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4. Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919
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4 Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919 Eliza Ablovatski “It was like a plague of locusts had devastated the place. Consumed and exhausted , the town lay on the rubbish heap,” wrote Dezso Kosztolányi of the Hungarian capital Budapest in the late summer of 1919.1 Since the end of the World War in October, the city had indeed suffered a great deal: two revolutions (one democratic, the other soviet), a ®u epidemic, Romanian occupation, a®ood of refugees, and the armed gangs of the White Terror. The physical exhaustion he described, as well as the personal stories of hunger and suffering retold after both revolutions, were informed by the language of politics. In the postrevolutionary chaos that summer,Hungary’s political and social elite began to reassert itself and its values, although, as Kosztolányi noted, “Trams which had been painted under Communist rule were still to be seen in their revolutionary scarlet with revolutionary slogans daubed across them, dashing suicidally through town like refugees from a mental institution.”2 Political slogans and political calculations were behind even the most ordinary personal interactions , from forms of address and greeting to interactions on public transit. In Kosztolányi’s novel, Anna Édes, the upper-class Kornel Vizy observed the city that summer, noting that, “there were also encouraging signs of improvement. Middle-class passengers on the tram were no longer afraid to stand up to the bullying conductress who addressed them rudely.They took pleasure in reminding her that this was no longer a Bolshevist state. Men once again began to give up their seats to ladies. It was a new and glorious ®owering of the age of chivalry .”3 The old elites reasserted social and political power through the af¤rmation of class (the conductress should use proper honori¤c forms of address) and gender roles (chivalry of the upper classes). The front line in the perceived struggle of cultures in 1919 Hungary moved from the world of armies and politics to the personal lives of Budapest residents, and the reestablishment of traditional gender roles played an important part in the postrevolutionary “Christian and National ”consolidation of power. The disordered world of revolution had shocked conservative intellectuals: It was as though the city had for years devoured countless Galician immigrants and now vomited them forth in sickness. How sick it was! Syrian faces and bodies, red posters and red hammers whirled around in it. And Freemasons, feminists, editorial of¤ces . . . night cafes came to the surface—and the ghetto sported cockades of national colors and chrysanthemums.4 For an observer like this nationalist woman, political restoration after 1919 was inextricably tied up with and dependent upon the restoration of the social, racial , and gender order that the revolutions had threatened. In the expanding ¤eld of the cultural history of World War I, the role of gender in the experience and memory of those years has often been summarized in the ¤ghting front–home front dichotomy. The experience of war on the ¤ghting front and the soldiers’ masculine world are contrasted with the realm of the home front, where women experienced the war through a variety of domestic hardships. There were, however, many men on the home front: older men, government of¤cials, and skilled workers in the war industries among them. In addition, a limited number of women experienced the ¤ghting front, mainly through the medical services, although also as civilians in the direct line of battle. Yet the division stands. A gendered division of experience of the war was something that contemporaries emphasized, and this gender dichotomy has inspired an impressive body of scholarly work on the cultural history of World War I and its aftermath.5 But what of revolution and civil war, where the generalized dichotomy of¤ghting front–home front does not hold? How do participants and witnesses experience and remember such events? Do the same genderdifferences apply? How does the presence of women in revolutionary movements and crowds affect the archetypes of the war experience: the myths of soldier’s honor and bravery, the images of the enemy, the images of battle? Events in the Hungarian capital, Budapest , afford us the opportunity to consider some of these questions. This essay examines the importance of gender within the two main cultures of remembrance that developed in postrevolutionary Hungary: a dominant right wing and an exiled and/or underground left wing. Both the left and the right wanted the events of 1918...