Volume 36, Number 4 · March 16, 1989
Fun City
By Istvan Deak
Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture
by John Lukacs
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 255 pp., $20.95
Few great cities in Europe have suffered more damage in recent centuries than the Hungarian capital; few have shown a greater capacity for renewal. Berlin and Vienna collapsed into ruins during World War II, and Madrid in the Spanish Civil War; Prague, Paris, and Rome have largely escaped devastation, but not so Budapest. The city, or rather three cities, for Buda, Pest, and Óbuda ('ancient Buda') were officially united only in 1873, flourished as a seat of humanistic learning under King Matthias Corvinus in the fifteenth century, only to fall into the hands of the Ottomans in 1541, and slowly decay for over a century. Budapest was liberated, and almost totally destroyed at the hands of Christian armies in 1686. During the sixteen or so decades punctuated by the revolutionary wars of 1848–1849, it developed into a lively commercial and cultural center. The city was badly damaged during the mid-nineteenth-century uprising, but, ever self-renewing, it then became a dynamic metropolis, the proud capital of a self-confident—over-confident—Great Hungarian Kingdom. Shaken by a lost war and the left-wing revolutions of 1918–1919, it subsequently became the overblown capital of impoversihed and grievously truncated counterrevolutionary Hungary.
Review, 4051 words
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