The Hungarians

A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat

Paul Lendvai, Jefferson Decker

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691114064, 9780691114064
• eBook ISBN: 9781400851522
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Hungarians is the most comprehensive, clear-sighted, and absorbing history ever of a legendarily proud and passionate but lonely people. Much of Europe once knew them as "child-devouring cannibals" and "bloodthirsty Huns." But it wasn't long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of the Christian West and fought heroic freedom struggles against the Tatars (1241), the Turks (16-18th centuries), and, among others, the Russians (1848-49 and 1956). Paul Lendvai tells the fascinating story of how the Hungarians, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, have survived as a nation-state for more than 1,000 years.

Lendvai, who fled Hungary in 1957, 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. Hungarians are ever pondering what being Hungarian means and where they came from. Yet, argues Lendvai, Hungarian national identity is not only about ancestry or language but also an emotional sense of belonging. Hungary's famous poet-patriot, Sándor Petofi, was of Slovak descent, and Franz Liszt felt deeply Hungarian though he spoke only a few words of Hungarian. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and imposters, based in part on original archival research, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernization versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism.

He movingly describes the national trauma inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920--a trauma that the passing of years has by no means lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, as Lendvai's restrained account makes clear, but are now part of history.

An unforgettable blend of eminent readability, vibrant humor, and meticulous scholarship, The Hungarians is a book without taboos or prejudices that at the same time offers an authoritative key to understanding how and why this isolated corner of Europe produced such a galaxy of great scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Foreword to the English Edition
• Introduction
• 1. “Heathen Barbarians” overrun Europe: Evidence from St Gallen
• 2. Land Acquisition or Conquest? The Question of Hungarian Identity
• 3. From Magyar Mayhem to the Christian Kingdom of the Árpáds
• 4. The Struggle for Continuity and Freedom
• 5. The Mongol Invasion of 1241 and its Consequences
• 6. Hungary’s Rise to Great Power Status under Foreign Kings
• 7. The Heroic Age of the Hunyadis and the Turkish Danger
• 8. The Long Road to the Catastrophe of Mohács
• 9. The Disaster of Ottoman Rule
• 10. Transylvania—the Stronghold of Hungarian Sovereignty
• 11. Gábor Bethlen—Vassal, Patriot and European
• 12. Zrinyi or Zrinski? One Hero for Two Nations
• 13. The Kuruc Leader Thököly: Adventurer or Traitor?
• 14. Ferenc Rákóczi’s Fight for Freedom from the Habsburgs
• 15. Myth and Historiography: an Idol through the Ages
• 16. Hungary in the Habsburg Shadow
• 17. The Fight Against the “Hatted King”
• 18. Abbot Martinovics and the Jacobin Plot
• 19. Count István Széchenyi and the “Reform Era”: the “Greatest Hungarian”
• 20. Lajos Kossuth and Sándor Petöfi: Symbols of 1848
• 21. Victories, Defeat and Collapse: the Lost War of Independence, 1849
• 22. Kossuth the Hero versus “Judas” Görgey: “Good” and “Bad” in Sacrificial Mythology
• 23. Who was Captain Gusev? Russian “Freedom Fighters” between Minsk and Budapest
• 24. Elisabeth, Andrássy and Bismarck: Austria and Hungary on the Road to Reconciliation
• 25. Victory in Defeat: the Compromise and the Consequences of Dualism
• 26. Total Blindness: The Hungarian Sense of Mission and the Nationalities
• 27. The “Golden Age” of the Millennium: Modernization with Drawbacks
• 28. “Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar?” A Unique Symbiosis
• 29. “Will Hungary be German or Magyar?” The Germans’ Peculiar Role
• 30. From the Great War to the “Dictatorship of Despair”: the Red Count and Lenin’s Agent
• 31. The Admiral on a White Horse: Trianon and the Death Knell of St Stephen’s Realm
• 32. Adventurers, Counterfeiters, Claimants to the Throne: Hungary as Troublemaker in the Danube Basin
• 33. Marching in Step with Hitler: Triumph and Fall. From the Persecution of Jews to Mob Rule
• 34. Victory in Defeat: 1945–1990
• 35. “Everyone is a Hungarian”: Geniuses and Artists
• Summing-up
• Notes
• Chronology of Significant Events in Hungarian History
• Index