Book Review - Budapest: Between East and West

 Budapest: Between East and West by Victor Sebestyen

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023 (first published 2022)  ISBN 9781474610018

A good book. Victor Sebestyen, born in Budapest, has written a book that is full of humour, frustration, and amazement about a city (and a country - this book is as much a history of Hungary as of Budapest) that has been at the centre of much of modern European history.

Budapest really became a city of note only in the nineteenth century, which is why much of Sebestyen's writing about the earlier years of Buda and Pest is more wide-ranging than merely the development of those two towns. And they were two towns for much of their history - Buda and Pest only united in the Nineteenth Century (when the first permanent bridge over the Danube was completed, and political union occurred), and they continue to have separate characters.

It was when Hungary became part of the Hapsburg Empire (owing to the Austrian King being the inheritor of the Kingdom of Hungary) that both Buda and Pest began to grow, and that Hungarian-ness began to become a political weapon. The revolution of 1848 was the making of modern Hungary, with Budapest being the centre of that change. The compromise reached in 1867, when the Hapsburgs created the Dual Monarchy, seemed like an elegant solution at the time, assuaging Hungarian aspirations while keeping them in the Hapsburg tent, but led to an unhealthy expansion in chauvinism in Hungary.

Budapest played a big part in this - the Hungary of the Dual Monarchy was only 49% Magyar, but in Budapest the percentage was much higher, and the willingness of those in power there to share power with other nationalities was non-existent. Hungary became the needy and difficult child of the Dual Monarchy, wanting special privileges but not willing to allow the other children to have anything.

Budapest has been invaded and destroyed many times throughout history, and shifted from one political extreme to another across what was a difficult Twentieth Century for Hungary and Hungarians. Sebestyen uses short pithy chapters to cover the irony of Budapest being a strong supporter of the Austrians entry into World War One, the joy of revolution, the terror of Bela Kun and Admiral Horthy and the descent into Holocaust and the madness of the Arrow Cross, and the alternating depression and fear generated by 50 years of Communist Rule.

What Sebestyen conveys is that the essence of Budapest - the cafe lifestyle, the easy sophistication of the denizens of the city, their (sometimes misplaced) pride in themselves and their country, have continued throughout all the fighting and oppression over the years. Each chapter begins with some apposite quotes, and I think the following, from Arthur Koestler is worth repeating here - "Hungarians are the only people in Europe without racial and linguistic relatives. The peculiar intensity of their existence can perhaps be explained by their exceptional loneliness... To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis..."

This book is a well-written tour through the history of part of Europe that we "Westerners" often gloss over.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell