary

My study presented three different women’s accounts of the siege of Buda Castle in 1849: three different accounts in which, despite the different backgrounds and perspectives of the authors, there are many common elements. During the siege, the roles of the various districts became much more important on the mental maps of these three authors than in peacetime. The question of whether a given point in the city was within firing range of the Buda Castle, i.e. how much of a target it could be, how easily it could be hit by shells, became a fundamental issue. As many of the city’s inhabitants were forced to flee, the focus in Pest-Buda shifted from the downtown area to the suburbs.

One essential consideration when using ego-documents as sources is the relationship between experience and text. In other words, one must remain aware that the events originally experienced and their narrated, constructed versions are never identical. When examining a mental map, this is a particularly pressing issue, since one cannot ignore which kind of source a given description of a cityscape is found in. Thus, research on the uses of space is closely linked to research on the uses of writing.

Emília Kánya remembered her 21-year-old self at the age of 75 and described her experiences of the city at that time in the framework of a narrative that she shaped into a story of escape. Her mental map is largely determined by a self-image centered on her maternal role and, as a result, her writing focuses on how she and her child sought escape routes in the menacing urban environment and how she tried to stay out of the siege’s reach. The direction of escape through the different parts of the city (the downtown area, Terézváros, the City Park, and Kőbánya), with the movement flowing towards the suburbs, can be considered typical, but the choice of the nodes within these spaces (the medical university, the Commercial Hospital) was made possible by Emília Kánya’s individual network of contacts. Her narrative also draws attention to the fact that social status fundamentally influenced the mode and destination of flight. She was able to leave the city as a wealthy bourgeois woman. Her child was looked after by a nanny, and they merely passed through the tent camp in the City Park, which for poorer townsfolk was a destination. New nodes appeared on the mental maps of the authors of the analyzed ego-documents, depending on their life situations and objectives. For Emília Kánya, who wanted to leave the city, the railway junction at Kőbánya became important as a means of escape, as was true for many other wealthier citizens, and in her autobiography this featured as the site of an impressive mass scene. For Lilla Bulyovszky, who wished to correspond with her absent husband, the post office in the Üllői Road casern was a key node for communication. For Anna Glasz, in whose letter it was the friendly rather than the familiar ties that dominated, the Krisztinaváros residence of the Virozsils meant a crucial node and refuge.

The ego-documents on which I have based this discussion contain descriptions of a wide range of emotional responses to the events, which were experienced differently, depending on the varying family roles and political visions of the authors. When considered at the intersection of the study of nationalism and of emotional history, the texts emerge as expressions of three radically different mentalities. Emília Kánya, who went through the events as a mother, did not focus on her national identity during the siege, but rather on her family and urban identity. Her descriptions of the neighborhoods through which she traveled while fleeing are imbued with dread. She regarded every part of Pest as dangerous terrain in which the safety of her child was threatened, which is why she wanted to leave the city. However, her first impressions of her return after the siege were fundamentally shaped by her identity as a denizen of Pest and the pain she felt at the sight of the destruction of her native city. Although other parts of her autobiography show that she sympathized with the cause of the Hungarian War of Independence, she recalled the events of May 1849 without nationalist overtones, adopting a purely humanitarian stance.

In contrast, Lilla Bulyovszky’s letters seem to offer the perspective of a young actress who prioritizes her patriotism and national identity and who considers the siege of Buda one of the most sublime and outstanding experiences of her life. Of the three ego-documents examined, hers is the only one in which positive emotions predominate. She addressed her letters to her husband from the position of a young, loving wife and a bold patriot fervently committed to the fight for freedom. For her, the city was the “stage” of a historic national event, which she wanted to follow as closely as possible, so the excitement and then the sense of joy at the Hungarian victory overwrote all other emotions. She used the banks of the Danube as an “auditorium” in order to see herself as part of the extraordinary event. And for her, Lipótváros, which she roamed after the end of the siege, was the sad “backdrop” that made her realize the serious damage caused by the bombardments.

The depiction of the city in the German-language letter by Anna Glasz, a loyal imperial subject residing in Buda, was shaped by a mixture of hearsay, incoming news, and the author’s own experiences. The imagined and the experienced images of the city became intertwined in the letter. As she herself resided in Buda, the descriptions of Pest are more imagined, while the descriptions of Buda are drawn on experience. Unlike Kánya and Bulyovszky, Glasz was in her home in Buda Castle throughout the siege. She also had to experience the destruction of a large part of her home, and she was compelled to seek shelter at a time when many other city dwellers were able to return to their homes. In her letter, which records the events of the siege simultaneously, as a series of signs, there is a constant shift of scale as she paints an image of the city. In one passage, we see the city and the castle in “extreme long shots,” while in another, we are given intimate “close-up,” but every passage contains references to the enormous scale of destruction.115

Although there is a rich literature on the military history of the 1849 siege of Buda Castle, an analysis of the ego-documents of women who lived through the events furthers a significantly more nuanced grasp of individual experiences of this phase of the War of Independence. The fact that these writings focus not on the frontlines but on the everyday problems in the “hinterland” (high prices, lack of food) is but one consideration. An examination of these women’s perceptions of the city and the emotions expressed in their ego-documents reveals how the unprecedented experience of war affected the mental maps of civilians. It also reminds us that research on the experiences of the denizens of the city does not exclusively belong to urban history. Any study of the theme of the “lived city” would ideally be connected with discussion of the “lived family” and the “lived nation.”

Archival Sources

Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtár és Információs Központ, Kézirattár [Manuscript Archive of Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences] (MTA KIK Kt.)

Kiscelli Múzeum, Térkép-, Kézirat- és Nyomtatványgyűjtemény [Kiscell Museum, Collection of Maps, Manuscripts and Prints]

Bibliography

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Boetcher Joeres, Ruth-Ellen. “1848 From a Distance: German Women Writers on the Revolution.” Modern Language Notes 97, no. 3 (1982): 590–614. doi: 10.2307/2906214

Bozsoki, Petra. “Egy női karrier elbeszélésének nehézségei: Kánya Emília emlékiratairól” [The difficulties of narrating a woman’s career: On the memoirs of Emilia Kánya]. Verso 1, no. 1 (2018): 25–45.

Bozsoki, Petra. “A honleányság mint női emancipáció: Kánya Emília alakja és munkássága” [Women’s patriotism as women’s emancipation: The figure and work of Emilia Kánya]. PhD-diss., University of Pécs, 2020.

Bozsoki, Petra. “Editorial Strategies of Hungarian Women Editors in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of European Periodical Studies 6, no.1 (2021): 126–14. doi: 10.21825/jeps.v6i1.15415

Bozsoki, Petra. “‘Sokat tehet a nő a társadalomban: betölteni nem csak emberi, de honleányi kötelességeit.’ Kánya Emília mint normaszegő anya” [“Much can a woman do in society: Fulfilling not only her duties as a human being, but also as a female patriot.” Emilia Kánya as a mother who broke norms]. Family histories blog, June 30, 2022. https://families.hu/sokat-tehet-a-no-a-tarsadalomban-betolteni-nem-csak-emberi-de-honleanyi-kotelessegeit-kanya-emilia-mint-normaszego-anya/ Last accessed on December 10, 2022.

Canning, Kathleen. “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience.” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 368–404.

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Czanik Béla. Kajászó(szentpéter) község és református egyháza története [History of the village of Kajászó (Szentpéter) and its Calvinist Church]. Kajászó: Kajászói Református Egyház, 2001.

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Deák, Ágnes. “Ha nő kezében a zászló…” [If the flag is in a woman’s hand]. Korunk 3, no. 2 (1998): 100–6.

Eiranen, Reetta. “The Narrative Self: Letters and Experience in Historical Research.” In Private and Public Voices: Az Interdisciplinary Approach to Letters and Letter Writing, edited by Karin Koehler, and Kathryn McDonald-Miranda. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015, 77–99.

Eiranen, Reetta. “Personal Nationalism in a Marital Relationship: Emotive and Gendering Construction of National Experience in Romantic Correspondence.” In Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000, edited by Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki, and Tanja Vahtikari, 85–108. Tampere: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-69882-9_4

Fábri, Anna. “Egy XIX. századi írónő Fiume magyarjairól: Kánya Emília emlékirata” [A nineteenth-century female writer on the Hungarians of Fiume: A memoir by Emilia Kánya]. In Fiume és a magyar kultúra: művelődéstörténeti tanulmányok, edited by Csaba Kiss Gy., 47–80. Budapest: Kortárs, 2004.

Farkas, Gábor. “Andrássy Ignác Thuróczy-krónikája” [Ignác Andrássy’s Thuróczy Chronicle]. Magyar Könyvszemle 134, no. 2. (2018): 222–27.

Gál, Éva. “Kétszáz éves a Krisztinaváros I–II” [Krisztinaváros is 200 years old, I–II]. Budapest 9, no. 2 (1971): 20–22, no. 3 (1971): 18–20.

Gyáni, Gábor. “Az ego-dokumentumok történetírói haszna” [The uses of ego-documents in the writing of history]. Bárka 27, no. 2. (2019): 70–74.

Gyáni, Gábor. Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin de Siècle Budapest. New Jersey: Centre for Hungarian Studies and Publications, 2004.

H. Boros, Vilma. “A Trattner-Károlyi ház Pesten” [The Trattner-Károlyi house in Pest]. Műemlékvédelem 9, no. 3. (1965): 146–51.

Hermann, Róbert. “Buda bevétele, 1849. május 21” [The capture of Buda, May 21, 1849]. Budapesti Negyed 8, no. 3–4 (2000): 93–143.

Hermann, Róbert. “Heinrich Hentzi, a budavári Leonidász” [Heinrich Hentzi, the Leonidas of Buda]. Aetas 28, no. 2 (2013): 34–60.

Holló, Szilvia Andrea. The Vigadó – A fairy-tale palace on the Danube. Budapest: MMA, 2014.

Kapronczay, Károly. “Kossuth Zsuzsanna, az első magyar főápolónő tevékenysége a szabadságharc idején” [The work of Zsuzsanna Kossuth, the first Hungarian Head Nurse during the war of independence]. Valóság 62, no. 3 (2019): 20–27.

Kiss Gy., Csaba. “Fiumei képek Kánya Emília idejéből” [Pictures of Fiume in the time of Emilia Kánya]. In Évek és színek: Tanulmányok Fábri Anna tiszteletére hatvanadik születésnapja alkalmából, edited by Ágota Steinert, 177–81. Budapest: Kortárs, 2005.

Kivimäki, Ville, Sami Suodenjoki, Tanja Vahtikari, eds. Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000. Tampere: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Kivimäki, Ville, Sami Suodenjoki, Tanja Vahtikari. “Lived Nation: Histories of Experience and Emotion in Understanding Nationalism.” In Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000, edited by Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki, and Tanja Vahtikari, 1–28. Tampere: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-69882-9_1

Kövér, György. Biográfia és társadalomtörténet [Biography and social history]. Budapest: Osiris, 2014.

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Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The M. I. T. Press, 1960.

Magyar, Erzsébet. “Kertek, parkok Buda-Pest társaséletében a 19. században” [Gardens and parks in the social life of Buda-Pest in the nineteenth century]. Budapesti Negyed 12, no. 4. (2004): 136–64.

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Nemes, Robert. “Women in the 1848–1849 Hungarian Revolution.” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 3. (2001): 193–207. doi:10.1353/jowh.2001. 0072.

Nemes, Robert. The Once and Future Budapest. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

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Smith, Mark M. The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege. A Sensory History of the Civil War. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Spira, György. A pestiek Petőfi és Haynau között [The people of Pest between Petőfi and Haynau]. Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó, 1998.

Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical. Vol. 1, The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

Szabadfalvi József. Múltunk öröksége: Elmélettörténeti perspektívák [The legacy of our past: Theoretical and historical perspectives]. Budapest: Gondolat, 2016.

Tomsics, Emőke. Budapest Atlantisza: A pesti Belváros átalakulása a 19. század végén [Atlantis of Budapest: The transformation of the Pest city center at the end of the nineteenth century]. Budapest: Városháza Kiadó, 2015.

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Walton, Whitney. “Writing the 1848 Revolution: Politics, Gender, and Feminism in the Works of French Women of Letters.” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 1001–24. doi: 10.2307/286726

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Zimmermann, Susan. Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918. Budapest: Promedia Verlag–Napvilág Kiadó, 1999.

 

 

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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Németh G., Béla. “Létharc és nemzetiség: Az ‘irodalmi’ értelmiség felső rétegének ideológiájához, 1867 után” [Nationality and the struggle for life: On the ideology of the upper stratum of “literary” intelligentsia after 1867]. In Létharc és nemzetiség: Irodalom- és művelődéstörténeti tanulmányok, 7–41. Budapest: Magvető, 1976.

Péter, László. Az Elbától keletre: Tanulmányok a magyar és kelet-európai történelemről [To the east of Elbe: Essays on Hungarian and East European history]. Budapest: Osiris, 1998.

Pocock, J. G. A. “Burke and the Ancient Constitution.” In Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, 202–32. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

Romsics, Gergely. Mítosz és emlékezet: A Habsburg Birodalom felbomlása az osztrák és magyar politikai elit emlékirat-irodalmában [Myth and remembrance: The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the memoirs of the Austrian and Hungarian political élite]. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2004.

Rupert, Rezső. “Egy lustrum távlatából” [Looking back after a lustrum]. In Öt év multán: A Károlyi-korszak előzményei és céljai, 9–28. Budapest: Globus, 1923.

Sartori, Giovanni. Demokrácia [Democracy]. Budapest: Osiris, 1999. Originally published as Democrazia. Cosa è (Milano: Rizzoli, 1993).

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Szabó, Miklós. “Magyar nemzetfelfogások a 20. század első felében” [Hungarian concepts of the nation in the first half of the 20th century]. Mozgó Világ 9, no. 4 (1983): 50–60.

Szász, Zoltán. “Az oktobrizmus történelem-bölcsészeti kritikája” [A historical-philosophical critic of the ideology of the October 1918 revolution]. In Öt év multán: A Károlyi-korszak előzményei és céljai, 207–22. Budapest: Globus, 1923.

Szűcs, Gábor Zoltán. Az antalli pillanat : A nemzeti történelem szerepe a magyar politikai diskurzusban, 1989–1993 [The Antallian moment: The role of national history in Hungarian political discourse 1989–1993]. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2010.

Takáts, József. “Eötvös-revízió: Jászi Oszkár levele az Uralkodó eszmékről 1935-ben” [Rethinking Eötvös: Oszkár Jászi’s Letter Concerning the “Ruling Ideas” in 1935]. 2000, no. 9 (2012): 27-35.

Takáts, József. “Kemény Zsigmond és a rajongás politikai fogalma” [Zsigmond Kemény and the political concept of devotion]. Holmi 24, no. 10 (2012): 1212–18.

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A Cold War Humanitarian Action: The Western Admission of 1956 Hungarian Refugees*

Gusztáv D. Kecskés
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):913–935 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.913

The story of the refugees who fled Hungary following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Revolution and the coordinated international humanitarian operation launched to receive them is an outstanding chapter in the history of emigration. These refugees received far more favorable treatment than earlier Hungarian expatriates or other European refugees had been given. With a total of 200,000 refugees, their successful transportation to host countries and their subsequent integration represented an exceptional success for international aid efforts. How can this efficiency be explained? Trends in humanitarian sentiment in world public opinion, influenced in part by the horrors of World War II, and the increasingly precise formulation of the rights of the refugees were just as important, as factors, as the supportive attitude of the populations of Western countries, who empathized with the suppressed revolution. The exceptionally favorable composition, from the perspective of the labor market, of the mass of people who fled in 1956 coincided with Western economic prosperity, producing economic “miracles.” However, even these favorable initial conditions would not have led to such a swift and successful settlement in the West of nearly 200,000 Hungarians had it not been for the Cold War rivalry between the Eastern and the Western blocs. As a consequence of the ideological and propaganda conflict with the Soviets, the NATO governments had the necessary political will to give effective support for a resolution to the Hungarian refugee problem, even after emotional support among the public opinion had waned.

Keywords: humanitarian action, 1956, Hungarian refugees, United Nations, UNHCR

The story of the refugees who fled Hungary following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Revolution and the coordinated international humanitarian operation launched to receive them is an outstanding chapter in the history of emigration. These refugees received far more favorable treatment than earlier Hungarian expatriates or other European refugees had been given.1 With a total of 200 000 refugees, their successful transportation to host countries and their subsequent integration represented an exceptional success for international aid efforts. According to Peter Gatrell, “the outbrake of revolution in 1956 produced the most dramatic refugee-generating crisis in continental Europe between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.”2 Gatrell’s monograph on the World Refugee Year (1959–1960) also emphasizes this assessment.3 In her classic book, Louise W. Holborn summarizes in depth the situation of European refugees and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the eve of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.4 In his masterpiece on the history of the UNHCR, Gil Loescher emphasizes the importance of the Hungarian refugee crisis in extending the scope of this organization.5 The official historical review published on the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the UNHCR (2000) also characterizes the emergency relief for Hungarian refugees as an event of outstanding significance.6

How can the significant success of the admission of the Hungarian refugees be explained? What changes did it lead to in the development of the international asylum system? The Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956, as one of the basic stories of international refugee admission, is a frequently told and retold chapter in the history of the postwar era. However, there is no detailed work that has analyzed the full dimension of the international humanitarian action in support of Hungarian refugees. Only a fraction of the available archival sources has been revealed in the existing research. Thus, for example, the archives of NATO and the two Geneva-based international Red Cross organizations, as well as the Hungarian archives, have hardly been studied in this respect. In this paper, I intend to draw general conclusions, pulling together threads not always linked in the secondary literature. In explaining the reasons for the successful and rapid admission of the refugees, I underscore the importance of humanitarian culture, contemporary economic growth, and the Cold War and anti-communist sentiment. Some elements of this argument have already been mentioned in the secondary literature, but this study provides a multifactorial explanation that draws on a much broader source base than the previous work on the topic. I also call attention to the changes to which the Hungarian case gave rise in the international treatment of refugees.

The Challenge of the Hungarian Refugee Crisis

After the bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, about 200,000 people left the country. More than 11,000 of these people returned to Hungary, taking the opportunity of the amnesty proclaimed by the Kádár government.78 The demographic effect of this emigration, which involved 1.5–1.7 percent of the population of the country, is well reflected in the fact that the resulting population drop exceeded the natural increase of the population in 1956 by 70 percent. The gender composition of the population also changed. As two thirds of the people who left the country were men, the preponderance of women in the population reached the level it had been at in 1949. There was a perceptible increase in the average age of the population, because the majority of the refugees belonged to the younger generations. We know from the statistics provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), published on March 11, 1957, that Austria provided the first asylum for about 173,000 of the refugees and Yugoslavia provided the second for about 18,600.9

The transport of these people to further countries began in November, 1956, because a large majority of the refugees regarded these states only as their first stop in a longer journey, and they wanted to move on. By April 1, 1957, 135,417 persons (70 percent) of the 193,805 refugees registered by the refugee office of the UN had been transported to 29 different countries, 14 of which lay outside of Europe. 78,574 (40.5 percent) of the refugees had been moved to other countries in Europe, and 56,843 (29.3 percent) had gone to countries which lay outside Europe.10 By the end of December 1957, about 90 percent of the refugees registered in Austria had arrived in their new homeland. Most of them settled in the United States (35,026), Canada (24,525), the United Kingdom (20,590), the West Germany (14,270), Switzerland (11,962), France (10,232), and Australia (9,423).11

The total cost of the action came to more than 100 million dollars, or more than one billion dollars at the present value, which far exceeded the amount paid into the United Nations Refugee Found, established in 1954, for the solution of the problem of World War II refugees,12 though in the middle of the 1950s, there had been more than 70,000 “hard core” refugees who, since the late 1940s, had been in more than 200 refugee camps in Austria, West Germany, Italy, and Greece.13

The earlier results of fundraising campaigns for the solution of the problems of the refugees didn’t give much cause for optimism. Myer Cohen, the leader of the section of the UN Secretariat in charge of the coordination of aid for the Hungarian refugees, bitterly complained in a confidential letter dated November 17, 1956: “Ten days ago there were some 15,000 refugees in Austria. I understand there are now 30,000. Who knows how many there may be a month from now? For the first time since the virtual liquidation of the large care programme of the IRO,14 governments are facing the problem of providing substantial funds for the care of refugees.”15 The contributions paid by governments into the United Nations Refugee Fund usually fell short of the envisaged amounts, as indicated by the High Commissioner to the Secretary General of NATO. On January 1, 1955, 293,450 refugees were under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The implementation of the four-year-long program elaborated for the solution of their situation required about 16 million dollars. However, from the amount envisaged for 1955–58, only 10.2 million dollars were available through payments and bonds. Thus, more than 36 percent of the necessary amount was lacking.16 The paralyzing effect of narrow financial capacity is made clear by the fact that, in the autumn of 1956—thus after almost two years of operation according to the analysis of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs—“none of the problems were solved,” not even that of the refugees from Greece, who were relatively few in number. On January 1, 1955, 2,700 of these people lived in refugee camps, and one year later, 2,400 of them still lived in camps.17 But the situation of the 1956 Hungarian refugees was quite different. The financial amount transmitted through the UNHCR for the solution of the Hungarian refugee problem also seems enormous compared to the later budget of the institution. For example, in the August 1958 session of the working group dealing with international aid for refugees, only four million dollars was proposed for the 1959 for the purposes of the organization.18 The success of mobilization of infrastructure and funds for the resettlement of the Hungarian refugees is explained by a shift in the international refugee situation: the rise of humanitarianism, the consolidation of the postwar economic boom, the social composition of the Hungarian refugees, and the increasing strong anti-communist political cultures in the West, spurred by the geo-political rivalry of the Cold War, reshaped the international institutionalization of the refugee crisis.

The Development of Humanitarian Culture and the Concept of Refugee Rights

At roughly the same time as the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention,19 the world climate of opinion was characterized by a sensible, humanitarian attitude which wanted to prevent at all costs anything resembling the horrors of World War II. Although the world still seemed to be an imperfect place, the international community aspired to ensure at least the human treatment of people who had been forced to flee their country of birth because of oppression and persecution. This is why the right to asylum was incorporated as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.20 There was also a determined effort for the practical realization of the fundamental human rights and freedoms formulated in the UN Charter too. Thus, the first paragraph of the Preamble of the 1951 Refugee Convention states, “the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… have affirmed the principle that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination.”21 The Refugee Convention was applied by most of the states in a fundamentally liberal and humanistic spirit.22 Thus the fact that, in the Geneva Convention, there is a definition of the status of “refugee” only for individuals did not prevent its application to groups when this seemed necessary.23 This was true in the case of the Hungarian refugees. At that time, it became a generally agreed principle of international law that states may not send “bona fide” refugees to countries where they are in danger:

a resolution unanimously… adopted at the United Nations Conference on the Status of Stateless Persons in 1954 is of relevance. The Conference stated that it was “of the opinion that the Article 33 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 is an expression of the generally adopted principle, that no State should expel or return a person in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of the territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.24

Paul Weis, who was perhaps the most outstanding jurisprudence authority of his age on the questions of the rights of the refugees, also confirmed in the April 1954 issue of the American Journal of International Law that this was a legal principle that enjoyed widespread, almost universal support.25 This view is well illustrated by the ruling of the Bavarian Administrative Court at Ansbach, which was responsible for examining rejected asylum applications in the Federal Republic of Germany: “In order to do justice to the spirit of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, its provisions must be interpreted sympathetically, in a humanitarian manner, and therefore liberally.” Given the plight of the refugees, the Court recommended that “considerable understanding” be shown when examining applicants’ statements regarding evidence of persecution.26

Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who had already emphasized the importance of the protection of human rights in international law between the two world wars, were major pavers of this humanitarian attitude. The terrors of World War II, in particular the Holocaust, which was directly experienced by both Polish Jewish jurists and/or members of their families,27 also highlighted the need, in public opinion and in political decision-making, for the most accurate codification of human rights. Lemkin wanted to ensure the international legal protection of entire peoples and ethnic groups by creating the concept of the crime of genocide. As a lawyer on the staff of the Nuremberg Attorney General for the conviction of Nazi war criminals, he was disappointed that the term genocide, which first appeared in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,28 was included neither in the Nuremberg Charter nor in the final judgment. Faced with the devastation caused by the war in Europe, he decided to propose an international convention banning genocide at the United Nations. His persistent efforts contributed greatly to the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,29 which came into force on January 12, 1951.30

Lauterpacht, who was also present on several occasions during the Nuremberg trial and provided advice to the British special prosecutor, suggested in the background that the concept of “crimes against humanity” be introduced at the London conference preparing the trial. After World War II, he sought to compile a list of human rights and make it part of international law.31 He repeatedly stressed that individuals are the ultimate subjects of the relevant rights and duties. This also led to support for the trials of Nazi leaders, as Lauterpacht considered individual criminal responsibility to be essential. As he had already stated in his famous article published in 1944, “The rules of law are binding not upon an abstract notion of Germany, but upon members of the German government, upon German individuals exercising governmental functions in occupied territory, upon German officers, upon German soldiers.”32 He believed war crimes were acts punishable by international law. According to him, it is not necessary to punish a state collectively, but to punish persons acting on behalf of the state.33

The Economic Boom in the West and the Integration of Hungarians

Hungarian refugees arrived in the West at the beginning of a period of great economic prosperity, when the demand for labor was increasing.34 As the sources unanimously indicate, people at the time, including the responsible experts on the refugee question, were fully aware of this. “The world was in a favorable economic situation to absorb these people,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees August Rudolph Lindt said to the participants in the Geneva coordination committee dealing with the Hungarian refugees in January 1957, when both the financial means for the solution of the Hungarian refugee problem and the willingness of states to admit the Hungarians was temporarily flagging.35 The aforementioned Paul Weis, leading legal expert to the High Commissioner, said during the May 6, 1957 session of this body that, “owing to the favorable economic conditions the situation in most countries could be considered as satisfactory; the refugees gradually being given the right to work in the same manner as nationals.”36

According to a letter of the Belgian government sent to the Secretary General of the UN in December 1957, “It would seem that, within four or five weeks, virtually all the refugees will have found work and will have been integrated in the Belgian community.”37 According to a speech given by a British representative during a session of the Executive Committee of the UNREF in January 1958, of the 15,000 Hungarian refugees in the United Kingdom, only 600 were unemployed.38 And in Switzerland, by the end of August 1957, 72 percent of the Hungarian refugees were already gainfully employed, mainly in industry.39 In France, the last statistics released by the Ministry of the Interior on the Hungarian refugees was prepared on December 15, 1957. In the first months of 1958, they were of the opinion that “all new Hungarian refugees are considered integrated into the French community.”40 According to one of the contemporary studies quoted above, in the United States, many representatives of the major industrial firms came to the central refugee admission station, Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, to hire skilled Hungarian refugees. Representatives of every sort of interest group, including the entertainment industry, made visits to Kilmer.41 The success of integration into the American economy is characterized by the fact that, at the end of 1957, 65.7 percent of Hungarians who had come to the United States after the Hungarian Revolution were in wage-earning positions.42 The Hungarians had good chances of finding employment in part because other refugees and guest workers from the area around the Mediterranean Sea didn’t had not yet arrived in the countries to the west.43 According to a survey of 151,731 persons over the age of 15 by the Central Statistical Office, the Hungarian authorities also concluded that “most of the people who have left Hungary can be useful in Western economic life.” 44

Anti-Communist Culture

However, as the once secret documents of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reveal, the decisive factor behind the international decisions which exerted such a positive influence on the fate of the Hungarian refugees was the powerful political will of the Western governments. The NATO member states, especially the United States, which was the determining force in the alliance, considered the en masse admission of the Hungarians an extraordinary possibility for international propaganda in the ideological battle against the Soviet bloc.45 The need for closer cooperation among Western states in dealing with refugees from the Soviet bloc had been observed since the Prague coup of February 1948. Emmanuel Comte considered the adoption and rapid entry into force of the 1951 Refugee Convention to have been a key element in this effort. We can agree with his statement that the smooth cooperation among the Western governments in the reception of the Hungarian refugees of 1956 was the culmination of this deepening cooperation.46 I also share Peter J. Verovšek’s assessment of the US refugee admission system for the period of the early Cold War, according to which migration was one of the fronts of the geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.47

Both the written sources and the oral history documents unanimously clearly indicate that Western public opinion, which followed with eager attention the life-and-death struggle of the Hungarian revolutionaries and was shocked by the brutal military intervention of the Soviet Union, received with particular compassion the Hungarian refugees who arrived in their lands.48 As Gyula Borbándi, a Hungarian writer and historian who worked for decades at Radio Free Europe, observed, “The Hungarian emigrants of 1956 arrived abroad as the participants in the glorious revolution and as heroes of a national fervor which elicited the admiration of the world. The Western citizens in many places deemed it almost an honor to meet with the Hungarian freedom fighters, the earlier feelings of aversion, for example in Switzerland, were replaced by feelings of sympathy and empathy.”49 This attitude characterized both the official government declarations and the feelings among the civilian populations and also the conduct of the authorities who came into direct contact with the refugees. The propaganda of the leading power of the Western world, the United States, gave the impression even in 1956 that the fate of the Eastern European countries was important to the West, which, if given the opportunity, would be ready to help the peoples of the region free themselves of Soviet rule. As historian Csaba Békés notes, “Understandably thus, the Western public was stunned to witness the plight of the Hungarian people, who could never have expected much sympathy because of Hungary’s role in the Second World War, as they revolted against the immensely superior power of a world empire, jeopardizing their lives, existence and families in a heroic, tragic, and—according to political logic and common sense—irrational struggle for freedom.”50 Békés also notes that they made this sacrifice “For an idea which was the most abstract and the most important one at the same time.” He adds that Western public opinion had to recognize that their governments were unable to intervene effectively to save freedom in the realms under Soviet influence.51 Thus, the government measures in the interests of Hungarian refugees enjoyed widespread social support, and they strengthened the position of the governments or governing parties.52 As a thoroughgoing report at the time stated, “The Free World reacted so generously and spontaneously to the plight of Hungarian refugees that quick action was necessary to satisfy popular feeling in countries of potential asylum.”53 The report further noted that emotional identification with the Hungarian cause among the civilian populations in the West had a decisive impact on the willingness of the authorities to admit the refugees.

In the Cold War conflict between the Soviet-led Eastern and the American-led Western blocs, the question of the Hungarian refugees became part of the peaceful ideological struggle between the two camps. When on the Western side the politicians spoke about the moral responsibility of the West towards the refugees, they emphasized the fact that, “Along with the factory workers, the Hungarian students were the principal group keeping political opposition to the regime alive (Kádár government). They were the spearhead of the October revolt.”54 As we have seen above, if the Hungarian refugees had returned en masse to their homeland because of difficulties faced in the process of integrating into the countries and societies in the “free world,” this would have been a political and moral defeat for the West. The importance of the ideological component is also proved by the fact that, already during the first session, dealing with the Hungarian refugee students, of the Committee on Information and Cultural Relations (held on December 18, 1956), the representative from Great Britain remarked that, because the center of the World Federation of Democratic Youth was in Budapest, the Hungarian refugee students would be excellent ammunition for the propaganda against this organization and the next World Youth Festival, which was planned to take place in Moscow.55 But the Western leaders, when they organized the reception of the Hungarian refugees in a generous way, took into account the spontaneous sympathy and solidarity of their own citizens towards the suppressed revolution. And when this wave of emotions diminished, the NATO Council asked the allied governments to mobilize public opinion in their countries and not to cease in their efforts in the interests of the Hungarian refugees. However, the public knew nothing about the secret work to harmonize government efforts done behind the scenes in the Chaillot Palace in Paris, which at the time was the headquarters of NATO. The visible central agent of the fundraising activities for the refugees and of the informational activity and propaganda campaign closely related to it was not NATO, but the United Nations.56 UN intervention was legitimated by international law and by the resolutions of the UN General Assembly calling for aid for the Hungarian refugees. The highest consulting and decision-making organ of the UN took a stand in the first days of the refugee crisis in support of humanitarian assistance for the Hungarian people, which meant helping both the Hungarian population in Hungary and the Hungarian refugees.57

The show of compassion in Western public opinion in the mid-1950s was not yet characterized by the fatigue of the mediated crisis situations of later decades.58 The proposals of the report accepted on the April 24, 1957 session of the North Atlantic Council (the primary political decision-making body within NATO) called upon the governments of the member states to receive Hungarian refugees in growing numbers from Yugoslavia and Austria and also to shoulder the costs of their settlement too. These governments were also called on to participate in the measures that had been already begun, the purpose of which was to get all the Hungarian refugees to their chosen new country by the end of 1957. They were also asked to respond generously to the summons of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) for funds necessary for the settlement of the Hungarian refugees.59

The Atlantic Alliance treated the question of aid for the Hungarian refugees as a separate issue. NATO member states contributed on a large scale to the success of the international humanitarian action undertaken in the interests of the Hungarian refugees. Responding to the UN summons, the US government, for example, gave 5 million dollars for this cause in 1956. The overwhelming majority of the Hungarian refugees settled in one of the NATO countries, where they received considerable government support. Although the UN and its refugee organization began and directed the humanitarian programs, cooperating with the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, with the League of Red Cross Societies and private organizations, the implementation of these programs was made possible first and foremost by the generous donations of the NATO member states. Thus, the role of NATO in this international action was to motivate the governments of the member states to take measures to help the refugees and to push them to coordinate their efforts. Nevertheless, despite an American proposal made in December 1956, NATO did not make the efforts it was taking on behalf of the Hungarian refugees public, as it did not want to organization to become a convenient target of Soviet propaganda.60

Thus, the political will of the NATO countries, which were in an increasingly direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, played a decisive role in the successful admission and integration of Hungarian refugees in the West in 1956–1957. The funds that were used to address the refugee crisis were largely provided by the governments, primarily those of the NATO states. The significance of government contributions us clearly revealed by the fact that the costs of the care provided for Hungarian refugees in Austria were covered to a large extent from the funds paid by individual governments to the UN and other organizations. Although important, the contributions made by private organizations were only supplementary as a fraction of the overall cost.61 This distribution of inflows fully supports Michael Barnett’s contention that, in what is known as the new humanitarian regime (“neo-humanitarianism”) which arose in the wake of World War II, resources from states are crucial to resolving humanitarian crises.62 Peter J. Verovšek also emphasizes the importance of government will in his discussion of the US asylum system in the early Cold War. As Verovšek observes, immigration policy and related political and social mobilization are “primarily the products of the state responses” to challenges from the international system.63

Although NATO countries played a crucial role in providing the financial means and reception facilities for the international admission of the 1956 Hungarian refugees, it is important to underline the roles played by some of the neutral European countries in resolving the crisis. In terms of population and territory, relatively small neutral European countries such as Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden resettled more Hungarian refugees than many NATO member states. These countries were among the first in the international community to decide to take in refugees who were fleeing the events in Hungary. The positive attitudes of the governments enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the public in all three cases. The humanitarian aspect, as a clearly emphasized element of foreign policy, can be observed in the Austrian, Swiss, and Swedish cases. The Swiss and Swedish admission decisions were also motivated by the desire to help Austria, which was serving a growing mass of refugees. Although the governments of the three neutral countries did not explicitly include anti-communist arguments directly linked to the Cold War confrontation, Austria and Switzerland clearly showed that the admission of Hungarian refugees was an opportunity for them to express their belonging to the West.64

The Hungarian refugees were also an “ideal” group of new arrivals to the countries in which they sought refuge in that they were young, healthy, well-educated single men who could be put to work almost immediately, and this was unquestionably a factor which contributed to the warm and enthusiastic welcome they were shown.65 Their anticommunist political leanings were beyond any doubt, which was clearly a factor from the perspective of the United States, which was the largest financial power among the countries that supported the international refugee care system. The United States was interested primarily in refugees who were fleeing communist countries and therefore could be useful for the purposes of the Cold War propaganda.66 The weight of the security dimension of US foreign policy is shown by the fact that refugees from the Soviet bloc were objects of constant political consideration.67 Race was undoubtedly also a factor. The Hungarians were white, and there were not that many of them in total, at least not as a fraction of the populations in the countries in the West.68 For example, in the Federal Republic of Germany, on January 1, there were 216,000 refugees in the charge of the UNHCR. Thus, the arrival of 15,000 new Hungarian refugees did not constitute a dramatic change.69 In October 1956, 375,000 people were registered as refugees in France,70 so the roughly 10,000 Hungarians who settled there also did not amount to a large number.

Reshaping International Refugee Mechanisms

The help provided on the international stage for Hungarian refugees in 1956– 1957 is one of the defining moments in the history of refugee assistance. It was the first time in the history of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that this office had been appointed by the international community as a leading agency in a large-scale emergency relief operation. Indeed, UNHCR has played a central role in coordinating the activities of governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental organizations involved in humanitarian action. UNHCR then became a key player in the international asylum system. The strengthening of the international prestige of the office and the expansion of its room for maneuver made it possible to broaden further the responsibilities of the institution. In 1957, under new UN General Assembly resolutions, the organization was given a broader and more flexible mandate. It was able to take an active and successful role in solving the European refugee problem that has been going on since World War II. By 1959, the World Refugee Year had been declared with the full support of the United Nations. It expanded its activities to the Third World, providing assistance for Algerian war refugees in Morocco and Tunisia, which marked a turning point in the institution’s emergence as a global organization.71

The cooperation among the main institutional participants in the Hungarian refugee crisis continued later. Instead of the mood and tone of rivalry which had prevailed before, cooperation among the UNHCR, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM),72 the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Red Cross Societies came to the fore.73 The relationship between the High Commissioner and the League was also strengthened.74 The volume of studies edited by Lina Venturas explores in detail the functioning and significance of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), which has played a key role in the institutionalization and international regulation of migration since the early 1950s. The founders of the organization, which also played an important part in resolving the 1956 Hungarian refugee crisis, wanted to build a bridge between the countries that were issuing a surplus population and the host states overseas.75 Through the roles that it played in addressing the Hungarian refugee problem, this institution became one of the most important components of the international humanitarian system dealing with refugees.

The growing role of information and press activities in humanitarian institutions is also a partly new phenomenon in the management of Hungarian case.76 In parallel with the increasing emphasis on media work, the activities of humanitarian institutions have become increasingly professional. The level of organization has improved, and international centers and secretariats have been strengthened. This development fits in well with the trend described by Michael Barnett, who points out that, in this “neo-humanitarianism,” humanitarian organizations which became increasingly dependent on states also became increasingly bureaucratic, with a growing emphasis on long-term planning.77 Several institutions, including the UNHCR, the ICEM, and the League of Red Cross Societies, emerged as strong global humanitarian organizations in no small part because of the roles they played in addressing the Hungarian refugee crisis in 1956.78

The Hungarian refugee crisis also provided an opportunity to introduce new methods. Telex was used for the first time to facilitate communication among the units of the League action79 and the aid teams of the same nationality,80 and new accounting procedures were introduced in the refugee camps.81 The International Committee of the Red Cross used the radio wavelength assigned to it for the first time in connection with the Hungarian emergency.82

Conclusions

The explanation for the extraordinary success of the Western resettlement of the 1956 Hungarian refugees is multi-faceted. The humanitarian sentiment of world public opinion, which still vividly remembered the horrors of World War II, and the increasingly precise and definite formulation of the rights of the refugees were just as important factors as the supportive attitude of the populations of Western countries who empathized with the suppressed revolution. The exceptionally favorable composition, from the perspective of the needs of the labor market, of the 1956 refugees as a group coincided with western economic prosperity, producing economic “miracles.” However, these favorable initial conditions certainly would not have led to such a swift and successful Western resettlement of nearly 200,000 Hungarians had it not been for the Cold War rivalry between the Eastern and the Western blocs. Because of the ongoing ideological and propaganda war against the Soviets, the NATO governments remained firm in their commitment to address the Hungarian refugee crisis, even after the emotional support among the civilian populations had waned.

Archival Sources

Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, France (AMAE)

Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva (ICRC Archives)

Archives of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva (IFRC Archives)

Archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Geneva (UNHCR Archives)

Archives of the United Nations Office in Geneva (UNOG Archives)

Library of the International Organization for Migration, Geneva (LIOM)

National Archives and Record Administration, Washington (NARA)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, Budapest [National Archives of Hungary, State Archive] (MNL OL)

NATO Archives, Brussels (NA)

Service des archives de la Croix-Rouge française, Paris (SACRF)

United Nations – Archives and Records Management Section, New York (UNARMS)

 

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The Story of Croatian Bosnia: Mythos, Empire-Building Aspirations, or a Failed Attempt at National Integration?

Dénes Sokcsevits
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 4  (2022):870–912 DOI 10.38145/2022.4.870

The nineteenth-century processes of “nation-building” and national integration took place in the western regions of southeastern Europe against a distinctive backdrop. The formation of national self-images, the creation of a national self-definition, and indeed the emergence of any clear consensus on who constituted or should constitute a given national community proved daunting tasks for the multi-ethnic and multi-religious populations of southeastern Europe in the provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire.
The essential contention of this inquiry is that religious and national identities are not clearly interrelated in southeastern Europe (much, indeed, as they are not clearly interrelated elsewhere). I offer, as a clear illustration of the untenability of religious identity as an adequate foundation for nation building, an examination of the case of Bosnia and the development of a sense of identity and national belonging among Bosnian Croats and Muslims. Even the case of the emergence of the modern Serbian and Croatian nations, often cited as archetypes of national identities which developed along religious fault lines, is not as clear as it often seems to be in the public mind. It was not the only possibility, but rather was merely one alternative, an alternative that was shaped as much by internal circumstances as by the prevailing foreign political situation: the emergence, meaning, and “content” of the nation can be interpreted as a response to these factors.

Keywords: Bosnia, Croatia, nationalism, Muslims, Catholics, Ortodox, empire building

The emergence of the modern Croatian nation was the result of an extremely complex process of national integration, which in some cases only took final form in the twentieth century. The intellectuals and politicians who developed the national program(s) played an essential role in the move towards integration, but their influence on the actual development of the processes themselves was nonetheless limited, even if they tended to assume (wrongly) that their words bore great weight. At the same time, the differences that had developed in earlier periods (for example, religious and denominational affiliations) should not always be seen as barriers to national integration within the community of speakers of the same language. One often comes across the claim that, in the Balkans, religious belonging essentially predestined the processes of national belonging and nation building. This contention, however, proves only partly true, even simply from the perspective of the final outcome of these processes (for instance, in the case of the Serbs and Croats). In other cases, external circumstances, the shifts in events and conditions, and the impact of external factors thwarted processes of integration that were underway. The failures of national integration among the Bulgarians and Macedonians offer good examples. One hardly needs the divine gift of prophecy to see that, had Greater Bulgaria, which was created by the 1878 Treaty of San Stefano (or more precisely, by the successes of the Russian armed forces), not been torn to pieces by the opposing European powers at the Congress of Berlin, the integration of the linguistically and religiously very close Macedonian Slavs into the Bulgarian nation would not have been an insurmountable task for the Bulgarian intellectual and political elites. And it would be simply foolhardy (and methodologically unsound) to project the current situation back to the mid-nineteenth century, claim that the situation at the present is the “outcome” of processes of national integration, and then assess the nation-building programs and strivings on the basis of this apparent “success.”

In the last decades of the twentieth century, influenced in no small part by the bloody events that came with the disintegration of the second Yugoslav state, in Western (and also Hungarian) public opinion, thanks in large part to the writings of several figures in the media with only the most superficial grasp of the situation, the image of the Balkans as a region torn since its earliest history by ethnic conflicts began to spread (again). Thus, for example, one reads time and time again of the ancient tensions between Serbs and Croats, though the chronicles contain mention of not a single armed conflict between these two “peoples” before the twentieth century, and before the mid-nineteenth century, even their national narratives and theories of national belonging did not collide with each other much. Of course, the opinions and national stereotypes that emerged and gained sway in public opinion often had as little to do with any observable reality in the nineteenth century as they do today. The only real similarity one finds is that the “educated West” always had the right to offer ethical judgements and condemnations concerning the individuals and/or countries on the historical stage of the region.1 The best example of this is the image that emerged of the national liberation movements in the Balkans and the Ottoman state, which sought to squash them. Victor Hugo, Byron, and their contemporaries felt an overwhelming sympathy for the Greek freedom fighters, and they rallied French and English public opinion to their cause, writing dramatic works about the massacres and cruel acts committed by the “barbaric Turks” (for instance the massacre at Chios, also famously immortalized in a painting by Eugène Delacroix), but no one bothered to note that the “poor, defenseless, oppressed” Balkan rebels (both Serbs and Greeks) had completely cleansed the liberated territories of their Muslim civilian (Turkish or even Islamic Slavic) populations.

The Question of Denominational Belonging and Nation in Bosnia: Ante Starčević’s Innovative Approach to the Followers of Islam

The abovementioned claim according to which national integration in the Balkans was shaped by religious belonging—a claim found repeatedly in the secondary literature on the region—is most certainly not true of the peninsula as a whole. The Albanian nation, after all, successfully united followers of the Islamic Faith, the Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Christian Church. Sectarian-religious differences proved an obstacle to national integration in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in relations between Croats and Serbs. For the Albanians, a shared language and common cultural traditions proved an adequate foundation for integration.2 This was not the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where attempts that began in the nineteenth century to promote integration from various sides or to hinder similar efforts on other sides were mutually conflicting and ultimately contributed to the situation in the last decade of the twentieth century, when divisions came to the fore and the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who essentially speak the same language, became three separate and opposing nations whose identities are based on religious affiliation.3 In the discussion below, I consider the fate of one of these attempts, the Croatian attempt at integration in Bosnia. From time to time, I mention the endeavors of other sides in this conflictual situation simply to clarify various aspects of the essential questions I am raising, but I do not delve into the problems of integration between Catholic and Orthodox factions, nor do I consider the Croatian and Serbian secondary literature on the subject.

The uprisings of Christian peoples of the Balkans against Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century inevitably took the form of religious conflict, and the serious mutual atrocities committed by armed groups against civilian populations (such as acts which took place in Bosnia during the 1875 uprising) gave rise to lasting tensions among the peoples of different faiths which hardly vanished in the twentieth century, the many political and cultural shifts and upheavals notwithstanding. This historical legacy has been one of the factors that has hindered the integration of Muslims into the Serbian nation, although attempts were made by Serbian politicians and intellectuals to win over members of the Slavic population who follow the Islamic faith.

In the literature of southeastern Europe, from the folk heroic songs to the works of the Renaissance and Baroque and even works by nineteenth-century Romantic authors, anti-Ottoman sentiment is a strong element, or in other words, there are many, many works which could be characterized as anti-Turk (antiturcica). The same was true of Croatian popular thought, as shown both in the heroic songs that were passed on by word of mouth among the broader population and in the fiction that appeared in print. The Muslim Ottoman Turks were cast as the enemy and the Christians as the heroes of freedom. One can easily see how, against this backdrop, Ante Starčević, who later founded the Croatian Party of Rights, gave utterance to an almost revolutionary notion in the history of the peoples of southeastern Europe in 1858 when he used words of praise in an article about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. This constituted a startling break with the existing literary tradition and the practices in the print media of attacking not only the Ottoman Turks but also their religion. It is clear from Starčević’s later writings and speeches that his principal aim was to integrate the Bosnian Muslim population into the Croatian nation.

Other Croatian and Serbian politicians had also sought to do this, of course, but Starčević was the first to attempt to do this not by hoping to convert Muslims to Christianity but by showing respect for their religious beliefs and culture. It is worth keeping in mind, of course, that the war between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire had come to an end in 1791, and most of Croatia had not been under Ottoman rule since the Peace of Sremski Karlovci in 1699. Thus, the conflicts of previous centuries were a distant memory.

The Medieval and Early Modern Roots of Croatian National Integration

In order to understand Starčević’s initiative towards national integration, one must first know a bit about the roots and developmental stages of Croatian national integration. The processes that took place between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries proved important for the later movement towards Croatian national integration, the formation of a unified Croatian nation, and a nation-state encompassing the whole of what was regarded as Croatian ethnic territory. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Venice finally managed to assert control over the Dalmatian cities. Much of the Kingdom of Bosnia, which had become independent at the end of the fourteenth century and was becoming increasingly Catholic as a consequence of the efforts of the Franciscans, had become part of the Ottoman Empire by 1463. After the Battle of Mohács in 1526, some two-thirds of Croatia and Slavonia also became part of the Turkish Empire. The Croatia which remained, which was referred to as the remnants of the remnants by the Croatian orders of the time, continued to form a kind of commonwealth with Hungary under the protective wing of the Habsburgs, but in comparison with the period before Mohács and the fall of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, ties between the two parts of this country were looser. The first evidence in writing of Croatian independence dates to 1527. In a letter to Ferdinand Habsburg, the Croatian Sabor emphasized that Croatia had once been an independent kingdom and had voluntarily joined the Hungarian crown. At the same time, however, relations between the remaining Croatian coastal territories and the fragments of Slavonia had become closer, and the Croatian-Dalmatian Sabor, which had previously met separately, was united with the Slavonic Provincial Assembly.

In the sixteenth century, the Croatian ethnonym (and later the name Croatia itself) spread to medieval Slavonia through the members of the nobility who were attached to their identities as Croats but who had fled Croatia, and the name Slavonia came to refer to the eastern parts of the territory between the Drava River and the Sava River. The notion that the provinces (Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, or by their historical Croatian name, Trojednica or Trojedno Kraljevstvo, in Latin, Regnum trium unum, or Kingdom Three-in-One, and also, from time to time, alongside these three, also Bosnia) belonged together began to take form in the writings of members of the Croatian nobility and the Croatian orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as did the long-term goal of liberating these provinces from Ottoman rule. The liberation and unification of the Croatian territories (Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and even Bosnia) became a primary political goal among the Croatian orders. The struggles against the Turks, however, ultimately united the Croats and the Hungarians into a kind of community with a shared fate and quest, and Croatian aspirations for independence were only theoretical in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This bond of a shared fate is perhaps best exemplified by the writings of the Zrínyi brothers, Miklós (Nikola VII Zrinski) and Petar (Petar IV Zrinski or Péter Zrínyi in Hungarian).4 By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the image of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia as a unified community of states that stood on an equal footing with Hungary was clearly emerging in the mind of Juraj (Georgius) Ráttkay, one of the most prominent Croatian historians of the period and a member of the Zrínyi circle, and the united Croatian-Slavonian orders were also beginning to demand equal status with Hungary.5

One must keep in mind, of course, that there were other Croatian priests and monks who were active in the diocese of Zagreb, apart from Ráttkay, and who contributed to the development of Croatian nationalism, and some of the bishops of Zagreb also played a role in the birth of early Croatian nationalism. The Zagreb diocesan synod of 1634, which convened for the establishment of a national denomination, was a particularly important milestone.6

The ideas and efforts of Pavao Ritter Vitezović were also of immense importance to the development of Croatian nationalism, in particular the way in which this nationalism evolved in the nineteenth century. In his work Croatia rediviva (Croatia Reborn), which was published in 1700, Vitezović offered a bold vision of a great empire under Croatian leadership that would unite the neighboring Slavic states of the Balkans and even include Hungary.7 Vitezović was far ahead of his time with his ideas, and his ambitious national plans had no concrete political repercussions among his contemporaries in the eighteenth century, much as the visions of Slavic unity and an imagined Illyrian-Slavic motherland found early on (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in the writings of some Croatian (mainly Dalmatian) authors (such as Vinko Pribojević, Mavro Orbini, Ivan Gundulić, and Juraj Križanić) never became part of Croatian political thinking among the larger public, since it was really only found, before the emergence of the Illyrian movement, among members of the Croatian and Slavonian nobility.8

In the history of early Croatian national thought, a Catholic notion that took form in the Illyrian colleges in Italy in the seventeenth century occupies a special place. Indeed, the very question of who should or should not be considered an Illyrian was already a subject of debate in the seventeenth century, and the right to use the House of Saint Jerome in Rome (the seat of the Natio Illyrica in the Eternal City) was decided in a lawsuit in 1656. 9 This decision further narrowed the group of those who belonged to the so-called Illyrian nation. According to the Holy See decision of 1656, the Illyrians were to be understood as the Catholic Slavs of Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (this decision excluded people who had come from some of the Austrian hereditary provinces that constituted what today is Slovenia). This idea spread partly through the writings of Croatian Jesuits and Dominicans, but in particular as a consequence of the work of the Bosnian Franciscans, both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the territories under Hungarian control, and also in the territories of the Franciscan Order of Saint John Capistrano in Hungary and Slavonia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is particularly evident in the work and writings of the prominent figures of the Croatian Franciscan cultural circle in Buda, such as Emerik Pavić, Grgur Čevapović and Matija Petar Katančić. For example, the very name Dalmatian and Illyrian, which were used in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, spread among Croatian ethnic groups in Hungary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precisely through the works of this ecclesiastical intelligentsia, and the appearance of an early unified Catholic Illyrian-Dalmatian national consciousness was observable both among the Croatian nobility and among the bourgeoisie. Through Croatian national ideologies, movements, and political parties in the nineteenth century, however, these views became part of Croatian national consciousness. Vitezović’s visions in particular exerted an influence on both the ideas of the Illyrian movement led by Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s and 1840s, which proclaimed Southern Slavic unity, and the aforementioned Starčević’s Croatian Party of Rights, which formed in the 1860s and aspired to create an independent Croatian state (and which, in part because of the influence of Vitezović’s ideas, could be considered a sort of “Greater Croatia” party).

The Origins of the Croatian Idea of Bosnia

The notion that Bosnia was Croatian, however, was by no means a nineteenth-century creation. It can be found in Croatian literature and historical works from the Renaissance and even Baroque periods. In his sort of proto-nationalist political and ideological writings from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vitezović offers a clear sketch of this idea. Bosnia was first mentioned as a Croatian land in a fourteenth-century Croatian version of a twelfth-century chronicle from the seaport town of Bar on the Montenegrin coast. Bosnia itself was sometimes under Serbian, sometimes Croatian rule in the tenth century (of course, it was a much smaller area than present-day Bosnia, referred to as the little land of Bosnia10 by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus), but this meant little more than temporary and nominal rule, which was replaced by Byzantine rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The Bosnian banovina embarked down the path towards independence at the end of the twelfth century, although the Croat Šubić family temporarily took control of it in the late thirteenth century. By the fourteenth century, however, Bosnia had gained independence not only from the Šubić family but also from its powerful neighbors, Dušan Nemanjić’s Serbia and Hungary, which by then was under the rule of the House of Anjou. It became an independent kingdom, and the Kotromanić dynasty expanded its state at the expense of the medieval Croatian territories. Bosnia also remained separate from the neighboring powers for a long time from the perspective of religion through the independent Bosnian church, mistakenly called Bogomil (and in the Middle Ages patarenes, patarini). Bosnia was originally part of the Catholic Church, as it lay to the west of the Theodosian line on the Drina River (in the era before Ottoman expansion into the region, there were very few Orthodox in the eastern periphery of Bosnia), and the Western Church never abandoned its ambition to bring the inhabitants of the area back into the Catholic fold.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Western Church had proven largely successful in these efforts, following the peaceful conversion of the majority of the Bosnian population by the Franciscan monks who had established themselves in Bosnia in the mid-fourteenth century, though Stjepan Tomaš, the second-to-last Bosnian king, had expelled the remaining people (deemed heretics) who had refused to convert. In the surviving Slavic-language sources of the Bosnian state at the time, the Croatian ethnic name was only rarely used, and one could well conjecture that Bosnia might have embarked down the path towards the development of a separate national identity in the modern era had it not been for the Turks. In 1463, however, the Bosnian kingdom was dissolved by Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror. The landlord social stratum in Bosnia, which had evolved in a distinctive way in the Ottoman Empire and had managed, by the end of the sixteenth century, to ensure that its estates would be hereditable, was not compromised of actual descendants of the old landowning class (or if so, only in small numbers) and thus was hardly a guardian of Bosnian state traditions. Rather, the members of this stratum were fully integrated into the Bosporus empire.

The memory of the medieval Bosnian state was only preserved, as a consequence of a combination of fortunate circumstances, by the Bosnian Franciscans, who were given permission to pursue their efforts by the Ottomans, with later elements of Croatian identity emerging through contact with Croatian territories not yet occupied by the Turks or already liberated. Bosnia was referred to as the Croatian land of Bosnia in the works of Bosnian Franciscan poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a poem titled “The Croatian Virgins to Croatia,” which was published in 1626, Tomko Mrnavić Bošnjanin referred to the inhabitants of Bosnia as Croats. August Vlastelinović, also a Bosnian Franciscan, wrote in 1637, “the dominion of Prince Stipan has crumbled, the mighty realm of the Bosnian king, the courage of the Croatian people is broken.” In a book published in Venice in 1704, Ivan Filipović, a native of Sinj, addressed the patron saints of his country: “Defenders of our countries, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia, and the entire Croatian-speaking people, pray for us.” In his book The Flower of the Conversation of the Illyrian or Croatian-speaking People, which was printed in 1747, Franciscan monk Filip Grabovac, born in Vrlikan, refers to Bosnia in a poem titled “Glory to Dalmatia” as a Croatian province.11

These ideas found the most exuberant expression in the writings of the aforementioned Vitezović, who was active at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vitezović included not only Bosnia but also present-day Slovenia and Serbia in his vision of a Croatia reborn, or Croatia rediviva. Vitezović referred to all Southern Slavs as Croats, and in his petition to Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli on the borders of Croatia, he referred to Trans-Croatia (Serbia), Central Croatia (Croatia proper and Bosnia), and Seaside and Midst-River Croatia (Dalmatia, Slavonia).12 Vitezović’s work was immensely important, because the leaders of each of the two nineteenth-century Croatian national ideologies, Illyrianist Yugoslavism and Starčević’s theory of Greater Croatian integration, regarded Vitezović as a forerunner and drew on his ideas. In another one of his works, Bosnia captiva (which was dedicated to the Croatian Viceroy Peter Keglević), Vitezović called on Keglević, a Croatian nobleman who was also of Bosnian descent, to try to reclaim his homeland for the Holy Crown, to which it had once belonged. He offered the following plaintive sigh in this work: “If only Croatia would at least cherish the hope that Turkey, soon to be defeated again, will hand over the keys to the city of Jajce!”13

Bosnia in the Nineteenth-century Visions of Croatian National Integration

In his pamphlet Disertatia iliti Razgovor, Count Janko Drašković, who essentially set the political agenda of the nineteenth-century Illyrian movement, argued that, on the basis of Croatian state law (according to which Croatia, Dalmatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia were all Croatian kingdoms), Croatia should be united with Bosnia under Habsburg rule. Drašković was thinking of the whole of Bosnia, and not just the parts of western Bosnia to which the Croatian nobility referred as Turkish Croatia, which had been part of Croatia as late as 1592 (Drašković later formulated an even more ambitious vision of southern Slavic unity). Vitezović’s views, however, also shaped Ljudevit Gaj’s Illyrianism, which proclaimed broader national integration (Croatian, Slovenian, and Serbian) and a more far-reaching notion of Yugoslav unity. The circle of bishops surrounding Bishop Strossmayer, who was also an exponent of the idea of South-Slav unity, took a similar line in the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the Croatian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century continued the anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic tradition of the Renaissance-Baroque period and proclaimed the need for the South Slavic peoples to unite against the Turks just as their sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century predecessors Pribojević, Gundulić, and even Križanić had done. I am thinking for instance of Croatian poet Ivan Mažuranić’s epic Smrt Smail-age Čengića (The Death of Smail-aga Čengić), a major work of Croatian Romantic literature which unambiguously depicts the conflict between Montenegrins and a Muslim landlord as a clash between oppressed Christians and oppressive Muslim rulers (although the work could also be interpreted as depicting a generalized conflict between tyrants and the oppressed).14

In the 1850s, there was a significant change in Croatia’s relationship to Islam and more generally to the Southern Slavs in Bosnia of the Islamic faith when the Croatian national ideology developed by Ante Starčević and Eugen Kvaternik, which envisioned and aspired to the creation of a large Croatian state without Serbia on the basis of real and imaginary Croatian state law, appeared. This ideology stood in stark contrast to Illyrianism, which sought Southern Slavic unity.

The emergence of a narrower Starčevići-Kvaternik Croatian national ideology (narrower compared to the ideas of Gaj and Strossmayer) was strongly influenced by the fact that the attempt at national integration of Illyrianism had failed among both Slovenes and Serbs, and that in Serbia, a Serbian national ideology had emerged, and this ideology included its own and political ambitions and programs. The theoretical and practical work of Ilija Garašanin and enlightened Serbian writer, linguist, and ethnographer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in the 1840s offers a clear example of this. As it so happens, Starčević’s broader notion of Croatian identity, which in his view included Orthodox and Muslims living in the territory of Croatian state law, alongside Catholics, was a direct reaction to a work by Karadžić in which Karadžić characterized Southern Slavs who spoke the Štokavian dialect as Serbs, whether they were Catholic, Muslim, or Orthodox.15 Starčević regarded it as essential to integrate Bosnian Muslims into the Croatian nation, since both the Serbs and the Croats regarded the nationality of Bosnia’s inhabitants as the decisive factor that would settle the question of the state to which Bosnia would ultimately belong.

The Serbs, however, had spoken of Bosnia as a Serbian province from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Karadžić, as noted, considered the inhabitants of Bosnia to be uniformly Serbs. This idea, however, did not originate with Karadžić. It was a view espoused by most of the well-known Slavic philologists of the period, including the Slovene Jernej Kopitar and the Slovak-Czech Šafaryk, who lived in Vienna. For the preachers of the linguistic national model, factors such as shared historical tradition, the sense of belonging to a common state, or even the role of religion as a repository of culture and thus also an element of cultural difference did not matter or were not given the same importance.16 It is worth noting, however, that some former members of the Illyrian movement accepted Karadžić’s views and even the use of the ethnic name “Serbian” in the interests of Southern Slavic unity. Imbro Ignatijević Tkalac published a book in German on the so-called Eastern Question in which he predicted a bright future for the Serbs, whom he saw as the valiant heroes who had ousted the Ottomans and the nation that would finally create southern Slavic unity, a unity that would include the Croats.17

From then on, efforts towards Serbian national integration consistently included the aim of integrating non-Orthodox Christian Southern Slavs, though this was never achieved in practice. In his Načertanije (or draft plan), a writing that was secret at the time, Garašanin, who drew up the Serbian national program, promised religious equality, which he said would satisfy all Christians and “possibly some Muslims.” Garašanin does not touch on what would become of Muslims who were not satisfied with Serbian religious policy, much as he also offers no tactics with which to win the trust and sympathies of Bosnians of the Islamic faith, although he does suggest several ways to win over the Catholics and Franciscans in Bosnia.18 In the aforementioned work, Karadžić writes in a flattering tone about Bosnian Muslims. He praises their commitment to their faith, although he attributes this to their Orthodox Christian origins and contends that they were simply heirs to the strong tradition of religious conviction of their ancestors.

There were several reasons behind the failure of the integration attempts. Perhaps the most important of these was the simple fact that the Serbian national tradition and Orthodoxy were closely linked, and the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century failed to recognize the significance of this link (though Garašanin saw this). The Serbian Orthodox Church was both the guardian of the Serbian tradition of statehood and the institution through which Serbian national consciousness was spread (for example, among the Orthodox Vlach population of Croatian and Bosnian origin). In the Serbian Principality of the nineteenth century, Eastern Orthodox Christianity was the state religion. The historical interweaving of Serbian identity and Orthodoxy was present in the public mind and even permeated the schools. All this contributed to the fact that, for the majority of Serbs, religious and national affiliation were closely intertwined, and thus in practice, the prevailing understanding of Serbian identity did not include Catholics or Muslims, even if they spoke the same or a similar language. In the case of the latter, the profound mistrust between Orthodox and Muslims also hindered national integration and even any form of rapprochement.

The national uprisings of Christians in the Balkans in the nineteenth century had been accompanied by atrocities, murders, and acts of ethnic cleansing committed against Muslim populations everywhere, including in Serbia, and there had been frequent reprisals against Christian civilians by the Ottoman forces. Clearly, this hardly contributed to the integration of Muslims into the Serbian community, so Karadžić’s claim that Muslims who spoke the Štokavian dialect were Serbs remained little more than an optimistic vision or wishful thinking. The situation is perhaps captured eloquently by the simple fact that Prince-Bishop of Montenegro Petar II Petrović Njegoš’ epic poem Gorski vijenac, or “The Mountain Wreath,” which is regarded as one of the prominent masterpieces of nineteenth-century Serbian Romantic literature, is in part about the tragic expulsion of Muslim Montenegrins. Karadžić’s comparatively enlightened ideas of integrating Muslims met with little interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century among the Serbian elites either. The recollections of Bosnian Franciscan Anto Knežević offer an illuminating example of this. Knežević visited Belgrade before the Bosnian uprising of 1876 and was received by Serbian minister Blaznavac. Blaznavac encouraged the Bosnian Serbs to rise up against Ottoman rule, and he assured Knežević that Serbia would help: “As soon as they launch the uprising, call on the Turks [i.e. the Bosnian Muslims] either to be baptized immediately or to flee wheresoever they can if they don’t want to be massacred.” Knežević, the Bosnian Franciscan, was appalled by this and offered the following reply: “Sir, that is horrifying, for they are our brothers, even if they are Turks.” He added that, in time, the Bosnian Muslims would see the light and repent for what they had done in the past to their Orthodox brothers. The minister, however, continued: “Do not believe this! The Turks are followers of a faith of curs, and as long as they adhere to their cur faith, you will never have any peace.”19

The atrocities that were committed against the Muslim population during the anti-Turkish Serb uprisings of the early nineteenth century (and which today we would refer to as ethnic cleansing) thus sowed the seeds of deep mistrust among the majority of Bosnia’s Islamic population and reduced the chances of Karadzic’s arguably enlightened vision of national integration across religious lines of ever becoming a reality.

In strong contrast with this, Ante Starčević and his followers broke with the anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic traditions of Croatian literature. In 1851, Starčević offered the following call for unity with Muslims in the Zagreb periodical Narodne Novine (The People’s Newspaper): “In Bosnia lives the purest and least corrupted part of our nation, which can more easily do without us than we can do without it.” He made another gesture in support of unity with people he regarded as Croatian Muslims in the 1858 issue of the Hervatski kalendar (Croatian Calendar) when he presented the Prophet Muhammad as a great historical figure. In 1876, in an article titled “The Eastern Question,” Starčević contended that the Bosnian landlords were not Turks, but rather were “the purest and most ancient Croatian nobility in all Europe.”20 This assertion, which admittedly seems astonishing at first, is made a bit clearer by interesting data collected by Ivo Banac, according to which some Catholic and Muslim clans still regarded themselves as related to each other at the beginning of even the twentieth century.21 Eugen Kvaternik was also firmly convinced that Bosnia was Croatian (as were, in his view, the Bosnian Muslims), and in his assessment, it was necessary for the Habsburgs to take Bosnia from the Serbs (and, through them, the Russians) and, of course, annex it to Croatia.22 The deeply religious, fanatical Catholic Kvaternik, however, sought to bring the Muslims back into the fold of the Catholic Church, as his first letter to Austrian foreign minister Count Johann Bernhard von Rechberg-Rothenlöwen in 1860 makes clear:

If the king of the whole of Croatia succeeded in reconquering these lands—iure postliminii—and were to unite them with other nations, it would be quite natural that the 400,000 Muslims would, under the influence of the Catholic State, become Catholics and not Pravo-Slavs.23

The Bosnian Franciscan Ivan Frano Jukić was the first to venture the claim that the Bosnian beys and agas were the descendants of the nobility of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. According to Jukić, these descendants of the Bosnian nobles who had converted to Islam formed the Bosnian Muslim ruling class, and thus Starčević’s aforementioned idea (that the Bosnian Muslims represented the “purest and most ancient Croatian nobility in all Europe”) was in fact inspired by Jukić. As it so happens, recent historical research based on Ottoman sources has shown kinship between very few noble families and the Bosnian Muslim elites, and there is no convincing evidence of any mass Islamization in fifteenth-century Bosnia. For the most part, the medieval Catholic Bosnian nobility either migrated to Croatia (for instance the Keglević, Janković, Jurišić, and Jelašić families) or were unable to maintain their social positions in Bosnia under Ottoman rule.

The notion that Bosnia was fundamentally Croatian was espoused and proclaimed by many pro-right Croatian politicians and historians in the nineteenth century. Starčević, who stood on comparatively liberal grounds, considered it unacceptable that in the “modern era” (i.e., the nineteenth century) religious difference could be an obstacle to national integration.24

Bosnia was considered Croatian not only by these two politicians of the Party of Rights, but also by all nineteenth-century Croatian historians (regardless of party affiliation), including Franjo Rački and Vjekoslav Klaić. Admittedly, their Serbian contemporaries considered Bosnia Serbian, and this was true well into the twentieth century. The well-known Serbian anthropogeographer Jovan Cvijić, in contrast, believed that the inhabitants of Bosnia in the Middle Ages were Bogomils and Orthodox, and that it was only through the proselytizing of the Franciscans, who behaved like militant zealots in their efforts to spread their faith, that religious difference had strengthened and now threatened to separate what Cvijić referred to as the “Serb-Croat” people.25

The Muslim-friendly ideas of Starčević and his adherents, however, found expression in Croatian literature (the same cannot be said of Serbian literature). Josip Eugen Tomić, for example, chose prince Husein Gradaščević as the protagonist of his 1879 novel Zmaj od Bosne, or “The Dragon of Bosnia” (a kind of title or nickname that had been given to Gradaščević by historical tradition),26 and portrayed him as a praiseworthy hero of the struggle for independence.27 Ante Kovačić, another Croatian writer who belonged to the circle of the Party of Rights, wrote a satire titled Smrt babe Čengićkinje (Death of Granny Čengić), in which he attacked Smrt Smail-age Čengića (The Death of Smail-aga Čengić), Mažuranić’s romantic epic (mentioned earlier in this article), which had strong anti-Turk or rather anti-Muslim overtones. These compositions sought to nurture sympathy among Croatian readers for their Bosnian brothers and sisters of the Islamic faith.

Bosnia at the Crossroads of Croatian and Serbian National Aspirations

The struggle between Serbs and Croats, fought mainly through propaganda, over whether Zagreb or Belgrade would manage to integrate the populations in the territories between them into their national narratives and political bodies was underway. This struggle was made more complex for both sides by their political positions. The tiny state of Serbia was semi-dependent on the Turks, and its room for maneuver was influenced by Austria and Russia, while the limited autonomy enjoyed by the Croats gave them even less room for maneuver in foreign policy than the Serbs had. Despite this, Garašanin had been sending agents to Bosnia since 1844, where the Serbian Orthodox Church had already been working for decades with increasing success among the Orthodox communities for national integration with Serbia. The Croats had already tried to gain a foothold through the Bosnian Franciscans during the period of Illyrianism (though with appeals to Yugoslav unity), so only the initiatives of the Party of Rights circle had any real success. The situation became increasingly tense in 1876, when the Bosnian Serb rebels declared their intention to join Serbia, which went into battle against the Turks for Bosnia but failed. At the same time, after the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy invaded Bosnia, the Croatian Sabor sent a resolution28 to Franz Joseph appealing to him to unite the new province with Croatia (an initiative which also failed). These two opposing endeavors of the Serbs and Croats became a source of serious tensions between the two nations.29 A press war broke out between Croatian and Serbian newspapers over the question of which nation had the legitimate claim to Bosnia and its inhabitants.

Starčević was perhaps the figure who was most strongly opposed to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia. A large part of Croatian public opinion did not share his views, as it was hoped that Bosnia would then be annexed to Croatia-Slavonia. The pro-independence Starčević, however, had no wish to be the recipient of this “gift” from Austria (and it soon became clear that Vienna and Pest had no intention of making such a gift to the Croats). Starčević called for cooperation among the three Bosnian religious communities, as he feared that both Austria and Russia would try to bring them under their control. His concerns were hardly unfounded. After 1878, however, Croatian national integration efforts in Bosnia were not realized, or only to a limited extent.

Austro-Hungarian governor Béni Kállay espoused a policy of a unified Bosnian nation which prevented the integration of Muslim Bosnians into Croatia or Serbia. Admittedly, however, he could only boast of relative success. In 1891, in a poem published in the Kállay-backed journal Bošnjak, the eminent poet and writer Safvet-beg Bašagić still wrote in favor of the Bosnian national concept. A few years later, however, Bašagić identified as a Croat and had come to espouse Starčević’s views. In developing his new concept, Kállay chose the term Bosniak as the designation for this nation, which is a Slavic variant of the Turkish name for the inhabitants of the region, Bosnaklar (Bošnjak). Noel Malcolm, citing Bosnian authors, notes that the name Bosniak was only used by Muslims to refer to themselves.30 This was not the case, however, as Catholics had also used this name in the past, for instance a group of Catholic Croats who settled in and around Pécs in the seventeenth century and who, as the sources make clear, always referred to themselves as Bosniaks.31 According to Tomislav Kraljačić, Kállay wanted to apply the Hungarian nation-state model to Bosnia (this model is, in its essence, the same as the French national model):

Fundamentally, this [model] is a transformation of the doctrine of the Hungarian political nation. It is being adopted with the aim of creating a reliable political nation in an ethno-religiously heterogeneous society in Bosnia and Herzegovina led by the landowners as the pillars of this society.32

Kraljačić writes of the ethno-religious heterogeneity of Bosnia, but in my view, in 1882, one finds only the germs of a modern national consciousness, even among Catholics and Orthodox.33 Kállay, who represented the Austro-Hungarian (and not only Hungarian) Empire, tried to implement both an enlightened policy of modernizing state administration and modern institutions familiar from the British colonial model and to make the tensions arising from religious differences manageable in some way.34 An emphatically separate Croatian and Serbian national consciousness did not become widespread among the Catholic and Orthodox communities before 1914, a fact to which the still prevalent view of Southern Slavic unity and the existence of one and only one South Slavic nation contributed (and of course the modern national idea had not exactly gained strong influence among the largely uneducated Bosnian peasant population). It is possible that Kállay’s project to unify the Catholics and Orthodox simply came too late (due to the influence of modern nationalism, which had been gaining ground in Croatia and Serbia in the second half of the nineteenth century), but it is also possible that there was never really a strong chance of welding the different religious denominations of Bosnia into a unified Bosnian nation. In the twentieth century, Croatian and Serb aspirations essentially canceled each other out, although the Croats at times seemed to have had a better chance of successfully integrating the Muslims of Bosnia.

Thus, for a period of two decades beginning in 1883, acting through joint Minister of Finance and Governor of Bosnia Béni Kállay, the monarchy pursued a policy which was partly aimed at preventing Bosnia and its inhabitants from becoming attached to the Serbian or Croatian national narratives or integrated into the Serbian or Croatian political bodies, as both Vienna and Budapest were convinced that the monarchy’s position in the region would be equally threatened, whether Zagreb or Belgrade were able effectively able to state their claims to Bosnia. Partly for this reason, Kállay developed the concept of a unified Bosnian nation and forbade and strove to hinder Croatian and Serb integration efforts. According to Imre Ress, “Kállay sought a means of eliminating the rivalry between Serb and Croat nationalism and of overcoming Muslim religious conservatism by creating an integral Bosnian national consciousness.”35 His plan failed not only because he was too late (as noted above, this was hardly the only explanation), but also because he was unable to seal the Bosnian population off entirely from outside (Croat and Serb) influences.

Moreover, Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević, the most prominent Croatian poet of the time, became the editor of the literary section of the Sarajevo-based scientific and literary journal Nada, which Kállay had launched (and which was printed in Cyrillic and Latin letters). Kranjčević used the journal to publish works by the best representatives of Croatian modernist literature. The Serbs, however, boycotted the magazine.36 Ultimately, all Kállay really achieved with this journal was to hinder the integration of Bosnian Muslims into Croatia and Serbia and to awaken in them a sense of separateness that could not be explained solely by religious differences (the creation of a unified Albanian nation at least raises questions about the theory of insurmountable divisions between so-called civilizations on the basis, largely, of religious difference, a theory perhaps most frequently associated today with the work of American social theorist Samuel Huntington).37

Admittedly, there had been a struggle and even an armed uprising led by Bosnian nobles and agas in the 1930s against Istanbul for autonomy, but the main reason for this had been opposition to the Tanzimat reforms, which had threatened the privileges of the Bosnian Muslim landowners. In other words, this struggle had not had a truly national character. The integration of the Bosnian Muslim Southern Slavs into a national community was slow to take shape, but the process began during the period in which the region was under the control of the Habsburg Monarchy, and there were already signs of a transformation from a religious community to a national community. It was first and foremost Mehmet-beg Kapetanović Ljubušak and his circle that supported the principle of a separate (Muslim) Bosnian nation, but by the turn of the century, most of the Muslim secular intelligentsia had become more sympathetic to the Croatian national narrative, with only a minority of them gravitating towards the Serbs.38 Later, the Muslim ecclesial community became more of the foundation for separate Bosnian national aspirations.39 Although in principle Kállay had sought to prevent the Bosnian Orthodox from identifying with the Serbian nation as well, by obtaining from the Patriarch of Constantinople the right to appoint the leaders of the Orthodox community and by replacing the Greeks with Serbs, the Monarchy had in fact created an opportunity as early as the 1880s for the development of initiatives towards the integration of the Bosnian Orthodox population into the Serbian national narrative and nation, which was sanctioned (admittedly after a long struggle) by state recognition of the autonomy of the Orthodox community in 1905. In 1907, the Serbian National Organization was founded. The strivings of the Islamic religious community for autonomy also gained state recognition in the early twentieth century. The Muslim community was politically divided in the early twentieth century. The Muslim National Organization, founded in 1906, was more in favor of autonomy, while the Muslim Progressive Party, founded in 1908, was Croatian-oriented.

The shift in the church organization also constituted a turning point in the process of Croatian national integration. In 1882, the pope consented to the creation of the Archdiocese of Sarajevo (with the bishoprics of Banja Luka and Mostar), with Josip Stadler as Archbishop of Sarajevo. Stadler, who held this post from 1882 until his death in 1918, was a supporter of the so-called Trialist movement, which sought the unification of the Croatian-inhabited provinces. While the Franciscans of Bosnia had always favored southern Slavic unity, from the outset, the Franciscans of Herzegovina and Bishop Paskal Buconjić of Mostar were focused on promoting Croatian national integration.40 The Croats were slow to form a political community, and it was only in 1906 that they initiated the establishment of the Croatian National Community, which was only a cultural association at the time, as they were not permitted to pursue Croatian national policy or use national symbols. The Serbs, in contrast, had been able to use their national colors and symbols freely, partly from 1886 and fully from 1905. In 1910, shortly after the Annexation Crisis of 1908 (the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia), Bosnia-Herzegovina was given a constitution, and in provincial parliament that was elected at the time, the Croatian community, led by Nikola Mandić, generally cooperated with the Muslims against the Serbs, who were in the relative majority and were casting their gaze towards Serbia. After Kállay’s failure, the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Bosnia allowed the use of Croatian and Serbian ethnic names, and after the annexation, the constitution drafted by István Burián recognized three nations. But neither the Croats nor the Serbs gave up on their visions to integrate the Muslims of the region into their nations (they had already largely, though not entirely, abandoned their aspirations to assimilate each other), and both sides enjoyed some successes in this struggle (for instance, the cultural society Gajret, which was established in 1903, strove to promote Serbian identity among the Slavic Muslims, while the most powerful Muslim political organization allied itself with the Croatian party against the Serbs at the outbreak of World War I). The Serbs also tried to make gestures to win over the Muslims, and a work was published that listed prominent Ottoman officials of Bosnian descent among Serbian national heroes.41

Of course, there were exceptions and instances of cooperation between Serbs and Muslims in the name of South Slavic unity, for instance, Young Bosnia, a separatist movement that was active in Bosnia before the outbreak of World War I, or the aforementioned Gajret, which later was unambiguously oriented towards the Serbs, but which at first, when Safvet-beg Bašagić has played a more prominent role, had been more closely linked to the Croats.42

Indeed, at the time of the Balkan wars, Bosnian Muslims volunteers enlisted in the Serbian army even when some of the units of this army had massacred Muslims in communities in Kosovo.43 There was just as much distrust of Muslims among Serbs, of course, as there was of Serbs among Muslims because of the atrocities which had been committed by the Ottoman authorities and armed Muslims (for instance, when the First Serbian Uprising had been brutally squashed or at the time of the April Uprising of 1876).

Cooperation between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims was hindered by the fact that some leading Serbian politicians had a very low opinion of Bosnian Muslims. In his memoirs, the prominent sculptor Ivan Meštrović described a typical (and widely cited) conversation that he had in 1917 with Stojan Protić, a leading Serbian politician and the first prime minister of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Protić allegedly said that, when our army crosses the Drina River, we will give the Turks [this was the term he used to refer to Bosnian Muslims] 24 or perhaps 48 hours to return to the faith of their ancestors, and those who are unwilling to do so will be massacred, as we did in Serbia back in the day.44

Protić’s vision was not transformed into a reality at the time. Brutal atrocities of this kind were committed in 1918, but the official Belgrade leadership did not attempt to put his plan into practice.45

Hungarian Policy in Relation to Croatian National Integration Aspirations, with Regard to Croatian Ideas on Dalmatia and Bosnia

People active in political circles in Hungary first became aware of the Croatian national integration efforts after the emergence of the Illyrian movement, and it was then that the Hungarian press and then Hungarian politicians began to react to the Croatian nation-building ideology. Ljudevit Gaj, the leading figure of the Illyrian movement, took an active part in the Slavic-Hungarian language policy struggles by publishing two brochures written by Slovaks in Croatian lands. One was a pamphlet written in German by Samuel Hojč titled “Sollen wir Magyaren werden,” or “Should we become Magyars?” This writing, which encouraged opposition to the Magyarizing efforts of the Hungarian administration, became a source of tensions between Hungarians and Croats because Hojč had it published in Karlovac under the pseudonym Domoljub Horvatović, and it was seen by the Hungarians as a Croatian attack on the Hungarian cause and was even discussed as such in the National Assembly in Pozsony (Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia). The second work was a writing by Lutheran pastor Georgius Rohonyi, another Slovak author who exerted in influence on the relationship between Croats and Hungarians at the time. Rohonyi’s Palma quam Dugonics similesque Magyari Slaviae erupere attentarunt, vindicata, which was written in Latin but was also distributed in manuscript form in Croatian translation, was intended as a response to remarks made by Hungarian author András Dugonics (many, many years earlier) denigrating the Slavs. However, even the Hungarian political knew little of the new political, civil rights, and territorial demands of the Croatian movement at the time.

Ferenc Császár, who had once taught at a grammar school in Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia), had been the first person to try to inform the Hungarian public about the situation in Croatia and the Illyrian movement in 1839. He had portrayed the figures of this movement as Pan-Slavic agitators who were threatening to upset the old Hungarian-Croatian alliance, and this image of the Illyrians was passed on in the Hungarian press of the 1840s.46

Thus, the image (ominous for Hungarians and the Habsburgs) of a Pan-Slavic empire as envisioned by the Croats had already appeared in the writings of Császár, but at the time, the Hungarian political elite was troubled not by Croatian plans that staked a claim to Bosnia (Hungarian public opinion was not even aware of Drašković’s pamphlet, in which Drašković cast his gaze on Bosnia), but rather insisted on Slavonia as an integral part of Hungary, drawing on historical sources.47 Hungarian politicians also did not accept the basic Croatian aspiration for national integration (which envisaged the unification of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia), and they even questioned Croatia’s status as a legal political entity. This was captured in statements made at the National Assembly in Pozsony, such as, “Where is this Croatia? Ah, it was destroyed long ago, in the time of King Matthias!”

In the 1840s, Lajos Kossuth, one of the most prominent Hungarian politicians of his time, also rejected the Croatian public law theory as unfounded, thus also rejecting the legal foundations of the old Croatian autonomy, which had been based on customary law, and he did so at a time when the Croatian national movement was seeking to expand its claims (and emphasize what it saw as the legal justifications and foundations of these claims) and was demanding the full unification of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. This explains why the proposal made, at Kossuth’s suggestion, by Pest County in 1842 to detach Croatia (more specifically, the counties of Zagreb, Kőrös, and Varazdin) from the Hungarian administration was hardly well received by the Croatian national movement. Later, in late 1847, in a speech at the National Assembly in Pozsony, Kossuth questioned the very existence of Croatia as a legal separate, sovereign entity. “There is no Croatia,” he said, and he was only willing to accept use of the word Croatia “if no constitutional force is attached to the term.”48

Not everyone in Hungary shared Kossuth’s views concerning the question of Croatia and public law. The Hungarian conservatives cooperated with the Illyrianists after 1845, because, as was true in the case of many other questions, they did not want to make any changes to the Hungarian-Croatian public law relationship (not even on the question of Slavonia), as the articles by Count Antal Széchen make abundantly clear.49

Even in the Hungarian opposition, there were those who showed some understanding of or even support for Croatian national aspirations and even Croatian territorial ambitions. In his Szózat a magyar és szláv nemzetiség ügyében (Appeal on the issue of Hungarian and Slavic nationhood), Miklós Wesselényi, in contrast with Kossuth, characterized most of the Croatian national claims as legitimate, including the existence of a separate Croatian nation:

Croatia and Slavonia existed and still exist as a country. It had and still has its own nationhood, though tied to the Hungarian nation. They can justly demand the use of Latin, used instead of the mother tongue, or even the living mother tongues in their bosoms and in their internal administration; they can demand not only that they be permitted to live with their mother tongues among their families and in solitude, but that they be permitted to foster and cultivate them. 50

Wesselényi also recognized Croatian territorial claims, and he supported the unification of “Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia,” and in his plan to transform the Habsburg Empire into a “federation of states” (a plan outlined in the same writing), he would have linked the Slavic part of Istria to Croatia and the Italian part of the peninsula to the Italian federal unit. Wesselényi made no mention of Bosnia, however, which at that time was still part of the Ottoman Empire. It is worth noting that by the end of August 1848, Kossuth was also willing to recognize Slavonia as part of Croatia.

After 1860, the Hungarian political elite or at least Ferenc Deák, who had done much to further Croatian-Hungarian reconciliation, recognized the basic legal and territorial aspirations of the Croatian national movement. The Croatian-Hungarian Compromise of 1868 explicitly stated that the Hungarian side recognized the right of the Croats not only to Dalmatia but to Slavonia as well, in theory. In the meantime, however, the Austrian parliament had declared the province part of Cisleithania, and the Hungarian government had no desire over the course of the next few decades to assert Croatian virtual rights, which figured in the Compromise and had the sanction of Emperor Franz Joseph, against the predilections of the Austrians. Franz Joseph had already approved of the Austrian decision, but he had also had no qualms about signing the Croatian-Hungarian Compromise. In connection with this, Éva Somogyi quotes the critics of the whole system on which these compromises rested (in other words, the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement or Nagodba of 1868 and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867), who contend that this system was based on a lie. Somogyi challenges this argument, however, nothing that “the ‘resolution’ of the public law situation in Dalmatia shows that the complex compromise system on which the Ausgleich and the Nagodba rested had been built required uncertainty and imprecision on questions of public law, and it was advisable to avoid unambiguous decisions in the interests of making this system work.”51

The question of Bosnia and where it belonged only became relevant in 1878, after the occupation, and of course there was no question of the Hungarians
ever supporting the decision of the Croatian Sabor to annex Bosnia to Croatia (the newly annexed province was under joint Austro-Hungarian rule). This dual system of governance was not without problems, and the demands made by the Croatian Sabor (and the Croatian press) left no doubt in the minds of the government actors in Vienna and Budapest concerning the strength of Croatian nationalist demands. Indeed, the Croatian aspirations for a tripartite transformation of the Habsburg Monarchy became clearly palpable, even if they were not formulated so explicitly. Kálmán Tisza and the Hungarian government saw the issue very clearly, however, and the Hungarian Council of Ministers subsequently dealt with the matter. The prime minister even drafted a memorandum for the emperor in which he included a proposal for the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina between Cisleithania and Transleithania. The press campaign launched in the early 1880s by Frigyes Pesty against any Croatian-Hungarian compromise may well have been linked to Kálmán Tisza’s political ideas about Bosnia.52 Tisza’s plan was hardly unknown to the monarchy’s scholars.53 The text of the plan explicitly considered this division of Bosnia necessary in order to prevent Croatian trialist visions from threatening the empire (though I would note, these aspirations really only threatened the dualist system). Indeed, the memorandum is explicit about this:

As a final arrangement, however, the only solution that could be seriously taken into consideration would attach part of the lands in question to the lands of the Hungarian crown and the other part to the kingdoms and lands represented on the Austrian Imperial Council. This is the only way to ensure that the dualist structure of the Monarchy will not be threatened by the enlargement of the Empire to include Bosnia and Herzegovina. The inclusion of these two lands as direct imperial members of the Monarchy and their incorporation into the Monarchy in this form would be utterly contrary to dualism. This would create a third group of states in the Monarchy, which would draw Croatia, Dalmatia, and one or two lands from the territories represented on the Imperial Council or at least parts of them to itself… and the triad would be created in the Monarchy with a third, Slavic member.54

Tisza also advocated the annexation of Slavonia to Hungary, which clearly would have been necessary to establish a direct Hungarian link with the northern part of Bosnia. However, Franz Joseph did not support the Hungarian prime minister’s ideas, though he was also similarly unsupportive of the demands of the Croatian Sabor.

In the last decades of the Dualist era, questions concerning the place of Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Empire (i.e., the question of which part of the Empire they should belong to) was addressed several times in discussions on Hungarian-Croatian and Austrian-Hungarian-Croatian relations. Interestingly, the Hungarian political elite and much of the press also treated Croatian claims to Dalmatia as part of the Greater Croatian imperial aspirations, even though Hungary had acknowledged the legitimacy of this claim in the Croatian-Hungarian Compromise of 1868. When the Hungarian opposition (which still sought Hungarian independence from the Habsburgs) was making friends with people on Croatian oppositional circles, Ferenc Kossuth and his associates promised the Croats that they would support the reattachment of Dalmatia to Croatia (and the Hungarian crown), which led to the Fiume Resolution, in which Croatian opposition parties made the Hungarians a peace offer. As perhaps was to be expected (given the logic of oppositional party politics), the liberal periodical Az Újság (The Newspaper) criticized the supporters of the Fiume Resolution and the Hungarian political forces allied with them. It is worth quoting passages from some of these articles, especially on titled “The Croatian adventure.”55 According to Az Újság, the Fiume Resolution was little more than a manifesto of sorts of the vision of a Greater Croatia:

So let the coast from Trieste to Budva be Croatian. This was the program with which they set out to forge Hungarian-Croatian peace. The extreme newspapers of the coalition greeted this with a howl of triumph. It must be admitted, however, that the 1867 wing [the pro-dualist wing] of the Hungarian coalition was averse to this alliance. But the bait—Dalmatia—is having an effect here too.

After coming to power in 1906, the Hungarian opposition coalition forgot the promises it had made to the Croats concerning Dalmatia (Franz Joseph only allowed them to play a governmental role if they were willing to abandon demands for any major changes in public law). However, in Hungarian political life, the question of the part of the empire to which Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina should belong and, thus, the issue of Croatian ambitions (or the need to hinder or counter Croatian ambitions) continued to be raised later, even after the outbreak of World War I.

During the war, numerous solutions to the so-called Southern Slavic question within the Monarchy were proposed. The most strident opposition to any trialist solution or any solution that in any way threatened the Dualist system came from Prime Minister István Tisza, the National Party of Work, and the leading Hungarian political circles, and they maintained their firm opposition to these ideas right up to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The annexation of Dalmatia to the lands of the Hungarian crown was repeatedly demanded by the Hungarian public law (independence) opposition throughout the Dualist era. In 1889, Rezső Havass provided a new ideological foundation for this (with appeals not only to public law but also to economic arguments), and he continued to emphasize this view in the following decades, but unlike Pesty, he wanted to annex the province to the Hungarian crown on the basis of the 1868 Hungarian-Croatian Compromise (whereas Pesty would have attached it directly to Hungary, together with Slavonia). Havass’ vision harmonized with Croatian interests (at the time, Croats accounted for more than 80 percent of Dalmatia’s population, and they were also in the majority in the seaside cities and even in the leadership positions in the seaside cities). The issue remained on the agenda in the press, however, and during World War I, the idea of annexing other southern Slavic provinces to the Hungarian crown were also warmed up, as were the visions of other figures (such as Jenő Cholnoky and Gusztáv Beksics) concerning the creation of a great Hungarian empire. Cséry Lajos, for instance, nurtured these kinds of ideas in his 1915 booklet Új honfoglalás (A new conquest of a new homeland).56

In a book published in 1981, Bosnian Croatian historian Luka Đaković quoted minutes from meetings of the Hungarian Council of Ministers and claimed that the Hungarian government had already decided in 1915 to annex Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and even Slavonia to Hungary.57 Considering the delicate and complex public law relations and legal system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this claim has to be taken with reservations.

At a meeting on October 2, 1915, the Hungarian Council of Ministers did indeed deal with this important issue of public law.58 This urgency of the question was in part a product of the events of the war. The suggestion had been made that Russian Poland should be annexed to the monarchy, more precisely the Austrian part, and the Hungarian leadership feared that this might compromise Hungary’s position vis-à-vis Vienna. Balance could be reestablished, were this to happen, by annexing Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Hungarian crown. This question was discussed at this October meeting of the Council of Ministers, where Prime Minister István Tisza was granted authorization to make a statement on the matter at the joint ministerial meeting in Vienna. Tisza did just thus at a meeting on October 6.59 In my view, it is worth noting that the matter was not discussed behind the backs of the Croats, and indeed the document emphasizes that Tisza invited Baron Iván Skerlecz, the viceroy of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, “as a public law figure with an primary interest in the aforementioned group of questions.” At the Council of Ministers meeting, in connection with the annexation of Dalmatia to the Hungarian Crown, explicit and emphatic reference is made to Article XXX of the Law of 1868, which “almost obliges” the Hungarian party to annex the province to the Hungarian Crown, united with Croatia. The idea of annexing Slavonia directly to Hungary was indeed raised at the meeting, but mention of this is immediately followed in the minutes by the following text: “all these questions will have to be debated and determined at the time with the involvement of the competent Croatian-Slavonian and possibly Dalmatian figures.”60 Given the shaping ideas of the period, I think it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that there were no Croatian political figures (including Magyar-friendly Croatian politicians) who would have agreed to the annexation by Hungary of Slavonia. And without asking the Croatian Sabor, this major change in public law could not have been implemented anyway, and the document clearly indicates that the Hungarian government had no intention of consulting with the Croatian Sabor.

Hungarian ideas and political aspirations concerning Croatian national integration, tripartite plans, or the question of which part of the empire Dalmatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina should belong to became irrelevant with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. The newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes created a new situation. For the Croats, however, this new situation bore an important affinity with the old. Where earlier, they had had to contend with Austrian and Hungarian centers of power, now, they found themselves under the sway of a Serbian center of power.

Croatian Attempts to Integrate Bosnian Muslims in the Interwar Period and during World War II

Between the two World Wars, the issue was still unresolved in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.61 In many ways, the following contention by Ivo Banac reflects the reality of the earlier period of the rivalry between the Croat and Serb national projects for Muslims: “the Muslim masses in Bosnia instinctively felt that national alignment, whether to the Croat or the Serb side, was dividing their community, especially seeing as how the Croat-Serb conflict in Bosnia was particularly intense. Being a Serbian Muslim meant being anti-Croat and vice versa.”62 The Yugoslav state was firmly dominated by the Serbs between the two World Wars, and this had negative and even tragic consequences for Muslims as well (they suffered severe atrocities, including many deaths, at the hands of Serb nationalist extremists). The circumstances were particularly dire for the Muslim communities after the proclamation of a dictatorship by King Alexander in 1929. The Bosnian agrarian question took on a national dimension, and the land reform measures led to bloody clashes between Muslim landowners and Serb peasants, with the state power giving its support to the peasants.63 This may explain why, although the JMO (the Yugoslav Muslim Organisation), which was led by Mehmed Spaho64 and was the most powerful political party of the Muslim community, constantly tried to maneuver between Belgrade and Zagreb, most of the members of the Muslim intelligentsia at the time identified as Croats. Indeed, with the exception of Spaho, all the party’s MPs identified as Croats. (It is perhaps worth noting that Spaho insisted on his Muslim identity, in the national sense, but one of his brothers identified as Croat and the other as Serb.) Serbian politician Svetozar Pribičević wrote the following on this: “The (Muslim) intelligentsia is overwhelmingly Croatian-oriented, and the masses blindly follow the intelligentsia.”65

This was the period when Safvet beg Bašagić, who as a subject of the Habsburg Monarchy had not identified himself as either Croatian or a Serbian Bosnian, openly declared himself Croatian. In 1931, he published Znameniti Hrvati – Bošnjaci i Hercegovci u Turskoj carevini (Illustrious Croats – Bosniaks and Herzegovinians in the Turkish Empire) a biographical encyclopedia of Bosnian Muslims who had played significant roles in the Ottoman Empire.66

Bašagić was not the only Muslim intellectual to publish writings in the 1930s emphasizing the Croatian identity of Muslims, of course, and articles in this vein later proliferated in the press of the Independent State of Croatia. In 1936, for instance, Abdulatif Dizdarević wrote an article titled “Muslim Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” and Munir Šahinović Ekremov published an article titled “Muslims in the Past and Present of the Croatian Nation” in the 1938 yearbook of Croatian youth in Bosnia- Herzegovina.67 In 1938, Muhamed Hadžijahić published a book on Croatian Muslim literature before 1878 in Sarajevo.68

Naturally, Catholic Croatian authors also wrote many such works in the interwar period emphasizing the Croatian identities of Muslims. One could mention Stjepan Banović, who published a book in 1927 titled The Croatianness of the Old Dubrovnik and Bosnians and Herzegovinians, or Mladen Lorković, whose well-known work Narod i zemlja Hrvata (The country and lands of the Croats) treated Muslims as part of the Croatian nation, and Krunoslav Draganović, who expressed a similar view in his book Hrvati i Herceg-Bosna (Croats and Herzegovina), which he had published under the pseudonym Hrvoje Bošnjanin in 1940 (it was banned by the Yugoslav authorities).69

Tensions between Croatians and Serbians over Bosnia flared up in 1939, when, on the eve of World War II, the Croatian banovina was created as a step in the process towards the federalization of the previously centralized state (and as a compromise between Serbs and Croats that was intended to save the country). The question of the borders of this new political entity (which included not only historical Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia but also territories in Bosnia and Herzegovina) led to conflicts not only between Croats and Serbs, but also between Croats and Muslims and even among Croats. Many of the members of the Croatian Peasant Party, which had negotiated the compromise, were against it. They claimed that “a Free Croatia without Bosnia would be like a man without lungs,” or they argued against the partition of Bosnia, insisting that “within Croatia, Bosnia occupies a special place with Hercegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina are the core, the center, and the pillar of the Croatian territory (...) We will not allow Bosnia and Herzegovina to be partitioned!”70

When Bosnia was eventually partitioned, this caused great consternation among Muslims. Although they unquestionably bore resentment for the Croats, their anger was directed primarily at the Serbs. Croatian politician of the Peasant Party Vladimir Maček wanted a referendum to determine which part of the Yugoslav state Bosnia would belong to, but the Serbs, fearing defeat, refused to go along.71 Džafer Kulenović, who was Mehmed Spaho’s successor, suggested the creation of an autonomous and larger Bosnian federal entity, which would have included not only the parts earlier attached to Zeta and Drina banovinas (in 1939), but also the parts of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar that were inhabited by a Muslim majority. The Bosnian demand for autonomy increased after the great disappointment with the Croatian elite, and these endeavors indicated that unity based on religious grounds had come to the fore.

After Yugoslavia had been shattered by the Axis powers in World War II, Bosnia became part of the Independent State of Croatia. In 1939, the Ustaše was still strongly opposed to the partition of Bosnia. They espoused Starčević’s views and considered the Muslims and the entire province to be Croatian. Ante Pavelić, Prime Minister of the puppet state, referred to Muslims as the flower of the Croatian nation, and there were Muslims who, claiming to be Croats, played a leading role in the Ustaše government. Muslims were not unambiguously supportive of the Ustaše state and dictatorship (soon, masses of Croats turned against them). Horrific massacres of the inhabitants of Muslim villages by the Serbian nationalist royalist rebels, the Chetniks, drove Muslim crowds to the side of the Ustaše during the war (from which the Croatian state could not protect them), but there were still some initiatives among them for autonomy from the Croatian state, since they felt that, the rhetoric and praise notwithstanding, they had been given no real access to state power. They wanted to establish an autonomous Bosnia with German help and to create their own armed forces.72 The Nazi invaders went so far as to form an SS division (the Handsar Division) that was composed for the most part of Bosnian Muslims, with a small number of Croats, but this division was then taken to fight in France (it was later brought back, but it quickly soon crumbled in the fight against the partisans). By the end of the war, many of them ended up in the partisan formations fighting under Tito.

The Failure of the Croatian National Integration Experiment after World War II: The Rise of an Independent Bosnian Nation

In May 1945, as the war slowly ground to a halt, Croatian Ustaše troops fleeing to Austria were handed over by the British to the communist partisans, who quickly slaughtered tens of thousands of them. Many of the Croatian troops were Muslims.73 Muslim intellectuals who identified as Croats were either killed in the war or forced to emigrate. The Croatian attempt to integrate Bosnian Muslims into the Croatian nation thus lost any real foundation, if for no other reason than simply because the Tito government resolutely blocked it and granted Bosnia-Herzegovina the status of a separate republic (though initially it did not declare Muslims a separate nation, but rather merely added them to the number of people belonging to the category of “unspecified Yugoslav nationality”). The Yugoslav communist leadership did not support the integration of Muslims into the Serbian nation either (though many Muslim intellectuals followed this path in the leadership of the new state between 1945 and roughly 1965, mainly because of Serbian dominance within the party leadership in Bosnia). Finally, in the 1960s, the call for the recognition of Muslims as a separate nation became stronger and stronger, both among Muslims and in the party leadership. This recognition was officially granted in 1968. They were referred to as Muslims with a capital M, which was a significant step, as according to the rules of spelling in Croatian and Serbian, the names of nations are written with a capital letter, while the same term would designate religious affiliation if written with a lower-case first letter. The term Bosnian only began to be used as a designation of a nation after 1990.

For Croatian politicians and writers in exile and even for some Croatian nationalists still living in Yugoslavia, time stood still. They were not willing to acknowledge that in Bosnia and among the Muslim community in Bosnia, nationalist aspirations for independence (aspirations which earlier had perhaps often been latent but had also at times been quite evident) were beginning to rise to the fore. Croatian émigrés, who were opposed to the communist regime in Croatia, may well have believed that this behavior on the part of Muslims was merely a consequence of the dictatorship and that once this dictatorship had been overthrown, Muslims would “come back” to the Croatian nation. In an article titled “Herceg-Bosna i Hrvatska” (Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia), which was published by Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review) in Buenos Aires in 1963, exiled Franciscan historian Dominik Mandić’s argued for the Croatian origin and nationality of Muslims. Mandić proposed that Bosnia and Herzegovina should be an autonomous entity within a newly independent Croatian state.74 Émigré authors such as Kazimir Katalinić and Ivo Korsky were still firmly convinced that Muslims were the “flower of the Croatian nation.”75 Admittedly, in its 1988 program, the Croatian Republican Party in exile had written about the relationship between Muslim and Catholic Croats and Bosnia and the more “narrowly understood” Croatia that “despite their identical Croatian origins, historical events have given these two parts of Croatia different characteristics.” The party therefore suggested that the territory of the then Croatian Socialist Republic and Bosnia-Herzegovina should be transformed into a Croatian federal state consisting of two parts.76

Franjo Tuđman, one of the Croatian politicians living in Yugoslavia (for a time in a state of internal exile), also embraced the notion that the Muslim communities of the region would identify as Croats if given the chance. Tuđman had fought as a member of the partisans during the war. He then served in Tito’s regime before falling afoul of the dictatorship and even being imprisoned. He served as the first president of independent Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and he was in office when the referendum on Croatian independence was held in 1991. In his 1982 book Nacionalno pitanje u suvremenoj Europi (The National Question in Contemporary Europe), Tuđman claimed that the “vast majority of the Muslim population... when given the opportunity, always considered themselves part of the Croatian nation.” He also insisted that Bosnia was “the natural hinterland of Croatia, and its separation from Croatia had fatal consequences.”77

In his book, Tuđman proposed that, just as multi-ethnic Vojvodina or Albanian-majority Kosovo were part of Serbia as autonomous provinces, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina should form a federal entity within Yugoslavia. However, when Yugoslavia broke up in 1991–92, the Muslim Bosnian political elite did not cherish the political aspirations that Zagreb had expected them to have. In an attempt to give expression to its own interests, Bosnia-Herzegovina first tried to stay out of the war, and when this failed in the wake of the Serbian invasion, it was compelled to enter into an alliance with the Croats.

Attempts to implement the various international plans for the internal partition of Bosnia (the Vance-Owen plan, the Owen-Stoltenberg plan, etc.) turned Croats and Bosnians (who had been allies of a sort) against each other, in part simply because the manner in which these plans were implemented depended almost entirely on circumstances on the ground, or in other words, if there were armed Croats on the ground, a Croatian administration was set up, if there were armed Serbs, a Serbian administration, and if there were armed Bosnians, a Bosnian administration. The proposal made to the Croatian side by Slobodan Milošević regarding the partition of Bosnia (which from a territorial point of view was simply the 1939 solution, which meant a loss of land for the Muslim side) only exacerbated the situation.

The war which broke out between Croats and Bosnians in late 1992 and early 1993, which involved a number of serious acts of war on both sides (Croats in and around Mostar, Bosnians in central Bosnia), only came to an end in 1994 in large part as a consequence of US mediation. In the Washington Agreement, peace was concluded between the Croatian and Bosnian sides (the following year, they fought together again against the Bosnian Serb forces). They also agreed to establish a Bosnian-Croat Federation, which was enshrined in the Dayton Peace Treaty of December 14, 1995. The armed confrontation, which lasted a few months and did not include all the areas where Bosnians and Croats lived together (for instance, in Tuzla and the Sava River region, Bosnians and Croats continued to fight together against Serbian forces), finally put an indisputable end to the centuries-old Croatian attempts to integrate the Muslims of the region into the Croatian nation and the Croatian national narrative and relegated the idea of a Croat Bosnia to the world of historical myth.78

Archival Sources

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Haus-, Hof und Staatsarchiv (HHStA)

Politisches Archiv I (PAI)

Kt. 459 Titkos iratok [Geheimakten] Liasse IX. Bosznia-
Hercegovinára vonatkozó iratok 1877–1883.

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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.

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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