This is another step on the path of my obsessive study of all things Hungarian, anticipating our forthcoming visit to Budapest. Having read it I now feel about as prepared as I could be to get the very best from the several guide books I have acquired. It is a highly informative account of the history of a fascinating country, whose present-day relatively small area and population belies the political and cultural impact it has had on the region, and the world in general.
Be warned that this is a difficult read. Professor Kontler is no doubt a highly literate and eloquent, as well as erudite, writer in his native Hungarian. But, having held teaching posts in Anglo universities, he has elected to carry out his own translation, resulting in a text whose syntactic and grammatical anomalies can rather obscure the underlying information content, making for a rather slow and at times laborious read. The text is littered with awkward, and sometimes entirely ambiguous, turns of phrase, spurious connectives and malapropisms, often many to a page. Thus frequent re-reading of overlong sentences is required in order to parse their possible and probable intended meanings. The forward includes a grateful acknowledgement to the proof reader. Why I cannot say, for they clearly did a very poor job. No job at all in fact. It is surprising that the publishers, Palgrave, allowed the book to go out in this form, where a little effort might have so greatly improved the presentation of the final product. Despite this, I would still recommend it as a highly worthwhile read. I would also add that Kontler's command of English appears to improve during the course of translation, as the density of errors steadily decreases as we move through the text. Indeed the pace becomes positively racy by the time we hit the last hundred or so pages. So perseverance is rewarded.
It is one of those histories with telescopic focus. The first half of the book covers the pre-history and the eight hundred years or so up to the abortive revolution against the Habsburgs occupiers, in 1848. Meanwhile, the last hundred pages cover the post-war communist years, ending with a broad review of trends since its collapse. The hundred years between gets the most detailed treatment. The primary theme of the book's approach is the comparison between the social and political systems of Hungary and other European states, particularly those to the West, in an effort to identify and distinguish similarities, and those features that render Hungary unique. Hungary is a country in which an entrenched and bloated rural nobility hung on, tooth and nail, to feudal privileges, for many centuries, even in the face of reforming efforts by the occupying Habsburgs, thereby resisting the forces of political and social progress that transformed other European countries. A mythos harking back to the first arrival of the barbarous Magyars from the steppes, and the foundation, by force, of the Hungarian state by Arpad I, exerted a cultural pull that generally ran somewhat counter to the Christianising influence of the West. Contradicting this however, we have, in the urban centres, cultural and technological developments that have flourished since the Renaissance days of Matthias I, Corvinus. These have given rise to an educated and sometimes affluent middle class, whose contributions to science and the arts match those of any other enlightened European state. This tension between rural and urban forces is a key dynamic in the history of the country, that led to a landscape in which, for centuries, two countries seemed to exist side by side, with only peripheral contact. This tension is itself a manifestation of its own version of the deeper East-West identity question that has haunted other East and Central European nations.
Another constantly re-emerging theme is the quest for freedom and independence by a fiercely proud people, that has suffered under foreign occupation for so much of its history, but whose efforts towards liberation were so often self-defeating. In times when Hungary has been free it was seldom strong enough to resist the depredations of larger neighbouring states and empires, particularly when internally riven by dynastic or constitutional conflict. In addition, the unusually large ethnic diversity within its borders has inevitably given rise to centrifugal tensions that could only be resisted by ultimately unsustainable levels of repression. This latter factor has given rise to a political scene in which right wing groupings of varying extremity have often found themselves in fertile ground. The most direct expression of this tendency was with the Fascist government of Miklos Horthy, during the inter-war years, following the bitter national humiliation of the 1919, Treaty of Trianon, which obliged Hungary to yield around half of its territory to its neighbours. For these reasons, the fresh start being offered to Hungary today by its accession to the EU is of greater significance than simply a recovery from the destructive ravages of Communism (from which it emerged with the highest per capita debt in the world). The new Hungary is one in which it is at genuine peace with its neighbours, having relinquished its territorial grievances arising from Trianon. But just as importantly, at peace with itself, with the progress and prosperity that is slowly but surely being built, being built more or less on behalf of all classes, all regions and all of its ethnicities. Indeed, the prospects for Hungary look brighter today than they have for many centuries.
As another reviewer point out, one of the most intriguing parts of the book is the first chapter, which includes an epic account of the ebb and flow of the various barbarian tribes that erupted from the Siberian and trans-Uralic steppes. The account runs from Roman times up to the arrival of the Magyars in the tenth century, and describes the mutual impact of these tribes on the more settled civilisations they found to the West. There is something very mysterious about this wave after wave of peoples who had such a huge disruptive influence on those peoples who left a rich written and archaeological record, but who left barely any trace of their own origins and passages on the Earth.
So, a fascinating and highly informative book that, while telling the story of one relatively small European nation, manages to tell us a great deal about the wider History of Europe as a whole, (I now know much more about the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires). It also has much to tell about the nature of and the struggle for freedom, personal and national, within the history of European consciousness. The book loses one star for its difficult readability, but I would nonetheless emphatically recommend it to anyone who wishes to acquaint themselves with this fascinating country, or wanting to deepen their comprehension of the big picture of European history.
Report an issue with this product or seller
