Appetizer to Hungarian History

For half a century beginning in 899, the Magyars — the name Hungarians call themselves — ravaged Europe. Fierce horsemen from the East, they penetrated German lands, northern Italy and France. An ardent prayer of the time implores, “From the arrows of the Hungarians, O Lord, deliver us.” “La Chanson de Roland” calls them “breeds of Satan.”

Then in 955 the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great won a resounding victory over them at Lechfeld near Augsburg and the Magyars did what no other band of horsemen who had scourged Europe did — they settled down and created their own nation.

Hungary’s first Christian king, István (Stephen) I, descendant of Arpad the greatest of the Magyar pagan tribal leaders, received his crown from the pope on Christmas Day in 1000. In 1083, 46 years after his death, he was canonized, the first of eight saints of the House of Arpad before the dynasty came to an end in 1301.

Hungarian history, like most others, is full of blood and daring, errors and triumph.

A thread running through Hungary’s history: the strong feeling of Magyar “aloneness” in Europe, being sandwiched between Slavs and Germans, peoples who speak languages in no way related to Hungarian.

Hungary is thought of as the legendary land of gypsy violin music, of dashing men and beautiful women, and romantic nights in small Budapest cafes on winding cobblestone streets near the Danube. But it is also a place where much that’s tragic has happened. It’s a country, where, on occasion, heroism has been exemplary and heart rending — as in the ill-fated Revolution of 1956. At the same time it is a nation whose past has its unlovely and downright ugly moments.

An example of ugliness would be the blind nationalist fervor that hit Hungary during its 19th-century revival. István Horvát, professor at the country’s leading university, represents that fervor at its most extreme. His books and lectures on Hungary’s early history inspired an entire generation. What did he teach his students eager for Hungarian history? That the Magyars played a part in world history that few were aware of. Adam and Eve spoke Hungarian in the Garden of Eden. Homer, the poet of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” according to Horvát, was Hungarian, and so was Hercules. This is nonsense, of course, but easily explained as what happens when a nation, after centuries of stagnation, was busy reinventing itself and its past.

Often, Hungarian history has been tragic. On at least two occasions, the Magyars have been nearly wiped out, first in the Mongol invasion of 1241 and then again in 1526 when the Turks defeated the Hungarians at the battle of Mohács. Devastation and depopulation followed both events and recovery took many years.

But tragedy has come in other forms, too. The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 was put down severely by Russian troops in 1849. And in an instance of history repeating itself — Soviet troops with equally cold severity destroyed a rebellion against totalitarian rule that had caught the imagination and sympathy of much of the world.

Both Russian invasions brought an end to periods of great hope and optimism in Hungary. The 1849 invasion brought Hungary’s “First Reform Generation” — whose leading figures included the statesman Lajos Kossuth and the poet Sándor Petofi — and its hopes for a free and progressive Hungary to a violent end. The Russian tanks of 1956 shut down, for the time being, attempts to at least liberalize the communist system in Hungary, since eliminating it was not an option.

The deepest national trauma has been inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 - a trauma that the passing of years has not lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, but are now part of history.

History’s many disasters had a permanent effect on the Hungarian spirit. Like its linguistic isolation from its Slavic and German neighbors, they underlined Magyar separation and its lack of connection with the rest of Europe. István Széchenyi, the great Hungarian reformers of the 19th century offered this haunting warning to his countrymen, “Egyedül vagyunk” — “We are alone.”

After the failure of 1956, the Hungarian writer Tibor Déry remarked: “What is Hungarianness? A joke dancing over catastrophes,” a statement that captures one aspect of Hungarian separation and pessimism. Another is captured by the 20th-century author, Arthur Koestler, who was born in Hungary and lived much of his life elsewhere, but claimed always to have dreamed in Hungarian: “The peculiar intensity of their existence can perhaps be explained by this exceptional loneliness. To be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis.”

Yet after all of its tragic experiences, Hungary came back. The nation enjoyed one of its greatest periods in the late 15th century under its great Renaissance monarch, king Mátyás (Mathias), the man chosen by Hungarians to this day as their most admired ruler. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a flowering of Hungarian culture and intellectual life known as the Second Reform Generation that included such figures as the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and the man often regarded as the greatest of all Hungarian poets, Endre Ady.

And now, half a century after 1956, Hungary has shed off communism, joined the NATO and the European Union. Great achievements for a people who have always seen themselves as more western European than belonging to the east.

One of the major themes of Magyar history is how the definition of what it meant to be Hungarian came to be, certainly by the 19th century, a linguistic question.

After two cataclysmic invasions — the Mongol and the Turkish — and the subsequent immigration by Germans, Serbs, Croats, and many others, the country and its people were very diverse indeed, and many of those who called themselves Magyar chose to do so, leaving behind a German or Slavic past in favor of “Magyarhood.”

Hungarians “by choice” included some of the most famous Magyars. The poet Sándor Petofi, the beloved hero of the Revolution of 1848, was born Petrovics (his ancestors were Slavs) and took his Hungarian name as late as 1842. The composer Franz Liszt, too, was a Hungarian by choice. Liszt didn’t know Magyar, though he started studying the language in 1829. He is said to have stopped at his fifth lesson when he learned that the word in Hungarian for unshakeability is tántoríthatatlanság, a mouthful he evidently found un-pronounceable.

The major problems of 19th-century Hungarian history were the reinvention of the language after centuries of disuse, except among the peasantry, and the problem of land reform. Hungarian nobles, of which there were many, owned a lion’s share of the nation’s property and the lower classes next to none.

The nobles also had many “ancient” rights — to hold office, for example — while the peasantry had none at all. Most of 19th century and much of the country’s 20th-century history was the story of the upper classes to give an inch when it came to property and rights.

Another central issue is Hungary’s minorities (Croats, Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, and others) and the role they played in Hungary’s 19th and 20th-century history. In no Central European nation were Jews more free and more quickly assimilated that they were in 19th century Hungary. It was a different story in the 20th, when Jewish quota laws were enacted after World War I and in 1944-45, when nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were transferred to Auschwitz.

It is worth looking over the great personalities of Hungarian history. To mention just one, a non-Hungarian: Elisabeth, the wife of Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary until his death in 1916. Elisabeth — affectionately referred to as Sisy — was loved in Hungary. She learned the language and could speak it well. She often said that nowhere in the world did she feel at home but at the Royal Family’s Hungarian estate. Her assassination in Geneva in 1898 was a painful event for Hungarians.

Lastly, it is interesting to find out how many Hungarian scientists and artists rised to great success abroad during the 20th century. The impressive list includes the great physicists Edward Teller and Leo Szilard.

You can collect a long list of names of Hollywood’s Hungarians: the director George Cukor, for example, and the actor Leslie Howard, whose original name was László Steiner. This is where we have to mention the names of two of the film industry’s greatest cinematographers, who are Hungarian: Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács.

If you like, find out more about the remarkable Hungarian literature and of the great Second Reform Generation. You might want to start with Imre Madách’s 19th-century play, “The Tragedy of Man,” or by reading great poets, like Endre Ady and Attila József, Hungary’s great 20th-century poets.

Main source: The Hungarians - A Thousand Years of Victory and Defeat by Paul Lendvai