BUDAPEST
Portrait of a City Between East and West
by Victor Sebestyen
A satisfying history of a city that, “after London, Paris, and Rome…receives more tourists than any other capital in Europe.”
London-based journalist Sebestyen, author of Lenin and Revolution 1989, was an infant when his Hungarian family fled the city after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a cataclysmic event he chronicled in his 2006 book, Twelve Days. His evident love for the city emerges clearly in this engaging chronological account, and he provides a cleareyed sense of the “characteristic Hungarian pessimism.” Over the centuries, the strategic geopolitical locations of Buda and Pest, on either of the Danube, had drawn the attention of conquering armies, from the Romans to the early marauding Magyars, the Ottomans, Austrians, Nazis, and Soviets. Throughout his sweeping history, the author emphasizes the recurrent theme that the city often had to stand alone against these onslaughts. The Ottomans ruled for 150 years and left lasting legacies, such as the coffeehouse, and they mostly tolerated a large Jewish population in Pest. As religious wars in Europe heated up, Hungarian royals “threw in their lot” with the ultra-Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs, bestowing favors and titles on a few mega-loyal families who would come to dominate in decades to come. Nationalism drove the valiant but ultimately doomed first Hungarian Revolution of 1848, yet during the Austrian backlash, Jews were awarded unprecedented liberties. “Nowhere in Middle Europe,” writes the author, “did Jews play such a prominent part in modernization as in Hungary—in industry, commerce, banking, the professions.” The combining of the two parts of the city and replacement of the German language with Hungarian also fueled national pride. Despite being on the wrong side of both world wars and siding closely with Hitler, the Hungarians gained the world’s sympathy with what Sebestyen calls “the defining moment of the Cold War”—standing up to the Soviet army in 1956.
A beautifully wrought, admiring portrait of a beloved, beleaguered city and its people.