Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
Survivor in a Sea of Barbarism
By István Deák
Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918-1944
by Thomas Sakmyster
East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 476 pp., $59.00
In 1920, Miklós Horthy, a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian navy, was elected regent of Hungary by the Hungarian parliament. He remained in that post until 1944—a very long stretch by contemporary Central European standards. During Horthy's tenure, Hungary was still officially a kingdom, but it had no king—the last king, who was the last Habsburg emperor as well, went into exile in 1919. Although Horthy always wore his Habsburg admiral's uniform, Hungary no longer had a navy, since it had been cut off from the Adriatic Sea by the post-World War I peace treaties. This regent without a king and admiral without a fleet often attended public events on a white stallion—hence the title of the University of Cincinnati historian Thomas Sakmyster's informative and often wryly humorous book Hungary's Admiral on Horseback.
Review, 4663 words
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