Budapest

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BUDAPEST.

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
1900 TO 1918
1918 TO 1920
1920 TO 1938
1938 TO 1945
1945 TO 1956
1956 TO 1989
1989 AND BEYOND
BIBLIOGRAPHY

At the turn of the twentieth century, this central European capital—a product of the 1873 union between the settlements of Pest, Buda, Óbuda, and the Margit Island—was Hungary's largest city and an important center of culture, commerce, government, and industry within both the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as a whole.

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Already a fairly modern city for its time—home of the European continent's first underground transportation line, which was completed in 1896 and is still in operation—Budapest experienced a period of massive expansion and development at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1900 the number of people living within what would become the city limits reached 861,434, nearly triple what it had been just three decades earlier. The rapid growth was mostly the result of in-migration from other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. During World War I, the number of incoming refugees compensated for the number of wartime casualties, so the population of the city did not change significantly. The interwar period was characterized by another period of steady growth until World War II, when Budapest suffered heavy civilian losses (between 1941 and 1949, the population declined by about 7 percent). In 1950 the city was expanded to include several of its suburbs, raising the number of districts from fourteen to twenty-two and resulting in a significant population increase. The number of inhabitants stabilized at around two million in the 1970s, but the period since 1990 has seen a decline; in 2003 Budapest's population was down to 1,719,342.

1900 TO 1918

Compared to most European cities, Budapest was a highly industrialized urban center prior to World War I. In 1910, 40 percent of employed city dwellers worked in industry. For this reason—and the relatively pragmatic cultural scene, centered around a cultural elite made up more of journalists and politicians than of artists and philosophers—the Hungarian historian Péter Hanák described Budapest as a "workshop." Despite the city's industrial character, the period preceding World War I was characterized by intense cultural production. Among Budapest's most notable figures were the leftist poet and journalist Endre Ady, the leftist philosopher György (Georg) Lukács, the rightwing writer Dezsö Szabó, the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and the painters István Csók and József Rippl-Rónai. All were innovators in their chosen media and many were politically active.

The bulk of the city's most prominent architectural monuments were built around the turn of the century, including the grandiose and stylistically eclectic parliament building, which was the largest in the world when it was completed in 1902. Budapest's stock exchange (1895) and the Erzsébet Bridge (1903) spanning the Danube River were also of record-breaking size at the time they were constructed. The eclecticism of these monumental structures later yielded to Secessionstyle architecture, which began to appear in the city a few years before the war.

Politically, turn-of-the-century Budapest was at the center of the crisis of European liberalism. The Hungarian Liberal Party—which had negotiated the famous Compromise of 1867, giving the Kingdom of Hungary a kind of autonomous partnership status in the new Dual (Austro-Hungarian) Monarchy—had remained in control of the Hungarian government until just after the turn of the century. Crippled by corruption and scandal, and threatened by both growing nationalism (represented by the Independence Party) and an increasingly influential Social Democratic Party, the Liberals were finally defeated in the elections of January 1905. The period from 1905 to the beginning of World War I was marked by political antagonism between the national minorities and the Hungarian nationalists and rising social unrest resulting from the gross disparity of wealth between rich and poor inhabitants of the city.

In 1900, 79 percent of the city's inhabitants were native speakers of Hungarian, 14 percent spoke German, and just over 3 percent spoke Slovak. Although only about 5 percent of the total population of Hungary in 1910 was Jewish, Jews constituted nearly 23 percent of the total population of Budapest. Many Budapest Jews considered themselves Hungarians by nationality and most spoke Hungarian at home. They were also involved in the modernization of the city on many levels and made up a large part of the new middle and professional classes. Over 40 percent of individuals in certain professions (among them journalism, law, banking, and medicine) were Jewish. Their overrepresentation in the middle-class professions and in institutions of higher education fueled anti-Semitic sentiment among non-Jewish Hungarians who felt marginalized by the modernization process. The first anti-Jewish law in Europe, the numerus clausus of 1920, limited university enrollment of national and ethnic groups to numbers proportionate to their percentage of the overall population and was crafted to reverse this trend.

The character of the city was much changed by the events of World War I. After an initial wave of nationalist enthusiasm for the war, when the Central Powers—and Hungary with them—started losing, it became clear that a reshuffling of territory and the collapse of the monarchy was imminent. Neighboring countries were gradually occupying more and more Hungarian territory, causing a mass flight of civil servants and other refugees to the capital. From among the sizable Hungarian population remaining outside the country's borders, it is estimated that around 208,000 individuals—particularly members of the elite and former state employees whose livelihood was no longer ensured under foreign rule—converged on the city. Due to massive unemployment and the economic crisis that followed the war, however, many of these refugees did not remain in Budapest but moved to other parts of the country or abroad. Nevertheless, their presence and vocal dissatisfaction with the status quo contributed to the political instability out of which the so-called Soviet Republic was born.

1918 TO 1920

The postwar government headed by Mihály Károlyi was unable to stabilize Hungary's borders or to stop domestic social unrest incited by the Communists and Socialists. As a result, Károlyi ceded power to a left-wing coalition on 21 March 1919. That same day, the Communists—under the informal leadership of Béla Kun, a journalist who had been introduced to bolshevism as a prisoner of war in Russia—seized power from the more moderate socialists and proclaimed the Soviet Republic. The Communist leadership immediately set about nationalizing the economy and trying to negotiate a more favorable territorial settlement for Hungary. Its Red Army successfully re-conquered Kassa/Košice and large parts of Slovakia, and the Hungarian-sponsored Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed. On 1 May the workers of Budapest celebrated May Day with mass demonstrations. Despite a hopeful beginning, however, the new government's collectivization policies alienated the rural population, while Budapest residents grew anxious as city dwellers continued to suffer shortages of food and other goods resulting from the wartime economic blockade that was still in force against Hungary. Furthermore, by the end of July 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been defeated by the Romanian army, sponsored and equipped by the French general staff. The Romanians took Budapest on 4 August 1919.

Admiral Miklós Horthy, who commanded an antirevolutionary militia, entered Budapest at the head of his National Army on 16 November 1919. Following the departure of the Romanian troops from Hungary, Horthy established a "white" government, with himself as regent, in March 1920. That same year Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, according to which the country lost two-thirds of its territory to the new neighboring states of Czechoslovakia; Romania; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; and Austria.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Republic, the Horthy regime initiated the White Terror, a series of more or less violent reprisals against suspected communists, other leftists, and many Jews. It is estimated that as many as five thousand people were executed and another seventy-five thousand imprisoned or sentenced to hard labor. As a result of the terror, nearly one hundred thousand people fled the country.

1920 TO 1938

In 1921 Horthy appointed István Bethlen prime minister. Bethlen passed a minor land reform, allowed workers to organize and enter into collective bargaining with their employers, gave free reign to the press, and did not completely enforce the numerus clausus law, allowing Jewish professionals to remain active members of a growing urban bourgeoisie. Bethlen also reinstated a limited franchise that allowed only 27 percent of the population to vote. He remained prime minister until 1931 and is credited with rebuilding Budapest's industrial capacity, which had been greatly weakened by the war and the postwar settlement. His fall coincided with the onset of the Great Depression.

From 1931 onward, Hungary's leadership moved increasingly to the right and became periodically pro-German. It was not long before the Hungarian leadership saw Germany as the only power capable of effecting territorial revision in the region; regaining the territories lost with the Treaty of Trianon was a primary objective for all Hungarian governments of the interwar period, regardless of their political orientation.

1938 TO 1945

After receiving territorial gains through Hitler's dissection of Czechoslovakia (1938) and an Axis-mediated agreement with Romania (1940), Hungary formally became an ally of the Axis in November 1940. The wartime economy brought 130 new factories and forty thousand workers to the capital city. Yet apart from mounting anti-Semitism and the implementation of three increasingly harsh Jewish laws barring Jews from public service and the professions and assigning Jewish men to forced labor battalions, Budapest remained relatively unaffected by the war.

This situation changed on 19 March 1944, when Hitler occupied Hungary following neighboring Romania's defection from the Axis camp. The Jews of Hungary were rapidly ghettoized and deported, but Horthy stopped the deportations when it came to the Jews of Budapest—except for those living in suburban Budapest, who were deported in July—for whom he is supposed to have had a special sympathy. On 16 October, the German SS forced Horthy to resign, installing the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, in his place. In November, about fifty thousand Budapest Jews were deported to Austria by Adolf Eichmann and the Arrow Cross militia. Although the Red Army had already advanced deep into Hungarian territory, in early December Budapest police and Arrow Cross militiamen, working under the supervision of a handful of Gestapo men, rounded up about seventy thousand of Budapest's Jews and ghettoized them in Pest. During this time, the Swedish emissary Raoul Wallenberg sought by various means—including by forging Red Cross and Swedish government passes, bribing officials, and making appeals to various governments—to save some of Budapest's Jews. About 120,000 of the Jews who ended up in the ghetto or under Swedish protection survived the war.

For Adolf Hitler, Budapest was an important site as both the capital of Hungary (Germany's last remaining ally in Europe) and the last line of defense for Vienna and southern Bavaria. In addition, the Axis's only remaining crude oil plant was in southwest Hungary. Joseph Stalin also had good reason to hasten the fall of the Hungarian capital, believing that the liberation of Budapest and Vienna would increase his bargaining power with the Allies at Yalta. In late October he called on Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the commander of the Second Ukrainian Front, to seize Budapest within days. In the first week of November, Malinovsky's troops managed to reach Budapest's eastern suburbs and by Christmas his forces had completely surrounded city, leaving the German and Hungarian forces trapped in a cauldron. On that Christmas day, German forces mounted a massive counterattack and the battle for Budapest began.

Although a number of Budapest's civilian inhabitants had fled to western Hungary to escape the siege, the majority had remained, believing that the Soviets would take Budapest quickly. By January civilians and soldiers alike were scrounging for food, relying on melted snow, horsemeat, and meager bread rations. A breakout attempt initiated by the commander of the German forces on 11 February resulted in huge German and Hungarian losses, and by 14 February the siege was over. After Buda was captured, Red Army soldiers plundered the city and terrorized the populace. Already notorious for raping local women, Soviet forces compounded civilian fears by rounding up able-bodied Hungarian men and sending them to do labor service. The city itself was largely devastated, with thousands of buildings partially damaged or left in ruins. None of the city's five bridges over the Danube survived the siege, and nearly forty thousand Hungarian civilians—many of them Jews—had perished or been killed.

1945 TO 1956

The immediate postwar period saw the brief reemergence of a democratically elected government, which was edged out by the pro-Soviet communists by 1947. After the war, the reconstruction of Budapest began almost immediately. Over the next several years, the vast majority of the capital's historic buildings were restored. The communist leadership also initiated the construction of new residential buildings—better known as block apartments—around Budapest's periphery. Among the most notable structures from the Stalinist period is the Népstadion (people's stadium) sporting complex, which was constructed entirely by volunteers. Monuments to communist leaders, the Red Army, and Hungarian leftists also began to appear, and street names were changed to glorify revolutionary heroes. In 1950 the suburbs surrounding Budapest were formally incorporated into the capital, significantly increasing its size and population.

The first years of communist rule were typified by reprisals against wartime fascists and people who had collaborated with the Germans, and Stalinist-style show trials and purges of many old-guard Hungarian communists. Following Stalin's death in March 1953, the political atmosphere in the city became more relaxed. In the fall of 1956, following Poland's successful reform negotiations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Hungarian reform communists, students, and workers were inspired to push for change in Hungary. On 23 October, a demonstration in support of reform in Poland attracted tens of thousands of students who marched from Pest to Buda. In an unplanned gesture, the students continued on to the parliament building, where they demanded the reinstatement of reform communist Imre Nagy as prime minister. A smaller group of demonstrators gathered in front of the Budapest radio station, where they were fired upon by Hungarian secret police. Shortly thereafter, a large crowd toppled an enormous statue of Stalin, dragging parts of the statue through the city. Units of the Hungarian army, which had been ordered to protect key buildings, ended up giving their weapons to the rebels.

Nagy was made prime minister on 24 October but quickly discovered that the revolt was no longer about reforming the system but about eliminating it. On 25 October the secret police again fired on the demonstrators in front of the parliament building. Two days later, Nagy formed a new reform-oriented government and announced the withdrawal of the Soviet military from Budapest, the dissolution of the secret police, and Hungary's unilateral withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, appealing to the West to protect Hungary against Soviet military retaliation. The Soviets nevertheless invaded Budapest, and by 4 November their forces had crushed the "counterrevolution." Budapest was again heavily damaged by the fighting and an estimated two thousand Hungarians—most of them inhabitants of Budapest—died in the conflict and another two hundred thousand fled the country. Nagy and several members of his government were executed on 16 June 1958.

1956 TO 1989

AfterNagy'sremoval, János Kádár was installed as the new head of government, and he remained in that position for the next thirty years. Immediately following the 1956 events, the Kádár regime began arresting—or in some cases executing—those who had participated in the uprising, but Kádár later softened his stance and implemented a series of reforms that became known as "goulash communism." His reforms included the 1968 New Economic Mechanism, which allowed for limited private enterprise and partially decentralized the economy. Hungary was becoming the most liberal country in the Soviet Bloc, and Budapest began attracting young travelers from other Warsaw Pact countries.

Rising unemployment, high inflation, and mounting national debt resulted in Kádár's removal from leadership in 1988. The reburial of Imre Nagy in Budapest in June 1989 set the tone for the transition to a noncommunist government. The funeral attracted nearly 250,000 people to Budapest's Heroes' Square. The first free elections in over forty years were held in 1990.

1989 AND BEYOND

As it entered the twenty-first century, Hungary was divided between leftist liberals, represented by the socialist coalition, and nationalist conservatives headed by former prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Young Democrats Party, who struggled for control of the government and the ability to interpret Hungary's role in the past and determine its role in the future of Europe.

Several of the city's postwar cultural figures have received international acclaim. Budapest native Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 for his largely autobiographical novels about the experience of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. The work of another Budapest author from the interwar period, Sándor Márai, has been translated into several languages.

The transition did not come without difficulties and challenges, however. The capital city has, since 1989, earned a reputation as a sex capital of Europe, employing sex workers from poorer parts of the former Eastern Bloc, mainly Ukraine. The city is also battling a sizable illegal labor market that brings poor workers from neighboring countries to the city to take construction and other temporary jobs. Further challenges have included cleaning up the environmental damage brought about by careless industrial practices under communism, combating drug abuse, and dealing with extreme right-wing and skinhead groups who harass and sometimes physically attack members of minority groups living within the city, particularly Roma (Gypsies).

Despite these challenges, the city has nevertheless become a major center of international tourism. Many of the houses and other buildings in and around the centers of Buda and Pest have been renovated or rebuilt, and many historic sites, including churches and monuments, have been restored. In the spring of 2004 central eastern Europe's first Holocaust memorial museum opened in a renovated synagogue. Commercial construction has also increased sharply since the 1990s. Massive new shopping centers now line the city's periphery and a number of multinational companies have set up branches in Budapest. On 1 May 2004 inhabitants of the capital celebrated Hungary's entry into the European Union.