In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Hungary Between the Wars The psychological impact of the Treaty of Trianon was so pervasive that it produced a syndrome akin to a national disease. The loss of the territories was ‘‘tantamount to the death of the nation,’’ only to be prevented by the return of Greater Hungary.1 The trauma of defeat shook the nation’s foundations and made it almost impossible to accept the new situation and to acknowledge the rights of other nationalities. The emergence of a cult of Trianon was marked with the erection of four heroic statues on Freedom Square, representing the lost territories. On the day of the unveiling tens of thousands filled the square as the Catholic Bishop István Zadravecz called as witnesses ‘‘the Hungarian God, the sacred flag, and the Hungarian spirit . . . that we shall not rest until we are united with North, South, East, and West.’’2 The Holy Crown, popularly known to be a gift from the Pope for the coronation of St. Stephen in a.d. 1001, became the symbol of the dismembered kingdom, often spoken of as a living person or organism; ‘‘the lopped off limbs . . . faint with the loss of blood; in a swoon, they await death or resurrection.’’3 Ultra-patriotic societies sprang up, both civilian and military, supported especially by young radical-right officers, which blamed international Bolshevism and the forces of world Jewry for Hungary’s losses and agitated for revision of the treaty throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Students learned geography in interwar Hungary as if the Treaty Trianon had never taken place. ‘‘Whole generations of youngsters grew up having only historic Hungary’s borders etched into their minds and fully convinced that Trianon Hungary was but a temporary situation that was bound to disappear like an evil nightmare.’’4 Conditions in the country were chaotic. In the years from 1918 to 1920 refugees from the cut-off territories flooded the country, leaving their possessions behind. Those more fortunate moved in with relatives or friends, but thousands lived for years in railroad boxcars in Budapest railway stations. The refugees did not consider the remnants of the state their homeland; the lands from which they came had long traditions as Hungary Between the Wars | 31 part of the thousand-year-old kingdom; they felt themselves strangers in truncated Hungary. Budapest, a multiethnic city with a large German and Jewish population, carried none of the symbolism attached to Kolozsvar (Cluj) in Transylvania or Pozsony (Bratislava), now in Czechoslovakia.5 Many refugees landed in the cities of Szeged or Debrecen, close to the new border with Romania. The young Viola Tomori from Transylvania never felt at home on the flat lands around Szeged; she missed the mountains of her homeland, and as a Protestant, felt herself a stranger in the largely Catholic city.6 Refugee students swarmed into Budapest from the former Hungarian universities of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and Pozsony (Bratislava). Penniless and without family support they registered at the University of Budapest. In the fall of 1919, overcrowding led to campus violence, fueled by radical students who blamed the Treaty of Trianon on the communist government of Béla Kun with its heavily Jewish make-up, and the wave of antiSemitism forced the government to suspend university classes.7 By the middle of 1920 anti-Semitism had become a societal issue with many demanding that the civil rights of Jews be curtailed, citing the participation of Jews in the revolution and the high incidence of Jews among war speculators. Already in the fall of 1919, the overburdened medical faculty and faculties of law and theology had raised the necessity of establishing a quota system for students. In August 1920, Minister of Culture and Education István Haller submitted a bill to the National Assembly to limit the admission of Jewish students to the universities. After several weeks of debate, on September 22, the National Assembly endorsed Act XXV: 1920, which came to be known as the anti-Jewish numerus clausus law. The ailing Prime Minister Teleki did not participate in the debate, but in a speech to the Szeged electorate in October he defended the act, although condemning generalizations about the Jews. In his arguments he distinguished between the integrated Jewry who identified themselves with national goals and the newly immigrated and not assimilated Galicians , who in his view were responsible for the revolution and thus justi- fied the discrimination.8 The law restricted the number of any ethnic group admitted...

Share