Hungarian Conservative

With their fearless undertaking on 15–16 July in 1931, György Endresz and Sándor Magyar forever etched their names into the annals of Hungarian and global aviation.

‘Szekfű described “capitalism” as “having grown in size over time, becoming a more and more fearsome monster, creating factories and cramming hundreds of thousands and millions of people into the unhealthy, immoral air of smoky cities. And the longer the unrestricted freedom proclaimed by liberalism lasts, the more freely the capitalist big business devours the little ones, the more freely it exploits the economic weaklings, especially the workers.” Szekfű’s book Three Generations, in which he also called for extensive worker protection and the regulation of industrialists by law, bears a striking resemblance to the basic tenets of socialism.’

Standing on the ground of inexorable social progress, Prohászka views social transformation positively, and even despite his harsh criticism of socialism, he acknowledges its necessity. After all, social democracy serves to achieve social progress that ‘excludes the phraseology of delusive emotions and disturbing social passions,’[vi] which is otherwise so problematic in revolutionary change.

After it was tragically blown up during World War II, the complete restoration of today’s Petőfi Bridge took more than seven years. It was handed over at last on 22 November 1952, and was named after renowned Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi.

Bartha highlights that it is a painful phenomenon that the non-Communist Hungarian resisters ‘have been relegated to the no-man’s land in terms of memory politics in the 21st century.’ Hopefully, in the future, more attention will be devoted to the anti-Nazism not only of Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky or Lieutenant General János Kiss, but also that of István Lendvai, István Zadravecz or even Gyula Kornis.

Hungary is not the only country in East-Central Europe that sees unwanted commentary and meddling by Russia with regard to interpretations of its history. The periods the evaluation of which is the most frequently contested by Russia are the Cold War era and World War II. While Russia glorifies the USSR’s effort to defeat Nazi Germany, CEE countries, including Hungary, highlight the 45 years the Red Army spent in Central Europe as an occupying force after the end of World War II.

One hundred fifty-five people from Hungary travelled to Poland to attend the International March of the Living on 18 April, where nearly 10,000 participants from 54 countries marched the 3 km route between the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau lagers. The march was held on Yom HaShoah, which is Israel’s National Day of Mourning for the victims of the Holocaust.

The Germans had demanded the deportation of the Hungarian Jewry long before the German occupation. A note in October 1942, in which German Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Luther summarised his negotiations with Sztójay, the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin at the time, openly mentions the German demand and the fact that it had come directly from Adolf Hitler. According to the text, the ‘handling’ of Jews in Hungary is ‘urgent’.

‘Through the gaps in the door, I saw Arrow Cross members leading people to the Danube bank to be shot to death. I also witnessed that those who could no longer walk were shot dead then and there, on the street.’

Paradoxically, Communist Béla Kun and the contemporary nationalist racists had more in common in terms of their views than the Communist leader had with the social-democratic and the left-leaning bourgeois émigrés.

While Hungarian national memory of communism is far from being consolidated, the tendency among young people to view their ancestors’ actions under a totalitarian regime with empathy while at the same time to strongly reject communism as a political ideology is a promising development.

During the great show trials of the late 1940s and 1950s, the Communists often held small ‘side trials’, which provided ample opportunity to extract and collect further compromising data and testimonies against the primary targets, as well as to conduct silent showdowns and to set the course for later trials. This is how the Archbishop Grősz trial led to the arrest and imprisonment of some 50 people, including well-known Hungarian monarchists.

Just as some Christians had trouble accounting for their role in the 1918 Aster Revolution and the 1919 Communist coup d’état, some Jews also had difficulty facing their former position in terms of these events.

The majority of the refugees were intellectuals, mostly from Transylvania, followed by those from what is Slovakia, Serbia and Austria today, but there were also some who fled to Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Tibor Baranski saved the lives of no less than three thousand Hungarian Jews according to Yad Vashem in Israel, but the actual number could be as many as twelve to fifteen thousand.

Aversion to work was not unique to the leaders of the emigration. After a while, Mihály Révész, a social-democratic journalist in exile, had enough of living abroad and tried to get a job in Budapest. But when his left-wing friends found him a job as a manual worker, he turned it down, indignantly declaring ‘I won’t be a street sweeper’.

Although the official Hungarian propaganda constantly portrayed the ‘dark figures’ of the leftist emigration as plotting from abroad against Hungary, the surviving primary sources show a picture of ineffectual losers fighting among themselves.

In this article we will walk you through the history of the names of Budapest’s bridges and the historical events that influenced their evolution.

The approach of Weis to welfare, an attitude that in fact prevailed under the Teleki government, was not only sensitive to social issues, but also subscribed to the idea of an ‘anti-capitalist democracy’, and also to ‘progress’ and ‘social justice’.

The best side is the neutral side, that is staying out of the killing. ‘Anyone who disputes this and spouts moral arguments has never seen war,’ Demkó warned.

Objectively speaking, hundreds of unauthorized executions took place in the country, the victims of which were either ex-functionaries of the communist system or innocent Jewish traders and citizens.

This final piece deals with his even more chaotic relationship to the contemporary governing right, and his rocky road from Liebling-author to opposition prophet during the twenties and the rest of the Horthy-era.

Dezső Szabó was not only a nationalist, but also a strong opponent of capitalism during his entire life. The fact that this was hidden by socialist historiography only shows that many more myths have to be debunked by the Hungarian historians of today. 

In the articles of the years of transition, it was a basic guideline that the Roma are the people who avoid work and have a criminal tendency; who must be forcefully integrated into the system of the new, “democratic”, socialist Hungary.

The fact that Austria, which also lost the war, was being compensated at the expense of Hungary, made the situation even more unacceptable for Hungarians.

Hungary joining the League of Nations transferred the country from the shameful spot of a ‘warmonger’ to the ranks of ‘recognised’ nations.

The early twenties in Hungary brought about not only a fervent nationalist discussion about Trianon, the Romani or antisemitism, but also illusory concepts regarding the Eastern roots of the Hungarian people.

This chapter of the interwar system needs to be reckoned with, if only to illustrate the progress the Hungarian right has made since then: today, small neo-Protestant Christian churches are allies of the right in Hungary, and not treated as adversaries.

If one spends some time in Hungary, one may come to the opinion that the Serbs a ‘stubborn’ and ‘rather barbaric people’. This kind of anti-Serbian language dominated contemporary British reports.

The question was posed as follows: was Hungary truly occupied, or did enough of Hungarian sovereignty remain to label the country “independent”?