This is a comprehensive history of a legendarily proud and passionate but lonely people. Much of Europe once knew them as "child-devouring cannibals" and "bloodthirsty Huns" but it was not long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of Christendom and fought heroic freedom struggles against the Tartars, the Turks and, among others, the Russians. Paul Lendvai tells how, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, the Hungarians have survived as a nation-state for more than 1000 years. He traces Hungarian politics, culture, economics and emotions from the Magyars' dramatic entry into the Carpathian Basin in 896 to the brink of the post-cold War era. Lendvai brings to life the short-lived revolutionary triumphs of 1848-9 and 1918-19; the traumatic Treaty of Trianon (1920) which deprived Hungary of Transylvania and other historic Magyar lands; and the successive Nazi and Communist tyrannies. These are among the episodes that have formed the consciousness of the Hungarian people.
Through anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and impostors, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernisation versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism. This work is a blend of narrative, irony and humour, occasional anger without taboos or prejudices. It also offers an authoritative key to understanding how and why this corner of Europe produced such a galaxy of great scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.
Table of Contents
1. Barbarians over-run Europe; 2. Land settlement or robbery: the question of Hungarian identity; 3. From the Magyar invasion to the Christian kingdom of Arpads; 4. The struggle over continuity and freedom; 5. The Mongolian invasion of 1241 and its consequences; 6. Hungary becomes a great power under foreign rule; 7. The heroic age of the Hundayi against the Turkish menace; 8. The long road to the catastrophe of Mohacs; 9. This disaster of Turkish domination; 10. Siebenburgen as the stronghold of Hungarian statehood; 11. Gabor Bethlem -- vassal, patriot and European; 12. Zrinyi or Zrinski? Hero of two nations; 13. The rebel leader Thokkoly; 14. The freedom struggle of Ferenc II Rakoczi against the Habsburgs; 15. Myth and historiography; 16. Hungary in the shadow of the Habsburgs; 17. The struggle against the 'King with the Hat'; 18. Abbot Matinovics and the Jacobin conspiracy 19. Count Istvan 'Szechougi and the 'Age of Reform': Rise and fall of Greater Hungary; 20. Lajos Kossuth and Sandor Pefofi: Symbols of the 1848 Revolution; 21. History, defeat and collapse; 22. Kossuth the hero and 'Judas' Gorgey; 23. Who was Captain Gusev?; 24. Empress Elisabeth, Andrassy and Bismarck; 25. Victory in Defeat: the 1867 Settlement; 26. The delusion of being without frontiers; 27. The golden age of the Millennium; 28. Hungarian Jews or Jewish Hungarians?; 29. Will Hungary be Hungarian or German?; 30. From the First World War to the 'Dictatorship of Despair'; 31 The Admiral on horseback; 32. Adventurer, counterfeiter, pretender to the throne: Hungary as the troubled man of the Danube Basin 33. Marching in step with Hitler; 34. Victory in Defeat: 1945 to 1990 35. 'Everyman is a Hungarian': men of genius and culture; 36. Chronology of Hungarian history
Author Biography
Paul Lendvai fled to Vienna in 1957, months after the Soviet repression of the rising in his native Hungary. For twenty-two year he worked for the Financial Times, then became head of Radio Austria International. His previous books include Blacklisted: A Journalist's Life in Central Europe, St Martin's Press, 1998.
