Abstract
European Studies
Norman Stone is a Cambridge-educated Oxford historian who has been living abroad for a number of years, first as Professor of History in Ankara at Bilkent University and lately a freelance historian in Hungary. It is not clear whether his present residence influenced the choice of his new subject, a history of (mainly) nineteenth- to twentieth-century Hungary, or the other way round: did he decide to settle in Hungary because of a large honorarium he drew from a foundation supported by the present Hungarian government? In either case, it is to be praised that he found time to write a short new history of this small central European nation torn between conflicts of East and West.
Stone’s style is swift, often witty and his narrative is based mostly on facts, not on presumptions or hypotheses. This is a virtue of the book, which progresses in leaps and bounds rather than by thorough analysis of historical events. This is particularly true for the first 28 pages which give us the ‘setting’, i.e. the history of the Kingdom of Hungary, including Transylvania, up to 1850. In this chapter Stone, who was born in Glasgow, quite rightly stresses the role of Protestants, especially Calvinists, in the Hungarian language revival of the late 1700s and early 1800s, but fails to attribute enough importance to the role of such revolutionary firebrands as Sándor Petőfi in the events of March 1848. Another omission concerns Poles. Although Stone mentions Nicholas I’s preoccupation with a possible Polish revolution instigated by the Hungarian struggle for independence, he fails to point out what must have annoyed the Tsar and ultimately caused him to intervene in Hungary: the participation of two leading Polish generals and an entire Polish legion in the Austro-Hungarian War of 1848–9. As for Habsburg retribution after 1849, Stone does not curb his language talking about the ‘stupid vindictiveness’ of the Austrians, including the hanging of 13 generals who had fought in the Hungarian revolutionary army.
The book’s quick pace slows down in the second half of the nineteenth century and this is the least controversial part of this occasionally too rapid survey of regional history. Although the name of Garibaldi (an important one for Hungarian history) is sadly missing, Stone explains the reasons for the Compromise of 1867, which transformed centralized Austrian rule into the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, an agreement which held out for over 40 years and was destroyed only by the break-up of the Monarchy at the end of a lost war. From Stone’s analysis it transpires why Hungary started a war which promised no territorial gains or economic improvement for the country: the Monarchy, or rather István Tisza the Prime Minister, hitched Hungary’s waggon firmly to the Germans. In the Versailles Treaty not only was Germany handled ‘absurdly clumsily’, but also Hungary, losing two-thirds of its territory. While the partition of the Kingdom of Hungary was inevitable with the military collapse of Germany and its allies, the borders were drawn entirely on un-Wilsonian principles, ignoring the wishes of large ethnic communities. That is why territorial revision became the basic political aspiration of the post-1920 Hungarian regime under Admiral Horthy, and why the country ended up once again in a disastrous German alliance.
Norman Stone makes a brave effort to disentangle the web of Hungary’s involvement in the Second World War and can see that at least a part of the Hungarian elite resisted German admonishments to increase anti-Jewish persecution which eventually led to Hitler’s invasion of Hungary in 1944. He does not gloss over the double responsibility of Hungarian politicians (not only of Bárdossy who brought Hungary into the war) for the worst possible endgame. In this he contradicts present-day Hungarian politicians who blame the Germans for almost everything that happened after 1938, and even more after March 1944, when the Wehrmacht marched into Hungary. He is wrong on a number of issues, e.g. describing the June 1944 regulations as ‘ghettoization’. The so-called ‘yellow star-houses’ meant state control over the Jews of Budapest, but only a semi-ghetto-like existence: until the Arrow-Cross Fascist takeover in mid-October, Jews were not restricted in their movements during daylight. The Budapest Ghetto itself was finally set up by Szálasi, the Hungarian Fascist leader who resisted the wholesale deportation of Budapest Jews (from the provinces they had been deported to Auschwitz months earlier, when Horthy was still in power), saying ‘they should work for us, not for the Germans’. This, however, does not diminish the role of marauding Arrow-Cross gangs responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews in the capital.
Hungary’s postwar history is discussed fairly objectively, but on p. 162 there is a serious error: Stone alleges that the People’s Courts set up after 1945 sentencing war criminals carried out 500 executions. What he fails to mention is that out of these only in 189 cases were the sentences actually carried out. Also the role of Rákosi, the Hungarian mini-Stalin, in getting back Hungarian gold from the United States, absolutely necessary for the stabilization of the currency, goes unmentioned. (This is something for which Stalin never forgave the otherwise subservient Hungarian Communist leader.) Where Norman Stone is less than reliable is unfortunately the events of the year 1956: on p. 190 he claims that the Soviets did not insist on Imre Nagy’s expulsion from the Communist Party, but on the next page we read that during a public debate at the Petőfi Circle ‘Nagy’s reinstatement in the Party was demanded.’ (The latter statement is correct: Nagy was eventually readmitted to the Party only a few weeks before the revolution in 1956.) Describing the events of 22–23 October, Stone omits the role of the Technological University where the students’ demands were first formulated and – alas – gives the wrong date for the time of the second Soviet intervention: it is 4 November, not 3 November, 1956.
This history of Hungary is full of misspellings of Hungarian words, some of them persistent. On p. 177 alone there are four of them. The photographic section (for which apparently the author himself bears no responsibility) is a disaster, the first photo already containing an obvious misspelling (‘Angyanföld’ instead of ‘Angyalföld’) and the rest giving a false image of modern Hungarian history. There is a photo of Horthy and his family, a picture of Rákosi (carried in front of a Communist demonstration); no Imre Nagy, but two photos of Viktor Orbán, the present Prime Minister of Hungary. Profile Books could have made a better job with a more responsible editor of a book which in many ways is a useful complement to The Will to Survive, Sir Bryan Cartledge’s masterly history of Hungary.