Chicago of the Balkans

Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900-1939

Gwen Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351572163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

At the point of its creation in 1873, Budapest was intended to be a pleasant rallying point of orderliness, high culture and elevated social principles: the jewel in the national crown. From the turn of the century to World War II, however, the Hungarian capital was described, variously, as: Judapest, the sinful city, not in Hungary, and the Chicago of the Balkans. This is the first English-language study of competing metropolitan narratives in Hungarian literature that spans both the liberal late Habsburg and post-liberal, 'Christian-national' eras, at the same time as the 'Jewish Question' became increasingly inseparable from representations of the city. Works by writers from a wide variety of backgrounds are discussed, from Jewish satirists to icons of the radical Right, representatives of conservative national schools, and modernist, avant-garde and 'peasantist' authors. Gwen Jones is Hon. Research Associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Four years before World War I, eight years prior to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, and a good decade earlier than the golden age of organized crime in Chicago, Lajos Hatvany reflected on the place of Hungarians and Hungarian culture on the periphery of Europe, in the seminal literary journal Nyugat [West, 1908—41]. In 'Magyar irodalom a külföld előtt' [Hungarian Literature before Foreign Lands, 1910], he imagined an exchange with an educated European — specifically, a German — regarding perceptions of his home country:

Ez a szó: Magyarország — eleve és utólag valami korcsmában látott maszatos olajnyomat bizonytalan képzetét kelti. Sivár pusztai tájon tekintélyes nyáj legelész az ösztövér gémeskút körül, — a magyar költő ezt óriási szúnyoghoz hasonlítja, amely az öreg föld vérét szívja ki, kócos-lompos birkabőr-subákba burkólozott parasztok is állnak ott, nagy pipákból pöfékelők, — az egész kép megmártva vöröses alkonyi fényben. [...] Magyarország 1867 óta kezdetleges földművelő népből magasabb rendűvé emelkedett, — a közgazdasági gyarapodás, haladás korszaka ez. Ez korszaka az ország európ... az amerikaiasodásának idcjc. Budapest a Balkán Chicagójává lesz.¹

[This word — Hungary — summons up, in advance and subsequently, the uncertain idea of a greasy stain seen in some tavern. A sizeable herd grazes on bleak plains around the lean shadoof, which the Hungarian poet compares to a huge mosquito sucking out the blood of the old land, while peasants wrapped in unkempt, shaggy sheepskin coats also stand there, puffing on great pipes, and the whole picture is steeped in a reddish twilight. [...] Since 1867, Hungary has risen from a rudimentary agricultural people to a higher rank: this is the era of economic growth and progress. This era is the time of the country's Europ... its Americanization. Budapest will become the Chicago of the Balkans.]

Baron Hatvany (1880—1961), a critic, novelist, and early sponsor of Nyugat, described Hungary primarily in its relation to western Europe. Budapest is knowingly located within an absurd contradiction, between a place of dynamism and mobility, overnight megacity of the new world connecting east with west, and a culturally diverse peninsula or offshoot, a dusty hinterland characterized by hierarchy and obscurity (in Hungarian, balkán conveys largely pejorative connotations of backwardness, but also spontaneity, disorder, and abandon).² There was nothing new in Hatvany's comparison of Budapest with Chicago. The modernization and 'Americanization' of urban life concerned intellectuals across Europe from the last decade of the nineteenth century, at which time the outer reaches of Erzsébetváros, the district of inner-city Pest that attracted numerous incomers, were nicknamed 'Csikágó' (a Hungarianization of Chicago): it was the speed with which this residential part of Pest was built in the late 1890s that inspired the comparison with Chicago, rather than the later connotations of organized crime, seediness, and even the jazz era of the 1920s.³ Hatvany's position embraces the irony of a metropolis on the margins, its iconoclasm and productive forces of assimilation attempting to leave the provinces and the past far behind. At the same time, he reaffirms the city's location at the heart of the modern Magyar experiment, for which literature provides crucial form and content: 'Az új szók új embert teremtenek és az új ember új országot teremt' (New words create new men and new men create new countries].⁴

A reading of this short passage, excerpts from an essay extolling the early twentieth-century new wave in Hungarian verbal art, introduces the subject matter of this book: the ways in which Hungarian intellectuals depicted their capital city in narrative fiction and non-fiction from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War II. Following the 1867 Compromise, the cities of Pest, Buda and Óbuda were unified in 1873 to create Budapest, a confident new urban centre and capital city that was to embody the aspirations of Hungarian liberalism. By 1910, successive waves of migration had created the eighth largest and second fastest-growing city in pre-World War I Europe,⁵ transforming Budapest into a dynamic, and primarily Hungarian-speaking, city, synonymous with all that was new. The period between 1867 and 1914 was 'without doubt the golden age of Hungarian Jewry and, some claim, of Hungarian culture generally'.⁶ The city's upward trajectory indicated grander aspirations: Budapest was becoming, at least by local standards, a Weltstadt. Yet at the same time as Hungarian society became increasingly dominated by its fast-growing modern capital, it also became more receptive to critiques of industrial society and suspicious of 'alien' values.

Budapest existed in two very different contexts in the period discussed here: as the Hungarian capital and second city of the Habsburg monarchy until 1918⁷ and, following the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, two short-lived revolutionary incarnations and the proclamation in November 1919 of the punishment of the 'bűnös város' [sinful city], as the capital of a much smaller, homogeneous state from 1920, the 'whipping-boy' of Admiral Miklós Horthy's interwar Hungary,⁸ a non-place frequently demoted to the realm of a noxious alien 'spirit', eventually decoupled from any positive national identification and emptied of 'Hungarian' qualities. At the same time, the Interessengemeinschaft between Jews and non-Jews was gradually undone during the interwar years by a variety of rhetorical and legal means, culminating with the introduction of a series of dissimilatory, racist anti-Jewish laws in 1920, and later from 1938 onwards. If Budapest had been a positive model of assimilation, and the pride of Hungarian liberals until the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, post-liberal Budapest and its Jewish inhabitants were subjected to a battery of loyalty tests. Paradoxically, it was precisely Budapest's function as the motor of Hungarianization and modernization that generated denunciation of its 'character' and allegiances.

This book presents a diachronic analysis of Budapest narratives in prose and polemics over these four decades, spanning the turn of the twentieth century and decline of liberalism, as well as the post-liberal 'Christian-national' era. At the heart of this study is a debate about the institutions of national life and Jewish assimilation: antipathy towards metropolitan culture was consistently linked to the fear that Jews had assimilated too successfully. Throughout the period under consideration, the capital city occupied a focal place in modern national imaginings, and functioned as a metonymic device for discussions of morality, assimilation, belonging, race, and the nature and purpose of art. My aim is to illustrate the ways in which writers engaged with their capital city and, rather than distribute texts and ideas into neat pro-and anti-Budapest camps, or as expressions of Westernizing versus autochthonous traditions,⁹ I am interested in how various representations moved between understandings of modernization and assimilation, the growth of the middle class and what would be understood as the 'usurpation' of space by Hungarian Jews, the desire to reconquer the city, and its eventual rebirth as the embodiment of a 'pure' nation. It was in Hungary's capital that the sublime ideal of the nation-state was to be realized, even after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which cut the territory and population of the new Hungarian state by around two-thirds.¹⁰ This severance of the link between state and nation radicalized ideas that were already in circulation, transforming moral concerns into political action, yet the post-liberal era drew heavily from earlier Enlightenment and liberal notions on the perfectibility of life and its institutions. Moreover, competing visions of what the Hungarian capital was, what it was not, and how it should be, survived this period as sources of political and intellectual discord in Hungary, and continue to be intimately linked to debates over Hungary's location and orientation in relation to central and western Europe.¹¹

While these metaphors dominated ideas about the capital city's relationship to the nation, modernist writers who were not interested in dramatizing such concerns frequently sought to locate Budapest's uniqueness away from the centres of power, and, in their search for community and belonging in the metropolis, turned their attentions to the physical form of the city, its districts, different parts of town or even individual streets. These works tended to experiment with innovations in form as well as the city's colloquial speech and humour, and denied the imposition of any one kind of narrative authority.

The texts read here are works of fiction, polemics or autobiography set in Budapest, the narrative and thematic structure of which is informed by the city, or, more precisely, the writer's relationship with the city. This is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of Budapest literature; the city was the subtext, if not necessarily the location, for a much larger body of works than those discussed here.¹² I have chosen narrative works that thematize the metropolis itself, and popular concerns axiomatic to the anomalies of urbanization in Hungary. I discuss writers from a wide variety of ethnic and class backgrounds, from Jewish satirists to icons of the radical Right, representatives of conservative national schools, as well as modernist, avant-garde and 'peasantist' authors. What these intellectuals shared was a certain unease regarding Budapest, a city that always seemed somehow to disappoint. Whether it was compared to Vienna,¹³ the capital of the western half of the Dual Monarchy, or later to the Hungarian town or an idealized vision of the city, Budapest was found wanting, being neither one thing nor the other. It was this quality of being 'in between' things that was best exemplified by the idea of the 'Chicago of the Balkans'. This ambiguity was ever present, for the champions of assimilation and modern art such as Hatvany, as well as for the interwar thinkers who proposed that the city be made judenrein to redeem it.¹⁴

Cities: virtue, vice, and beyond good and evil

In European thought, the city may be regarded as the source of light and progress, a refuge from what Marx termed the idiocy of rural life.¹⁵ Accordingly, it is embraced for its diversity of pleasures, peoples and cultures, its opportunities for the (re-) creation of the self, or as the focus of a desire to improve life and its institutions: 'If cities are civilisation, they are also the cultural instrumentality by which humanity has attempted, since Neolithic times, to achieve a higher, more inclusive concept of humanity'.¹⁶ On the other hand, the city may also be a symbol of man's estrangement from God, a place where everything is for sale, a place of bloodletting, sin and folly, and Babylon, 'the first to be struck in the war between the Lord and the powers of the world'.¹⁷ For many, cities were the 'unnatural setting for the anonymous interaction of an alienated population',¹⁸ and pre-industrial cities were not exempt from being associated with chaos and trade in commodities of questionable moral character.¹⁹ In his influential 1963 essay 'The Idea of the City in European Thought: From Voltaire to Spengler', Carl Schorske expands on these two strands in European dialogues with urban life since the eighteenth century.²⁰ The first presented the city as civilized virtue, industry and higher culture, a view formulated by the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Adam Smith and Fichte. The second, a counter-current to the first, excoriated the city as the source of all vice. A fear of 'mammonism', a revolt against mechanistic rationalism, or a cult of Nature, were to be found in the ideas of Engels, the English Romantic poets, Freytag, Langbehn, Proudhon, Tolstoy and Zola. A third mode of thought placed the city, the 'essential ground of modern existence', beyond good and evil, and here Schorske cites Baudelaire and Rilke, Nietzsche and Spengler as authors who 'challenged the validity of traditional morality, social thought, and art', for whom the city had to be experienced fully in one's own person.

While the late nineteenth-century ideas and texts discussed a little later in this introductory chapter may be regarded as examples of the first school of thought (city as virtue)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Translations and Terminology
• Budapest by District
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Becoming pesti at the Turn of the Century
• 3 Fragments (I)
• 4 Revolutions and Conquest
• 5 Fragments (II)
• 6 Private Misery, Public Conflict
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index