Paul Lendvai - The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat

The Hungarians

PAUL LENDVAI

The Hungarians

A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat

TRANSLATED BY ANN MAJOR

Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey

Published in North America, South America, and the Philippine Islands by

Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

English translation first published in the United Kingdom by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, London

Originally published as Die Ungarn. Ein Jahrtausend Sieger in Niederlagen by

C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich, 1999

Copyright 2003 by Paul Lendvai

All rights reserved.

The right of Paul Lendvai to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number 2002110218

ISBN 0-691-11406-4

This book has been composed in Bembo by Word Pro, Pondicherry, India

www.pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in Scotland

7 9 10 8 6

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11969-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-691-11969-4 (pbk.)

Contents

Illustrations

Between pages 284 and 285

Maps

Foreword to the English Edition

Hungary is a country with a fascinating and complex, often chilling and sometimes inspiring history. I was born and brought up in Budapest, and my early life as a child and as a young man was directly and indirectly shaped by the demons of nationalism and ethnic hatred which have presented themselves in Central and Eastern Europe in many different guisesFascism, Nazism, Communism and post-Communist ferment. But even in this volatile corner of Europe, Hungary has repeatedly stunned the world beyond all expectations and lived up to its time-honoured reputation of being a country of extraordinary contradictions.

After my flight to Vienna, after the crushing of the 1956 October Revolution I have worked as a foreign correspondent (with twenty-two years on the Financial Times), and as a political writer and television commentator I have been able to observe both the political earthquakes in this region and the corresponding shifts in attitudes to national history. My main intention in this book, which was first published in German in 1999, was to avoid sweeping generalisations and to provide a truthful and dispassionate account, even of policies and actions which I deplore.

As a Hungarian-born Austrian author with Jewish parents and an English wife, now living in Vienna, but travelling and lecturing frequently around the world, I have always tried to avoid excessive partisanship for any nation or cause. The insights offered here into the often turbulent 1,100 years of Hungarian history, the elements of myth-making, the astonishing and enduring intellectual achievements and the beliefs about some divinely-ordered mission to discharge in the Danube basin have been formulated neither with cynical indifference nor with partiality for any particular group but in an effort to present a balanced picture. The fact that The Hungarians has also been published recently in Hungarian, Czech and Romanian convinces me that my effort to contribute, however modestly, to the study of Central Europe has been worthwhile.

I wish to record my gratitude to the Raiffeisen Zentralbank in Vienna and to the Government of Austria for their generous assistance in funding the translation costs of this book from German to English. I am grateful to the Hungarian Ministry of Cultural Heritage for its considerable financial contribution to the production costs of my study. Last but not least, I must thank Ann Major for her excellent translation and Christopher Hurst, the London publisher, for his personal engagement and expert editing of this book.

Introduction

The existence, the very survival, of the Hungarian people and their nation state in the Carpathian basin is a miracle of European history. There are few, if any, nations whose image has been shaped by so many and such contradictory clichs, spun during the course of centuries and epochs, as that of the Magyars. How did child-devouring cannibals and bloodthirsty Huns become the defenders of the Christian West and heroic freedom fighters against the Mongols, Turks and Russians? Who were these Asiatic barbarians who had spread dread and alarm during their forays from Switzerland to France and from Germany to Italy, yet did not sink into oblivion with the last migratory wave from Asia?

Their ancient homeland, their origins, the roots of their language, and the reason for their migration and settlement are still subjects of controversy. However, it can hardly be doubted that, except for the Albanians, the Magyars are the most lonely people of Europe with their unique language and history. Arthur Koestler, who dreamed in Hungarian but wrote his books in German and later in English, once said: The peculiar intensity of their existence can perhaps be explained by this exceptional loneliness. To be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis. This many-faceted loneliness has remained the decisive factor in Hungarian history ever since the Conquest around 896. The fear of the slow death of a small nation, of the Hungarians extinction and of the consequences of the forced amputation of entire communities due to lost wars (every third person of Hungarian origin lives abroad) forms the background of the prevalence of death images in poetry and prose.

Myths, legends and folk traditions concealed or distorted reality, but at the same time these myths shaped history in this region, moulding the concept of the nation. A varied relationship, at times crowned by brilliant successes and at others shaped by tragic conflicts, was set in motion between locals and conquerors, newcomers and the excluded under the crown of St Stephen as the symbol of the so-called political nation. The interaction between open borders and isolation, between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between the feeling of aloneness and sense of mission, between fear of death and rebellion against stronger adversaries, was impressively mirrored in the changing times and culture of Hungarys history. A long chain of crucial defeats strengthened the sense of defencelessness (We are the most forsaken of all peoples on this earth, said Petfi, the national poet) that has imbued almost every generation of Magyars with deep-rooted pessimism. The devastation of the country after being repeatedly left in the lurch by the West during the Mongol invasion of 1241, the catastrophe of Mohcs in 1526 with the consequent Ottoman occupation lasting a century and a half, the crushing of the War of Independence in 18489 by the united forces of Austria and Russia, the destruction of historical Hungary through the harsh terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, more than four decades of Soviet rule and Communism after the Second World War, together with the bloody suppression of the October revolution of 1956all were catastrophes, which time and again intensified the feeling of abandonment. Yet who could dispute this peoples endurance and mastery of the art of survival?

Despite the threefold carving up of the country during centuries of foreign occupation, the Hungarians managed to preserve their national identity. It was passionate love of their country that gave them the strength to survive when surrounded by Germans and Slavs, without relatives and isolated by the Chinese Wall of their language, and to weather these catastrophes. One of the keys to understanding the rise and fall of Hungary from the Conquest till the end of the First World War, but also the rapidly alternating radical changes between 1920 and 1990, is the exhortation (drawn up around 1030, probably by a German monk) addressed by the first Christian king from the rpd dynasty, St Stephen, to his son: