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DOI: 10.1177/0022009412451288

2012 47: 709Journal of Contemporary HistoryAlexander Vari

Nationalize Budapest during the Interwar PeriodRe-territorializing the 'Guilty City': Nationalist and Right-wing Attempts to

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Article

Re-territorializing the

Guilty City: Nationalistand Right-wingAttempts to NationalizeBudapest during theInterwar Period

Alexander VariMarywood University, USA

Abstract

In addition to successive Hungarian governments revisionist agenda and there-education of the population in a Christian and national spirit, the symbolic takeoverof Budapest spaces was another priority of Hungarian nationalist policy during theinterwar period. From 1920 nationalist and right wing groups in Hungary demonized

the capital and attempted to erase its previous associations with communism, cosmo-politanism, liberalism and unbridled consumerism by re-rooting it in the national soil. Inorder to achieve this effect they limited the autonomy of the municipality of Budapest,erected new monuments and re-wrote the meaning of old ones as well as periodicallyorganizing the spatial takeover of Budapest by Magyar villagers. From the later 1920s onit was the annual celebration of St Stephen in a two-week long festival which becamethe fulcrum of nationalist efforts to take over the public spaces of the city. However,economic concerns related to the development of urban tourism limited their effect-iveness. This article argues that due to the spread of consumerism and tourism propa-

ganda concerns within the festival, by the 1930s it was rather Budapest that wasurbanizing nationalism instead of the right wingers nationalizing the city.

Keywords

Budapest, festivals, Hungary, nationalism, spatial politics

On 16 November 1919 exactly one year after the big popular assembly celebrating

in front of the Hungarian Parliament the proclamation of the Republic rear

Corresponding author:

Alexander Vari, Marywood University, 2300 Adams Avenue, Scranton, PA 18509, USA.

Email: [email protected]


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admiral Miklo s Horthy entered Budapest as the leader of the counter-revolution-

ary forces which took over the capital in the wake of the retreating Romanian

army.1 Mounted on a white horse and surrounded by his troops, Horthy responded

in front of the Gelle rt Hotel to a welcoming delegation led by the Mayor of

Budapest (Figure 1) by emphasizing that he and his army were there to exorcize

a city that has denied its millennial past, and dragged into mud its crown and

national colors by dressing into red rags. After emphasizing the spite that he and

his troops felt toward a city that had collected as he put it all the garbage of

the country, Horthy hit a conciliatory note by promising to redeem and pardon

Budapest, if the capital would return to its country, and would dearly love again

the soil in which rot the body of our ancestors, love that soil which our rural

brothers toil on, [and] love the crown and the double cross,2 the centuries-old

symbol of the Hungarian kingdom.3

Historians often refer to Horthys words to describe a right-wing stance toward

Budapest that gained more and more ground in the years to come. In their discus-

sion of the conservative and national Christian turn that shaped Hungarian politics

during the interwar period, however, Horthys stance is only used illustratively4

without enough attention being given to a more systematic presentation of the

attempts made by right-wing circles to nationalize urban space and politics.

Claims such as those made in 1929 by Benedek Jancso , the minority expert of

the conservative journal Magyar Szemle, according to which Since Trianon,

Hungarian national policy has centered on two points: revision and the questionof the Magyar national minorities suffering under foreign domination,5 are also

often taken at face value by historians, to the extent of forgetting the fact that

interwar Magyar nationalists were interested as much in the nationalization of

Budapest as on the recovery of Hungarys lost territories.

1 The years 191819 were a tumultuous period in Hungarian history. After the proclamation of aliberal republic led by Count Miha ly Ka rolyi, power fell into the hands of communists led by Be la Kunwho set up a Soviet-type dictatorship, which ruled Hungary from March to August 1919. TheHungarian Republic of Councils (as the Kun regime officially called itself) was defeated in the

summer of 1919 by the Romanian Army, which at the urging of the Entente occupied Budapestand most of eastern Hungary.2 See Horthy Miklo s fo

00

veze r va lasza Bo dy Tivadar polga rmesternek a nemzeti hadsereg bevonula saalkalma val a Gelle rt sza llo elo

00

tt mondott u dvo zlo00

besze de re in J. Szekeres (ed.), Forrasok Budapestmultjabol, vol. 3: Forrasok Budapest tortenetehez, 19191945 (Budapest 1972), 21.3 For a discussion of the 191819 period from the perspective of the ideological emphases of eachregime and the significance of spatial takeovers such as the grand popular assembly in front of theParliament on 16 November 1918, the celebration in 1919 of 1 May (International Workers Day) by theKun regime, and Horthys entry to Budapest which was followed by another popular assembly, with astrong nationalist and Christian message, held in front of the Hungarian Parliament, see B. Vo ro s,Ku lo nbo zo

00

politikai hatalmak ugyanabban a fo00

va rosban. Szimbolikus te rfoglala si akcio k Budapesten1918-1919-ben in K. Csuri, M. Orosz and Z. Szendi (eds),Tomegek es unnepek. A nyilvanossag r tusai a

kozep-europai modernsegben (Budapest 2009), 1531.4 I.T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley, CA1998), 139.5 B. Jancso , A holnap Magyarorsza ga, Magyar Szemle July 1929, 218, quoted by M. Caples, Et inHungaria Ego: Trianon, Revisionism and the Journal Magyar Szemle (19271944), Hungarian Studies19, 1 (2005), 51104.

710 Journal of Contemporary History 47(4)


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There were many reasons why they were urging the nationalization of the cap-

ital. Before the war the population of the city represented 4.8 percent of the totalnumber of people living in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

As a result of the territorial losses that Hungary suffered at the end of the First

World War, in 1920 this percentage rose to 11.63 percent, Budapest becoming thus

the oversized capital city of a much smaller country. The urban development of

Budapest throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century pointed in a

Western direction. The 1873 unification of Pest and Buda into a single city

under the name of Budapest set the capital on the path of rapid economic and

demographic growth in the decades to come. By the turn of the century, although

nationalists mounted several ethnic and linguistic assimilation campaigns tostrengthen the Magyar character of Budapest, the capital was also celebrated by

many of its inhabitants as a cosmopolitan world city (vilagvaros) strongly emulat-

ing western and North American metropolises such as Paris, New York and

Chicago.

The concentration in Budapest of financial capital and factories, the spread of

liberalism, social democratic ideas, socialism, anarchism, trade unionism, modern

technologies such as electric lighting, the use of telegraph and telephone, transpor-

tation by tramways, subway and steamboats, the embrace of modern arts and

literature and other Western trends by a growing Hungarian and Jewish middleclass, in tandem with the emergence of urban mass culture, made conservatives and

nationalists feel estranged in the modern metropolis. To make up for it they idea-

lized the countryside and the Magyar peasants, while berating the cosmopolitan

decadence of the capital. The events that occurred in Hungary at the end of the

Figure 1. Mayor Tivadar Body and members of the Budapest Municipality welcome Admiral

Miklos Horthy on 16 November 1919. Courtesy of Metropolitan Ervin Szabo Library,

Budapest, Budapest Collection.

Vari 711


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First World War further strengthened their resolve. The support that Budapest

people gave on 31 October 1918 in front of Hotel Astoria to the creation of a

democratic government led by Count Miha ly Ka rolyi, which later turned Hungary

into a republic,6 and especially their involvement with the communist dictatorship

led by Be la Kun, which succeeded it, turned the capital and the liberal-minded and

left-wing constituencies living in it as we have seen into a target for retribution

and punishment in the eyes of Hungarian conservatives, nationalists, right wing

and anti-Semitic groups led by Horthy which entered the city in the fall of 1919.

During the following months, many supporters of Kun as well as social democrats,

liberals, Habsburg legitimists and Jewish businessmen were executed or imprisoned

by Horthys forces, while others were forced to flee abroad.7 In spite of these mass

retaliations, interwar Budapest continued to be a city which was cosmopolitan,

liberal and left-wing in spirit. This spirit was especially manifested in Budapestsinner core districts as well as in the capitals industrial districts, Angyalfo ld and

Csepel. Even more to the point, during the brief Republic of Councils, set up on

Soviet model by Be la Kun and his followers, workers took control of the capitals

inner districts, displaying red flags, symbolic hammers and other revolutionary

iconography, and covering the major monuments in red draperies to serve as a

background for plaster statues of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht and Lenin.8 Among

them, it was especially the Marx statue in front of the Millennium Ensemble

(Figure 2) which stood out. Retaking the city, both spatially and symbolically,

from these constituencies turned thus into an important goal for Horthy and hissupporters. It was the performative function that every capital city has that they

wanted to control and infuse with their ideology.9

In this article, I focus on the discourses, administrative measures and symbolic

actions that enabled Magyar nationalist and right-wing groups to claim spatial

possession of Budapest in order to point out their importance in re-articulating

the conflicting relationship between nationalism, urbanization and modernity

which shaped Hungarian politics since the time of the turn of the century. From

literary representations of the capital as a sick and alien body and government

6 In addition to his liberal supporters, in establishing his government Ka rolyi also benefited from thestrong support of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. For more on this see I. Dea k, Budapest andthe Hungarian Revolutions of 19181919, The Slavonic and East European Review 46, 106 (1968),12940.7 See B. Bodo , Paramilitary Violence in Hungary after the First World War, East EuropeanQuarterly XXXVIII, 2 (2004), 129172. For a discussion of the Hungarian White Terror from theperspective of a broader Central European context see R. Gerwarth, The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War, Past andPresent200, 1 (2008), 175209.8 For more on the symbolic takeover of Budapest during the Hungarian Bolsheviks brief stay inpower see B. Vo ro s, Te rfoglala s Budapesten Te rfoglala s a to rte nelemben? in C. Pa sztor (ed.),Unnep

Hetkoznap Emlekezet; Tarsadalom es kulturtortenet hatarmezsgyejen (Sze che ny 2000), 1816 andKa rolyi Miha ly te r, Marx-szobrok, fehe r lo : Budapest szimbolikus elfoglala sai 1918-1919-benBudapesti Negyed 2930 (2003), 34, 144172.9 On this see A.W. Daum, Capitals in Modern History: Inventing Urban Spaces for the Nation, inA.W. Daum and C. Mauch (eds), Berlin-Washington, 18002000. Capital Cities, CulturalRepresentation, and National Identities (Washington, DC and Cambridge 2005), 328, esp. 18.



6/26

imposed restrictions on the former autonomy of the Budapest municipal council to

the erection of new urban monuments and the rewriting of the meaning of old ones,

the gamut of these measures loomed large. In addition, from 1926 on St StephensDay, a Catholic celebration that since the 1890s was pushed to the fore by conser-

vative forces as Hungarys unofficial national holiday, became the fulcrum of

nationalist and right-wing efforts to symbolically retake Budapest. However, eco-

nomic concerns related to the development of urban tourism limited their effect-

iveness. By the 1930s St Stephens Day was celebrated as part of a two-week festival

which included a host of cultural, commercial and sports events whose aim was to

promote urban tourism. This article argues that due to the spread of consumerism

and tourism propaganda concerns within the festival, by the 1930s it was rather the

metropolitan culture of Budapest that was urbanizing nationalism instead of theright wingers nationalizing the city.

Nationalist and right-wing visions of interwar Budapests role as a capital city

were fashioned in 191920 by three main representations that were all related to

previous turning points in modern Hungarian history. They were the Reform Era

(183048) culminating in the 18489 Revolution; the 1867 Dualist Compromise

and the post-dualist decades leading up to Budapests turning into a modern

metropolis; and, finally, as we have seen, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and

the proclamation of the Hungarian Republic on 16 November 1918, the latterreplaced on 19 March 1919 by a Bolshevik dictatorship under the leadership of

Be la Kun. While the developments which characterized the first period up to 1848

were embraced by nationalists and right-wingers, those that informed the other two

were rejected. A legacy of the Reform Era was the emphasis on the necessity to

Figure 2. The Statue of Karl Marx in front of the Millennium Ensemble on 1 May 1919.

Courtesy of Metropolitan Ervin Szabo Library, Budapest, Budapest Collection.

Vari 713


7/26

Magyarize the capital. The three cities Pest, Obuda and Buda which later became

modern Budapest were inhabited during the first half of the nineteenth century by a

majority of German speakers. Therefore the strong emphasis which Reform Era

liberal nationalists put on the publication of periodicals and books in Hungarian

language, the use of Hungarian in public forums, and the wearing of the Magyar

dress. Even pleasurable activities such as dance and club life were enrolled to the

service of the national cause. The Magyarization of Pest and Buda reached its apex in

the course of the 18489 revolutionary events when after the severing of ties with the

Habsburg Dynasty in April 1849, the two cities became the de facto capital of an

independent Hungary governed by Lajos Kossuth.10 The defeat of the Hungarian

Revolution was followed by a period of absolutist rule of the country by Vienna,

which eased up only during the early 1860s, a decade which led to the conclusion of

the Austro-Hungarian compromise in 1867, which granted Hungary full autonomyin domestic affairs. Although the magyarization of the city progressed at a fast pace

during the period of dualism as well,11 Budapests quick turning into a large metrop-

olis shaped by transnational developments such as quick industrialization, a high

concentration of capital, the spread of consumerism, and the rise of commercial and

popular cultures, was resisted from the 1890s on by groups loyal to the legacy of 1848

(grouped in a strong political opposition) as well as by newly formed right wing

parties because the citys opening up to the world questioned the feasibility of the

nationalist nation-building process.12 In the same vein, the Bolshevik revolution of

1919 raised the specter of Hungary joining the Soviet Union in support of a classwarfare inspired by an internationalist ideology13 that, by focusing attention else-

where, also undermined the Magyar nation-building project.14

The reduction of Hungarys size to about one-third of the territory that the

Hungarian government controlled between 1867 and 1918 added a new element

to the nationalist equation. On the one hand, the nationalists, right wingers and the

conservatives grouped around Horthy benefited from the decisions taken at

Trianon, since they were the ones who as a result of the fall of the Ka rolyi

and Kun governments, and the retreat of the occupying Romanian forces inher-

ited the reins of a territorially reduced but nominally independent country. On theother hand, however, as they soon realized, they were not fully in charge in

Budapest. This was a problematic issue for many of them since the role of

Budapest as the leading city in interwar Hungary (with no serious domestic

10 For more on this see R. Nemes,Budapest Once and Then (DeKalb, IL, 2005).11 A . von Klimo, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im euro-paischen Kontext, 18601948 (Mu nchen 2003), 1327.12 See M. Szabo , Az ujkonzervatizmus es a jobboldali radikalizmus tortenete, 1867-1918 (Budapest2003) and G. Gya ni, Budapest tul jon es rosszon: a nagyvarosi mult mint tapasztalat (Budapest2008), 6773.

13 R. Lo wenthal, The Hungarian Soviet and International Communism, in A.C. Janos and W.B.Slottman (eds), Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 (Berkeley,CA 1971), 17382.14 For a discussion of important antecedents pointing in this direction, see B. Vo ro s, A multatvegkepp eltorolni?: Tortenelmi szemelyisegek a magyarorszagi szocialdemokrata es kommunista propa-gandaban, 1890-1919 (Budapest 2004).



8/26

competitors) was considerably enhanced by the territorial changes that took place

at the end of the First World War. Given the mostly provincial support that the

new right-wing governments received during the early 1920s, Budapest was initially

singled out as a gangrenous piece of the national body that they had to extirpate/

redeem/sanitize if they wanted to achieve success in the completion of their right-

wing minded nation-building project. Their negative representation of the capital,

however, was not much different from what nationalists came up with elsewhere.

French nationalists also demonized the modern metropolis as a place of excessive

individualism, artificiality, and a den of immorality fostering the loss of traditions.

Nationalist writers in turn-of-the-century France, for instance, incriminated Paris

for the defeat the country suffered in the Franco-Prussian war and denounced

Paris as the source of French decadence.15 The epithet of the Guilty City

(Bu00

nos varos) that Magyar nationalists used to describe Budapest was thereforethe product both of local (the revolutionary context of 1918 and 1919) and

European-wide historical developments that in the wake of the nineteenth-century

processes of industrialization, urbanization, modernization and globalization

invested the city and the countryside with opposite meanings.

Later, however, Horthy and his supporters changed tactics. Instead of continu-

ously blaming the capital, from the mid-1920s on they paid more and more atten-

tion to specific urban spaces in a concerted attempt to relate them to the country as

a whole. In the following sections of this article I will discuss the shift from virulent

anti-Budapest discourses to concrete measures and practices that enabled Magyarnationalists to control not just municipal politics but the symbolic meaning of

Budapest places and spaces with the ultimate goal of bridging the ideological

gap between the capital and the countryside.

The Bujdoso Konyv: Feljegyzesek 19181919-bo00

l (An Outlaws Diary: 1918

1919), whose first volume was published in December 1920 by Ce cile Tormay,

a 45 year old Catholic woman coming from a conservative gentry background,

represented the first systematic attempt to demonize Budapest.16 Given its intrin-

sic anti-liberal, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic stance, Tormays book wasinstantly embraced by those who supported the national-Christian course imple-

mented from 1919 on by Horthy.17 During the interwar period, The Book of a

Fugitive turned into a veritable Bible for middle-class nationalist and right-wing

circles. Its author was feted and covered with decorations,18 and graced with the

editorship of the Napkelet, a new journal started in 1923 by conservatives and

nationalists, whose aim was to serve as the counterpoint to Nyugat, the publication

15 S. Hazaresingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford 1994), 39.16 C. Tormay,BujdosoKonyv: Feljegyzesek 19181919-bo

00

l,2 vols. (Budapest 19201). Tormays book

was also published in English in London in 1923. Subsequent quotes from this book are referenced to its1923 republication in Hungary by Pallas Literary and Publishing House.17 For a recent discussion of the latter see P. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion,Nationalism and Antisemitism, 18901944 (Ithaca, NY 2006).18 J. Ka da r, Az antiszemitizmus jutalma: Tormay Ce cile e s a Horthy korszak,Kritika32 (3) (2003),912.

Vari 715


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of Hungarian modernism that after the First World War was perceived as too

cosmopolitan.19

Tormays view of Budapest bordered on the paranoid. In the pseudo-diary

that she kept in 19181920 Tormay described the events that she witnessed in

the Hungarian capital as the giant bowel movements of a degenerate and sick city.

According to her, on 31 October 1918, the day of the great popular upheaval,

which led two weeks later to the proclamation of the Hungarian Republic:

The city was like a huge stomach that for years had swallowed all the immigrants

from Galicia and now was suffering from heartburn. It was a terrible heartburn.

Syrian faces and bodies, red placards and red hammers, were whirling in it.

The freemasons, feminists, members of the editorial boards [of the progressive

journals], members of the Galilei circle, customers of shady coffeehouses, and the

rabble of the stock exchange all floated on its surface, while the inhabitants of the

Dob Street ghetto had all attached national cockades and white daisies to their lapels.21

Tormays anti-liberal and anti-Semitic views prompted her to compare the sup-

porters of the Republic to products of underground sewers that flowed together to

create an uncivilized rabble.22 It was in this vein that she compared them to the

mob that attacked Versailles during the time of the French Revolution.23

References to historical precedents to be abhorred because of their questioning

of authority were constantly used by Tormay. On another occasion, her depictionof the actions of the Budapest mob spilling barrels filled with petroleum on the

street and setting them on fire24 conjures up in the readers mind the conservative

French Third Republics anxiety-ridden image of the petroleusesetting Paris on fire

during the Commune.25

Her depiction of the Bolshevik takeover in March 1919 was similar. Once again,

she metaphorically talked about a city flooded by the dirt and garbage of the

sewers.26 As news of the dissolution of the Ka rolyi government in favor of one

led by communists reached her, she shuddered at the prospect of having Be la Kun,

Trotskys agent, [and] the robber of workers savings as she put it rule overSt Stephens Hungary.27 From her perspective, Kun was a traitor who had sold

out the country to Bolshevik Russia.28

19 See V. To th-Barbalics, A Napkelet megalapta sa, Magyar Konyvszemle120, 3 (2004), 23856.20 On the apocryphal character of some of the entries in Tormays diary see Kadar, Az antiszemi-tizmus jutalma, 9.21 C. Tormay, BujdosoKonyv: Feljegyzesek 19181919-bo

00

l, 2 vols. (Budapest 1923), I: 18.22 Ibid.23 Ibid., I: 21 and 40.

24 Ibid., I: 32.25 See the chapter on the petroleuse in G.L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of theCommune(Ithaca, NY 1996), 15990.26 Tormay, Bujdoso Konyv, II: 827 Ibid.28 Ibid., II: 278.



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Tormay saw the events of 31 October 1918 and 19 March 1919 as products of an

urban revolution that the rest of the country was against. Rehashing a scapegoating

strategy that worked well in contemporary Germany,29 she described Count Miha ly

Ka rolyi and his liberal, Jewish, social-democratic and communist supporters as

backstabbers who were responsible for Hungarys defeat in the war.30 She continu-

ously emphasized the presence of a strong Jewish element in the Ka rolyi and Kun

governments,31 and claimed that their ultimate goal was to ostracize and persecute

the Magyars in their own country. Given the strong support that the population of

Budapest offered to the former, she expected redemption to come only from the

countryside. In addition to uttering these claims explicitly,32 Tormay used several

other analogies to describe the opening rift between the capital and the rest of the

country. The olden days of Ofen(Buda)/Pesth in the 1840s, and the peaceful provin-

cialism of the then rather small Pest and Buda, which later witnessed a real revolu-tion under the leadership of Kossuth and Peto00fi, were contrasted by her to the sick

ways of doing revolution in a cosmopolitan, internationalist and Jewish dominated

Budapest.33 Tormay used even weather-related analogies to highlight the contrast

between the capital and the countryside. As Judit Ka da r, a scholar of Tormays

interwar literary output pointed out, the events of 1918 and 1919 in the

Hungarian capital are always depicted as taking place in fog, rain, snow, under

overcast weather or in the shadows, while the sun comes out and shines only when

the author is physically in a countryside location.34

Tormays insistence on the contrast between a sick capital and healthy provin-cial cities and countryside was taken even further by one of her contemporaries,

Dezso00 Szabo . Szabo , the author of Az elsodort falu (The Lost Village), a book

published in 1919 in which he decried the loss of rural traditions and values in the

welter of capitalism and modernity,35 was another author that nationalist and

right-wing circles fervently embraced during the interwar period.36

Szabo discussed the contrast between Budapest and the rest of the country in

two editorials that he wrote in 1921 for Virradat, a prominent right-wing

29 For a discussion of the significance of theDolchstosslegende (or Dagger-stab-in-the-back myth) inrallying German militaristic and conservative forces (and later the Nazis) against the Weimar Republic,see M. Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 1922/1933: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and NationalSocialist Dictatorships (Cambridge 2007), vol. I, 19820030 Tormay, Bujdoso Konyv, I: 56. For more on the similarities between the Hungarian and Germancontexts in 191819 and the relevance of the stab-in-the-back claim see P. Bihari, Images of Defeat:Hungary after the Lost War, the Revolutions and the Peace Treaty of Trianon, in R.A.C. Straddling(ed.),Crossroads of European Histories: Multiple Outlooks on Five Key Moments in the History of Europe(Strasbourg 2006), 16571.31 Tormay, Bujdoso Konyv, I: 1516 and II: 15.32 Ibid., I: 23, II: 38933 Ibid., I: 38 and II: 324.

34 Ka da r, Az antiszemitizmus jutalma, 10.35 D. Szabo , Az elsodort falu (Budapest 1919).36 Szabo (18791945) was a populist nationalist, who in addition to the above mentioned book,quickly achieved domestic fame through his unorthodox views and radical criticism of various interwarHungarian governments. For more on him see J. Gyurgya k, Ezze lett magyar hazatok: A magyarnemzeteszme es nacionalizmus tortenete (Budapest 2007).

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periodical. For Szabo , his native town, Kolozsva r, represented the urban standard

for every Hungarian city. He contrasted Kolozsva r, which he described as the

epitome of Magyar culture,37 with Budapest, a city that, according to him, was

dominated by Jews. He equated Jewish Budapest with all the ills of urban mod-

ernity such as capitalist spirit, conspicuous consumption, and public immorality.

He described Jews as dominant not only in the professions but in the literary and

artistic life of the capital. Because of this, he claimed that Budapest needed to be

retaken by the Magyars. He proposed a number of radical measures such as the

expulsion and the expropriation of the property of the Galician Jews, who settled in

Budapest after 1910, and the punishment and resettling of Budapest cinema oper-

ators, shop and coffeehouse keepers, and factory owners if it could be proven that

they had co-operated with the Bolsheviks. He also urged the initiation of penal

proceedings against all of the Budapest press, and the closing down and expropri-ation of Jewish synagogues which would be turned into hospitals and homes for the

children of the Hungarian working and impoverished middle classes. Given these

priorities, Szabo singled out the conquest of Budapest as the most important

domestic task for the Magyars.38

Literary and journalistic condemnations of Budapest such as those penned

by Tormay and Szabo did not represent a completely new phenomenon. They

had already been voiced during the 1890s and gained steam during the

early 1900s, to the point that many modernist writers of the time such asIgnotus, Endre Ady and Ferenc Molnar felt obliged to take a public stance to

defend Budapest against them.39 For instance, in a festive speech given in the

City Hall on 17 November 1913 on the occasion of the 40 year commemoration

of the creation of a united Budapest, Molna r extolled the capital by describing it as

the most important thing that Hungarians gave to the world, so as to placate its

detractors, who already called it the scapegoat of Hungary, a separate body in the

midst of the country and an American city that Hungarians had nothing to

do with.40

What changed after the First World War, however, was that what up to thenwas mostly a discursive battle waged in the press turned afterwards into a matter of

governmental policy. Instead of working with the leaders of the capital as they did

during Dualism, the successive Hungarian governments that took office during the

interwar period actively tried to undermine the power of the Budapest municipality

37 D. Szabo , Kolozsva r, Virradat, 20 March 1921.38 D. Szabo , Budapest visszafoglala sa, Virradat, 11 February 1921. For more on Szabo and thepolitics of scapegoating Jews, liberals and communists for the ills of Hungarian history in interwarHungary see A. Po k, The Politics of Hatred: Scapegoating in Interwar Hungary, in M. Turda and P.J.

Weindling (eds), Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and SoutheastEurope, 19001940 (Budapest 2007), 37588.39 See Ignotus, A bojkotta lt Pest (I-III), A Het, 26 August 1904, 11 September 1904 and 25September 1904, and E. Ady, Francia-e Pa rizs?, Vasarnapi Ujsag 20 September 1908.40 See Fo

00

varosi Kozlony, 86 (1913), 2861 quoted by A. Spos, Reformok e s reformto rekve sek afo

00

va rosban (19201947), Budapesti Negyed1, 2 (1993), 4967.



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by trying to limit its autonomy.41 Although with the adoption of Law IX of 1920

by Horthys supporters in the new Hungarian Parliament the electoral base of the

Budapest municipality was considerably broadened (the law being thus celebrated

as a democratic measure), the destruction of the narrow voting system that elec-

tions in the Budapest Municipal Council were based on between 1873 and 1919, led

to the weakening of the sphere of influence of big industrialists and financiers in

municipal affairs. Since many of the latter were Jewish, the measure served well the

anti-Semitic and anti-Budapest goals of the new regime. Furthermore, the enlarged

electoral constituency allowed for the creation of a national-conservative lobby

that won by a large margin the municipal elections held in July 1920. Thus control

over the Budapest Municipality fell into the hands of the Christian Municipal

Party, created in the aftermath of the elections. Led by Ka roly Wolff, it was this

party that shaped Budapests municipal politics from 1920 to 1925.42

The stabilization of the Horthy regime in the aftermath of the signing of the

Trianon Peace Treaty in August 1920, and the lifting of the censorship on liberal

and social-democratic publications during the early 1920s led to a serious contest-

ation of the grip of the Christian Municipal Party over municipal politics. The new

municipal elections held in 1925 were technically won by a liberal and social-

democratic coalition that gained more strength between 1923 and 1925. The

Bethlen government (in spite of the normalizing course that it adopted since its

coming into power in 1921),43 however, intervened and nullified the practical result

of the 1925 elections by adding 38 government-appointed members to the newlyelected Budapest Municipal Council.44

This governmental coup was symptomatic for the conservatives and national-

ists keen interest in keeping Budapests administration under their control. As a

result, the municipal opposition failed continuously to overturn the existing bal-

ance of power. Thus in spite of considerable political mobilization among the ranks

of the municipal left, the elections for Budapests mayorship held in 1926 were won

not by Istva n Ba rczy (the former mayor of the capital between 1906 and 1918) but

by Ferenc Ripka, the candidate of the Municipal Party, a new political faction

personally supported by Istva n Bethlen. Similarly, the municipal elections held in1930 and 1935 were won by those who in 1919 as well as during the remainder of

41 See Z.L. Nagy, Transformations in the City Politics of Budapest, 18701940, in T. Bender andC.E. Schorske (eds), Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation (New York, NY1994), 3555, and K. Ignacz, A hatalom eszko zei a valasztoi akarat korrigalasara: a to rvenyhatosagiva laszta si rendszer elvei e s gyakorlata Budapesten a Horthy-korszakban, Multunk 1 (2005), 21037.42 The material in this paragraph is indebted to Ga bor Schweitzers discussion of Budapest municipalpolitics in his essay Budapest, az orsza g vakbele. A magyar politikai ko zbesze d to rte nete hez,BUKSZ4(Winter 2005), 32835.

43 For a discussion of the broader outlines of Istva n Bethlens policy as head of the Hungariangovernment between 1921 and 1931, the so-called Bethlen decade, see M. Ormos, Magyarorszag aket vilaghaboru koraban, 19141945 (Debrecen 2006), 7880 and T. Lorman, Counter-RevolutionaryHungary, 19201925: Istvan Bethlen and the Politics of Consolidation, East European Monographs(New York, NY 2006).44 For more on this see Z.L. Nagy, Budapesti va rosatya k, 18731944, Rubicon4 (89) (1993), 645.

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the interwar period, continued to look at Budapest as a guilty city in need of

political and moral reformation.45

In order to achieve this goal, however, as I would like to argue in this article,

Magyar conservatives and nationalists used methods that were more sophisticated

than the use of political coercion and governmental fiat against the municipal

opposition. Their range stretched from the nationalization of Budapests monu-

ments to periodic symbolic takeovers of the citys public spaces.

During the early 1920s, supporters of the national and Christian course in

Hungary were strongly interested in dismantling the Habsburg, liberal and

communist system of symbols that have previously shaped the relationship

between Budapest and Hungary.46 They tried to erase from public memory

Budapests pre-war status as the second capital city of multiethnic Austria-Hungary by depicting Budapest as the capital of only one large ethnic

group which in their vision included not only the Magyars living in

Hungary but those who after 1920 found themselves legally described as

ethnic minorities in the successor states. With their anti-Communist propa-

ganda they also wanted to erase the memory of the transnational and left-

wing connections that were made in the spring of 1919 between Munich,

Budapest and Moscow,47 in order to better anchor Budapest in the Magyar

soil. Finally, as we have seen, they tried to subdue the power of pre-war

liberal urban elites and alter the citys early twentieth-century perception asa bastion of liberal and left-wing groups by administratively limiting the auton-

omy of the Budapest Municipality.

The next step of the conservatives and nationalists was to symbolically take

over Budapests public spaces through displays of historical and rural symbols.

This was done in several ways. For instance, a journalist writing for the

publication Gondolat (Thought) in February 1921 determinedly voiced the

wishes of the nationalists, by urging the municipality to rename most of

Budapests streets by replacing the existing ones with geographic toponyms

and the names of the cities that Hungary lost in the aftermath of theTrianon Treaty. Although such proposals were not accepted in 1921, a set

of decrees taken by the Budapest municipality between 1929 and 1930 imple-

mented many of its desiderata by using place names referring to the ceded

territories in the naming of new streets and squares in Zuglo , a residential

neighborhood of Pest developed during the interwar period.48

Of course, such attempts to symbolically retake the capital city were not limited

to Budapest. Right-wing groups competed for the appropriation of the cultural

45 G. Schweitzer, Budapest, az orsza g vakbele, 334.46 On pre-war Habsburg monuments and symbols in Budapest see V. Heiszler, Birodalmi e s nemzetiszimbolumok Becsben es Budapesten (18671918),Budapesti Negyed9, 3 (1995), 17392.47 For more on this see E. Ablovatski,Cleansing the Red Nest: Counterrevolution and White Terror inMunich and Budapest, 1919 (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005).48 M. Zeidler,A rev zios gondolat, 2nd ed. (Pozsony 2009), 21516.



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meaning of public spaces, street names and historical figures in Paris and Berlin

as well.49 In neighboring post-World War I Vienna, the social-democratic munici-

pality tried to dismantle the previous grip of the Christian-Socials and the

Habsburgs on the city, with a strong emphasis on the creation and promotion of

a genuine working-class culture in the citys public spaces.50 In Prague and

Bratislava (and in several other East-Central European cities) similar goals were

pursued by the new Czechoslovak authorities as part of the ethnic takeover of

institutions and public places in these two cities.51

Budapests case, however, calls for more comparisons with western European

cities. Unlike the case of the Czechoslovakization of Prague and Bratislava, the

symbolic retaking of the capital by Magyar nationalist and right-wingers was closer

in its ideology to the attempts made by similar groups to nationalize Paris, Rome

and Berlin. 52 The ideological lines of conflict that shaped these processes weredomestic and racial rather than ethnic ones. An important difference, though, was

that while in the case of Paris and Berlin, and especially during the 1920s, nation-

alist and right wing groups were rather marginal and powerless in achieving the

symbolic takeover of these cities according to the tenets of their ideological agenda,

Magyar conservatives, nationalists and right-wingers (similar to their counterparts

in Italy) successfully did so as soon as the first decade of the interwar period.53

49 See, for instance, the interwar appropriation by French nationalists of the figure and statue of Joanof Arc in Paris as discussed by M. Winock, Joan of Arc, in P. Nora, Realms of Memory: TheConstruction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY 1998), 43382. For theGerman context and the mid-nineteenth century erection of an obelisk on the outskirts of Berlincommemorating the German victory in 1813 in the Battle of the Nations as well as the later buildingof the Siegessa ule celebrating the German victories achieved during the 1860s by Bismarck as well as theSiegesallee commemorating mythical figures of German history unveiled in 1901, see M. Jefferies,National Monuments and the Mythologies of German Nationalism, in M.A. Perkins and M.Liebscher (eds), Nationalism versus Cosmopolitanism in German Thought and Culture, (17891914).Essays on the Emergence of Europe (Lewiston, NY 2006), 21542, and R. Alings, Monument undNation: Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal - zum Verhaltnis von Nation und Staat imdeutschen Kaiserreich, 18711918 (Berlin 1996), 15366. For a comparative perspective see H.

Rausch, Kultfigur und Nation: Offentliche Denkmaler in Paris, Berlin und London, 18481914(Mu nchen 2006), while for a discussion of the war over the meaning of Berlins First World Warmemorials during the interwar period see C. Saehrend, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmaler:Kriegerdenkmaler im Berlin der Zwischenkriegszeit, 19181919 (Bonn 2004).50 See H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 19191934 (New York, NY1991).51 N. Wingfield,Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge,MA 2007), and S. Mihalikova, The Making of the Capital of Slovakia, International Review ofSociology/ Revue internationale de sociologie 16, 2 (2006), 30927. For a discussion of governmentalinterventions in the public spaces of Vienna, Prague, Zagreb and Bratislava, among others, during theinterwar period, see also the essays in R. Jaworski and P. Stachel (eds), Die Besetzung des offentlichesRaumes: Politische Platze, Denkmaler und Strassennahmen im europaischen vergleich (Berlin 2007).

52 On right-wing groups attempts to nationalize Paris see E. Cohen, Paris dans limaginaire nationalde lentre-deux-guerres (Paris 1999), 6174.53 For a discussion of these processes from an Italian perspective see E. Gentile, The Sacralization ofPolitics in Fascist Italy, trans. K. Botsford (Cambridge, MA 1996); M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self:The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY 1997), and M.D. Lasanski, The RenaissancePerfected: Architecture, Spectacle and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA 2004).

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replicating a church pulpit. On it, the Hungarian flag was positioned at mast, while

a giant hand on top of the flagpole, shown as taking a ceremonial oath, was

modeled by the statues sculptor directly after Horthys right hand.60 Under its

base there were buried small containers holding earth from pre-war Hungarys 72

counties as well as numerous villages. In addition there was also earth taken from

Hungarys medieval, 18489 and First World War battlefields, including the homes

of Kossuth and Peto00fi.61 The role of the Reliquary Flagpole of the Land was to

represent Budapest both as a fulcrum of national mourning and grief and a place

from where the irredentist idea will spread outward. In 1932 the Szabadsa g square

ensemble was enriched with a new statue: that of Magyar fajdalom (Hungarian

Grief) represented by a naked female figure, which was supposed to symbolize the

Motherland mourning its orphaned children.62

While erecting new monuments such as these was akin to writing on a blankslate, rewriting the meaning of existing monuments was an ideologically more

complex operation. The most important among them was the Millennium

Ensemble started in 1896 and finished only shortly before the end of the First

World War. It was mostly in the case of the latter that Horthys regime attempted

a symbolic re-writing of its meaning. The initial purpose of the 1896 Millennium

Monument was to celebrate the founding of Hungary by A rpa d and the long

historical lineage of the Hungarian kingdom. Such a purpose was one that interwar

nationalists fully agreed with. Therefore what nationalists wanted to erase by pla-

cing in 1929 the World War I Heroes Tombstone under the column bearingArchangel Gabriel and surrounded by the seven pagan chieftains who conquered

Hungary in 896 located in the center of the semi-circle formed by the Millennium

Monument (Figure 3) was not the intention of the monuments builders but the

memory of the time when under the Bolshevik Republic in 1919 the Monument was

covered by red draperies and the column had a huge plaster statue of Marx placed

in front of it. The fact that the more impressive project of honoring the soldiers

who died in the First World War by placing a huge coffin on a catafalque jutting

out from the Gelle rts hillside in Buda (as proposed by Count Miklo s Ba nffy) was

rejected in 1927 for the sake of a much more modest tombstone symbolically placedin the center of the Millennium ensemble is highly revealing.63 Similarly revealing is

the renaming in 1932 as Heroes Square of the square formerly known as

Millennium Square.

With the location of the Heroes Tombstone in the middle of a monumental

ensemble centered on a display and celebration of Hungarian history and the

renaming of the square, nationalists achieved a double goal. They both symbolic-

ally connected the new regime with the Hungarian past, and, at the same

time, reinterpreted that past from the perspective of the ideological priorities of

60 Proha szka, Szoborhistoriak, 84.61 For a detailed description of the statue see Zeidler, A rev zios gondolat, 204.62 Ibid., 205.63 For a description of Miklo s Ba nffys project for the Gelle rt Hill monument see I. Helgert, NemzetiEmle khely: A Ho

00

so00

k tere, Bolyai Szemle 10, 3 (2001), 733.

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post-Trianon Hungary. As historian Ja nos Po to perceptively pointed out, before

the placing of the Heroes Tombstone:

[I]n the center of the square stood the obelisk, and the emphasis fell on A rpa ds

equestrian statue. One had to look up to the monument advertising [the countrys]

national glory, not just symbolically but physically as well. Because of the elevated

plinths the statues can be looked at only from below. Indeed, since it was assumed

that there was plenty to look back with pride, it was the raising of the onlookers heads

that was initially supposed to be the statues function. The Tomb of the National

Heroes, exactly to the contrary, however, turned the place into one where heads

bowed down.

The low tombstone placed under the obelisk, as Po to has noted, became the

focus point of the square, which turned the Millennium Monument into a mere

backstage. The Square was now narrating what those millennial borders meant to

Figure 3. The Millennium Ensemble with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the

foreground. Picture taken after 1929. Courtesy of Metropolitan Ervin SzaboLibrary, Budapest,

Budapest Collection.



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prompt those who made it to the spot to bow their head as an expression of their

grief over their loss.64

The symbolic takeover of Hungarys recent past through monuments both new and

old, however, represented just one of the many ideological priorities of

interwar Magyar nationalists. Another priority, much more important from the

perspective of Budapests symbolic retaking than the former, was the periodic

physical takeover of the citys public places. From 1924 on this was done every

summer during the celebration of St Stephens Day on 20 August.65 With the

choice of St Stephen (the founder of Christian Hungary) as the symbol of his

regime, Horthy validated one more time the Christian and national course that

he inaugurated in Hungarian politics after his takeover of the country at the end

of 1919.Until 1924 the parading of St Stephens mummified right hand in the city was

mostly a Catholic religious celebration. The Saint Rights procession as it was

also known was considered by many as not much of an attraction at all.66 During

1924 and 1925 all this started to change. Moreover, from 1926 on the procession

was integrated into a week- and from 1928 on a two week-long municipally spon-

sored festival with secular and nationalist overtones that included several other

attractions. The goal of the organizers was to turn St Stephens Day into post-

Trianon Hungarys national holiday.67 They also used it as a tool to promote the

regimes irredentist propaganda. For instance, the unveiling of the ReliquaryFlagpole of the Land in 1928 was scheduled to coincide with the celebration of

St Stephens Day on 20 August.68 To raise the events significance, Horthy made

festive speeches on each occasion. He also timed his public appearances to coincide

with the National Harvest festival, that was included in the St Stephens week

program by the Village Alliance (Falu Szovetseg) in order to give the up to then

mostly Budapest-related religious event, both rural color and a national scope.

According to a document released to the press in 1927 by the Budapest

Tourism Office the goal of the National Harvest Festival was to symbolize the

64 J. Po to , . . .a llj az ido00

knek ve gezete ig! Az ezrede vi emle kmu00

vek to rte nete,Historia18 (56) (1996),1518.65 See A . von Klimo , Nation, Konfession, Geschichte, esp. the chapter on Die Stephansfeiern in denzwanziger Jahren, 25158.66 For instance, with its broad array of attractions stretching from gypsy music performed by bandsalong the Andra ssy Avenue to musical varie te programs, wrestling and boxing matches, eating andlaughing contests, fireworks, and the masked ball, organized in the Angol Park, the Day of theJournalist (Ujsagironap) held on 7 September 1922 and inspired by the one organized four yearsbefore, had much more popular appeal than St Stephens Day. For more on this see Magyar Tav ratiIroda, Napi H rek/Napi Tudos tasok, 4 August 1922 and 16 September 1922.67 See the opening editorial in the brochure Szent Istva n hete, 1928 in Budapest City Archives IV 1501

F Budapesti Idegenforgalmi Hivatal Vegyes Iratok, Box 5: Szent Istva n heti u nnepse gek. See the samedocument for a list of the names of the festivals organizers. Among others, they included Ferenc Ripka,the government imposed mayor of Budapest, Istva n Zsembery, the Director of the National CatholicAlliance, Ba lint Ho man, the Director of the National Museum, and Gyula Balogh, the leader of theVillage Alliance.68 Zeidler,A rev zios gondolat, 203.

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thousand-year old unity between the Magyar people, Magyar soil and Magyar

agricultural produce. Furthermore, the festival was expected to provide as the

document emphasized an occasion to unite the capital and the countrys rural

provinces in a strong expression of common emotion.69

St Stephens Festival allowed interwar nationalists to symbolically and physic-

ally retake Budapests public spaces by having thousands of peasant boys and girls

dressed in folk costumes parade on the citys streets. For instance, in a photograph

published in 1927 in the Kis Ujsag, one can see a large procession of villagers exit

the Keleti Railway station in order to take in the city. After parading all day long

on Budapests boulevards, the villagers assembled in Buda in front of the Royal

Palace (now occupied by Horthy) to listen to his balcony speech.70 The reason for

the villagers presence in Budapest on St Stephens Day was spelled out in full.

According to the 1927 program of the festival:

Budapest and the countryside ought to love each other, they need to understand each

other, and the surest way to achieve this is by getting to know each other. Budapest is

the pride of the country and the hope of its future. With its beautiful buildings,

impressive thoroughfares, vivid traffic, the city makes a pleasant impression on the

foreign visitor, an impression that should be even more powerful on the Hungarians

from the countryside, who need to feel that Budapest is inhabited by the Magyar soul

[and a place] where there beats a Magyar heart.71

St Stephens Day in the Castle Hill district was also attended by selected repre-

sentatives of all of Hungarys counties and provincial cities.72 In addition, the

interwar St Stephens festivals included the Feast of Hungarian Mothers, a

public ceremony organized each year in front of the National Museum in Pest to

award money and decorations, and distribute clothes and shoes to needy mothers

with more than a dozen children. The event was a highly emotional one. According

to contemporary press reports thousands of onlookers among those in the audience

shed tears while watching the ceremony.73 Given the low birth rate among women

in Budapest, it is safe to assume that the Feast of Hungarian Mothers rewardedmostly peasant women.

Another festival attraction was the historical pageant that offered a panoramic

view of Hungarian history through a colorful parade of pagan chieftains, Christian

kings and Transylvanian princes. The procession usually concluded with a funeral

69 Szent Istva n-he t 1927. Budapest nagy elo00

ke szu leteket tesz az idei Szent Istva n-he tre, Press releaseby the Budapest Municipality, Budapest City Archives IV 1501 F Budapesti Idegenforgalmi HivatalVegyes Iratok, Box 5: Szent Istva n heti u nnepse gek.70 See the illustration reprinted in A . Kova cs,Jatek a tu

00

zzel. Fejezetek a magyarorszagi tu00

zijatekok es

d szkivilag tasok XV-XX. szazadi tortenetebo00

l(Budapest 2001), 75.71 Hogy unnepli Szent Istvan elso

00

apostoli kiralyunkat Budapest. Az unnepsegek programmja, 1927,augusztus 1725, 3.72 Szent Istva n hete, 1928, Budapest City Archives IV 1501 F Budapesti Idegenforgalmi HivatalVegyes Iratok, Box 5: Szent Istva n heti u nnepse gek.73 Kis Ujsag, 22 August 1928, quoted in Kova cs, Jatek a tu

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zzel, 74.



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was used to launch new Hungarian cigarette brands, and sell the already popular

Khedive, Memphis, Extra and Mirja m brands in new and sleeker packaging. As

Finance Minister, Tihame r Fabinyi emphasized in an interview, the undertaking

was influenced both by an increased attention given to fashion, individual taste and

a desire for novelty among consumers, an important shift of focus from which the

ministry expected an increase of its revenues.79

In the same vein, as the business of urban tourism took off during the mid-1920s,

city marketing concerns came to also bear heavily on the organizers minds.80

Foreign interest in visiting the Hungarian capital during St Stephens week was

expressed as early as 1929 by the organizers of the Salzburg festival, who soon

offered their international clientele the opportunity to spend a few days in

Budapest.81 Many foreign visitors travelling to neighboring Austria, and among

them many British and American tourists, also made it to Hungary. By the 1930s aswestern tourists started to arrive in greater numbers, Budapests earlier ideological

depiction as a Guilty City was overshadowed by its representation as The Queen

of the Danube, a city branding epithet clearly serving tourism marketing goals.82 A

confirmation of this switch in emphasis was made by foreign observers as well. An

article published in the Soviet Pravdaas early as 1928, for instance, berated Horthy

and his regime for advertising Budapest abroad as the capital of beautiful women

and the city of wine, love and gypsy music, an advertising strategy which the

author of the article equated with the bad taste typical of shady nightclubs.83 In a

similar vein, an editorial published in July 1932 in Cuvantul, a Bucharest dailyclaimed that over the past few years Horthys Hungary spent large amounts of

money and effort to advertise Budapests tourist attractions, and in order to

achieve this effect it did not refrain from catchy and vulgar advertising. The

author of the editorial also expressed his discomfort regarding the fact that it

was not just members of the Hungarian minority from Romania who travelled

to Budapest to buy cheap goods during the duration of St Stephens week but

Romanian tourists as well.84

The slow colonization of former nationalist undertakings by consumerist prac-

tices subordinated to urban tourism promotion goals was also noticeable in othercontexts. For instance, from 1928 onwards the Gelle rt Hill housed for three days

during the St Stephens week a number of popular attractions meant to popularize

in the capital the everyday habits and lifestyle of Magyar villagers. They included

scenes from life on the Puszta, Hungarian folk music, the reenactment of a peasant

wedding, dances and Hungarian gastronomic specialties. In 1929, however, in

79 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Napi H rek/ Napi Tudos tasok, 16 August 1934.80 A. Spos, Megmaradt orsza gunknank csoda s kincse . . .To rekve sek Budapest nemzetko zi szerep-ko re nek kie pte se re Trianon elo tt e s uta n, Limes 3 (2004), 6579.

81 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Napi H rek/Napi Tudos tasok, 2 March 1929.82 See my chapter From Paris of the East to Queen of the Danube: International Models in thePromotion of Budapest Tourism, 1885-1940, in E.G.E. Zuelow, Touring Beyond the Nation: ATransnational Approach to European Tourism History (Farnham, 2011), 103125.83 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Lapszemle, 23 February 1928.84 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Hazi Tajekoztato, 29 July 1932.



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order to popularize these events the organizers used megaphones installed on auto-

mobiles that drove on Budapests streets by day. At night the Gelle rt hillside was

illuminated by strong projectors that opened up the night for further consumption.

Given the good visibility of the place by night, and in order to attract even more

people, organizers hid various cash prizes in the bushes of the hill, which they

loudly advertised among visitors.85

Catchy advertising practices such as these soon paid off. During the 1930s the

importance of the domestic market in the promotion of Budapest (together with

former attempts to nationalize the city) started to recede in favor of its consump-

tion by foreigners. In 1934 the municipality reported the arrival to Budapest during

St Stephens week alone of more than a quarter of a million visitors out of which

almost 27,000 were foreigners.86 To promote further sales, during the mid-1930s

municipal authorities extended the officially regulated closing time of restaurantsand bars, from midnight to 4 a.m.87 Even the Day of the Journalist which was

marginalized as a citywide event by the official embrace of St Stephens Day in

1926, was resurrected from oblivion during the late 1930s and advertised again

through radio and film as an important metropolitan attraction.88

Even more important, it was the extension of the tourist season and the multi-

plication of offerings that led to more and more foreigners coming to the city.

During the 1930s Budapest turned into a destination for tourists from Austria,

Germany, Britain, France and the US, among other countries, not only due to a

successful marketing campaign launched by the municipality but also because, inaddition to the spectacles taking place during St Stephens week, the city was able

to offer its wealthy visitors quality accommodation in first-rate hotels equipped

with outdoor pools and Turkish baths, leisurely time in its restaurants and coffee-

houses, all coupled with a rich nightlife. Among the many night time locales con-

centrated around the Nagymezo00 street, the Arizona Dance Hall (Figure 4) certainly

stood out, with its Paris and Hollywood inspired musical revues and its technical-

props-enhanced productions which attracted such prominent visitors as the Prince

of Wales, Lord Astor and the Maharaja of Kapurthala.89

As the above mentioned commercially minded practices suggest, during the mid-1930s state and municipal interests in making money out of foreign arrivals to

Hungary tamed some of the former out-rightly nationalistic rhetoric aiming to

nationalize the city. Indeed, the adoption of the consumerist mindset was crucial

for the promotion of foreign tourism to Budapest. As a result of its adoption, the

number of foreign travelers continued to increase during the mid-1930s, reaching

their peak in 1937, when close to 183,000 foreigners visited the city.90

85 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Magyar Orszagos Tudos to, 10 August 1929.

86 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Magyar Orszagos Tudos to, 25 August 1934.87 Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Magyar Orszagos Tudos to, 16 August 1937.88 See Magyar Tav rati Iroda, Magyar Orszagos Tudos to, 11 August 1934 and Napi H rek/ NapiTudos tasok, 24 June 1937.89 See Vari, From Paris of the East to Queen of the Danube, 11721.90 A . Hala sz, Budapest husz eve: 19201939. Fejlo

00

destorteneti tanulmany (Budapest 1939), 2126.

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Seen from a European perspective these developments were not exceptional. Aspart of a conscious municipal and national policy aiming to preserve its top pos-

ition in international tourism, throughout the interwar period Paris continued to

boost the number of its visitors.91 It is also often forgotten that in spite of Fascist

Italy and Nazi Germanys emphasis on the regimentation and promotion of work-

ing class tourism through such institutions as the Italian Dopolovaro and the

German Kraft durch Freude associations,92 the same regimes also paid attention

to boosting foreign tourism figures.93 Indeed, forgetting about the reinvigorating

effects of international tourism on the economy was something that the European

states, as severely hit as they were by the global depression of the early 1930s, couldsimply not ignore. Moreover, the presence of many foreigners in Berlin, Rome or

Budapest could also internationally strengthen and legitimize the regimes in place,

a propaganda effect that each was eager to achieve.94

Figure 4. Nagymezo00 street in Budapest by night (c. 1935). The Arizona Dance Hall is on the

left. Courtesy of Metropolitan Ervin Szabo Library, Budapest, Budapest Collection.

91 Cohen, Paris dans limaginaire national de lentre-deux-guerres, 1112.92 V. de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge2002) and S. Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich(Cambridge 2004).93 T. Syrja maa, Visitez lItalie: Italian State Tourist Propaganda Abroad, 19191943: AdministrativeStructure and Practical Realization(Turku 1997) and K. Semmens, Seeing Hitlers Germany: Tourism in

the Third Reich (London 2005).94 On foreign tourism promotion efforts in the Third Reich and their relationship to Nazi propa-ganda, especially during the Olympic Games held in Berlin in 1936, see R. Koshar, German TravelCultures(Oxford 2000), 12934, and On the Road in Germany between the World Wars, in H. Schulz-Forberg (ed.),Unravelling Civilization: European Travel and Travel Writing (Brussels 2005), 287304 aswell as D. Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York, NY 2007), esp.1612. For the



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But there were also other reasons why attracting foreign tourists to prominent

urban centers and beyond mattered. The development of transnational linkages

between cities and the spread of a global urban culture were developments that not

only constituted important counterparts but also shaped nation-building efforts.

As Siegfried Kracauer pointed out in a feuilleton that he wrote for the Frankfurter

Zeitung, during the interwar period metropolitan centers were becoming more and

more alike and their differences [were] disappearing.95 It was the leveling hammer

of global capitalism, the transnational mobility of goods and persons, and the

spread of consumerism that led to this outcome. From the mid-nineteenth century

on metropolitan cities such as London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin became hubs for

the production and diffusion of knowledge and information that was instrumental

in the creation of markets for all kinds of goods and services, including tourism.96

Cities were brought closer together by a variety of other developments, amongwhich the shrinking of time and space made possible by the mass embrace of

train travel, telegraphy, automobility and from the late interwar period on, limited

air travel, was the most important. This new global awareness operated at local

and regional levels as mobility between urban areas increased and cities initiated

strategies to improve their public image and promote their own particular eco-

nomic and political agendas.97

As the spread of consumerism, and the embrace of economic self-interest and

international tourism promotion even within such a nationalist undertaking as

St Stephens festival proves, those in charge of Budapest could not ignore thesedevelopments. As they were embracing consumption, spectacular displays and the

boosting of Budapest tourism,98 moderate nationalists were drawing closer to the

metropolitan mindset that they had condemned before. Their goal now was to

project abroad an image of the Hungarian capital that was both the source of

specifically national values, and at the same time, that of a culturally open metrop-

olis which was the natural economic and cultural center of the Central and South-

East European region.99 It appears thus that in the process of taking over

Budapest and nationalizing the city initiated in the aftermath of the First World

Italian fascists interwar rebuilding of Rome and use of provincial towns such as Siena, Arezzo andFlorence to achieve a dual purpose: that of enrolling the past to celebrate the regime, while promotinginternational tourism to these places, see B.W. Painter, Jr.Mussolinis Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City(Basingstoke 2005), 2138, and Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle andTourism in Fascist Italy.95 See Analysis of a City Map, in S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, quoted by H.D. Harootunian,Historys Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (New York, NY2002), 68.96 See J. Steward, The Attractions of Place: The Making of Urban Tourism, 18601914, in M.Hessler and C. Zimmerman (eds), Creative Urban Milieus: Historical Perspectives on Culture,Economy, and the City (Frankfurt-am-Main 2008), 25584, quote from 256.

97 Ibid.98 See the discussion in A. Spos, A hivatalos va rospropaganda Budapest-ke pe a ke t vila gha boruko zo tt, in T.N. Kova cs, G. Bo hm and T. Mester (eds), Terek es szovegek: Ujabb perspektvak avaroskutatasban (Budapest 2005), 15564.99 Spos, Megmaradt orsza gunknank csoda s kincse . . . To rekve sek Budapest nemzetko zi szerepko r-e nek kie pte se re Trianon elo tt e s uta n, 76.

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War by Horthys supporters, by the 1930s it was rather the capital city and its inter-

regional interests that were urbanizing nationalism. The peril of the latter was

noticed by extremist right-wingers who by the 1930s considered the moral reform-

ing and ideological re-territorialization of Guilty Budapest as it had been done by

Horthy, Bethlen, and Ripka as rather unsatisfactory. They criticized the consumer-

ist and spectacular orientation that the celebration of St Stephens Day took.100 In

the same spirit, they called for more radical measures to allow for a more efficient

penetration and spread of the life style and visual symbols of the Hungarian village

in the capital.101 Among other measures, they proposed the organization on St

Stephens Day, in addition to the religious procession held that day, of a grandiose

pageant of the united and indivisible nation102 and the physical transplantation of

two Magyar villages in Budapest, which they wanted to use in the guise of a Trojan

horse for the final takeover of the city by inhabitants of the rural countryside.103

Indeed, during the late 1930s, the stronger embrace of fascism in Hungary,

signaled at a national level by the adoption of the second set of anti-Semitic

laws in 1938 and the reorganization on 2 February 1939 of the majority governing

bloc in the Hungarian Parliament as The Party of Hungarian Life (Magyar Elet

Partja) as well as the founding during the same period of new extreme right-wing

parties such as the Iva n Hejjas-led Party of the Defenders of the Magyar Race

(Magyar Fajvedo00 Part, active between 193845) and Ferenc Sza lasis Arrow Cross

Party (Nyilaskeresztes Part, active between 193945) led to extreme right-wingers

making progress in taking over several districts of Budapest at the ballot. Forinstance, the electoral victory of the government party, closely trailed by the

Arrow Cross Party in the elections held in May 1939 on the island of Csepel, a

traditionally working class and left-wing district of Budapest,104 was the beginning

of a process which culminated in Hungary joining Nazi Germany in its campaign

against the Soviet Union in 1941, followed by the Arrow Cross takeover of the

government and the capital in the aftermath of the German occupation of Hungary

in March 1944, which in turn led to the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in the

summer of 1944, the creation of the Budapest ghetto and the mass shootings and

atrocities committed by Sza lasis supporters during the winter of 19445.105

100 See the critical remarks of Gyula Szo ke, expressed in the 17 October 1930 meeting of the BudapestKereskedelmi e s Iparkamara (Budapest Chamber of Commerce). Reproduced in Magyar Tav rati Iroda,Magyar Orszagos Tudos to, 17 October 1930.101 D. Szabo , Budapest ko rnye ke (1937) in D. Szabo , Az egesz latohatar, 2 vols (Budapest 1939), I:41016.102 See Markus Laszlo elo

00

adasa az idegenforgalmi attrakciokrol, Magyar Tav rati Iroda, MagyarOrszagos Tudos to, 15 May 1936.103 For the proposal see D. Szabo , A falu Budapest (1935) in Az egesz latohatar, I: 2949.104 See La szlo Ku rtis chapter The Development of Red Csepel: Youth during the Monarchy andunder Fascism, in L. Ku rti, Youth and the State in Hungary: Capitalism, Communism and Class

(London 2002), 5581, esp. 746.105 See R.L. Braham, Politics of Genocide: The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, East EuropeanMonographs (Boulder, CO 1994); C. Gerlach and G. Aly, Das Letzte Kapitel: Der Mord an denUngarischen Juden (Stuttgart 2002); R. Patai, The Hungarian Holocaust: The Beginnings, in R.Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit, MI 1996), 5607; T. Cole,Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (London 2003); the chapter Pest, 1944, Ghetto, in



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More to the point, however, it is appropriate to conclude that the spatial take-

over of Budapest prior to 19389 shaped as it was by the ideological tenets held by

Horthy and his supporters, political intimidation and pressures at the level of

municipal politics, and the symbolic takeover of the citys public spaces and monu-

ments, was also molded in turn by European and global trends related to the

spread of consumerism and the growth of international tourism,106 with which,

even if for a brief period of time, moderate nationalists got accustomed to

living with.

Acknowledgements

A first version of this article was presented at the Association for the Study of

Nationalities Convention at Columbia University in New York City in April 2009.

The author would like to thank his co-panelists Patrice Dabrowski, Cathleen M.

Giustino and Bradley Abrams for questions and comments, as well as for the

valuable suggestions that he received in the process of revision and rewriting

from Robert Nemes, Paul Hanebrink and the Journals two anonymous reviewers.

Biographical Note

Alexander Variis Associate Professor of Modern European History at Marywood

University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His areas of research are in the fields of

urban history, the history of nationalism and tourism history. He is the author,

among other articles, of Urban Tourism and Identity: Hungarian Travellers in

Paris, 1918-1940, in Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel

Writing 7, 1 (Summer 2006), 81109; Bullfights in Budapest: City Marketing,

Moral Panics and Nationalism in Turn-of-the-Century Hungary, Austrian

History Yearbook 41 (2010), 14369 and several chapters in edited volumes. He

is currently working on a monograph on the connections between globalization

and nation building in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Budapest.

K. Frojimovics, G. Komoro czy, V. Pusztai and A. Strbik, Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History(Budapest 1999), 359425; P. Gosztonyi, Budapest langokban, 19441945 (Budapest 1998), and theessays in R.L. Braham and S. Miller (eds), The Nazis Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary(Detroit, MI 1998).106 For such developments taking place elsewhere see Harootunian, Historys Disquiet, 5368, P.Capuzzo, Spectacles of Sociability: European Cities as Sites of Consumption, in M. Ha rd and T.J.

Misa (eds), Urban Machinery: Inside European Cities (Cambridge, MA 2008), 99120; T. Syrja maa,Tourism as a Typical Cultural Phenomenon of Urban Consumer Society, in P. Borsay, G. Hirschfelderand R. E-Mohrmann (eds),New Directions in Urban History: Aspects of European Art, Health, Tourismand Leisure since the Enlightenment(Mu nster 2000), 171202; and P.J. Ethington, The Global Spaces ofLos Angeles, 1920s-1930s, in G. Prakash and K.M. Kruse (eds), The Spaces of the Modern City:Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ 2008), 5898.

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