PARIS 1919, page 36
The Yugoslavs muttered about boycotting the treaty with Austria but eventually agreed to a compromise. The part of Austria just to the north of Slovenia would have a plebiscite; if the inhabitants voted to join Yugoslavia, then the northern, more German part would also hold one. In October 1920 the vote, which all observers agreed was done in exemplary fashion, took place; a majority of 22,000 to 15,000 was for staying with Austria. The voters seemed to have been swayed by their economic links with Austria and a feeling that Austria was more advanced than the new Yugoslav state. For women voters, the knowledge that their sons were liable to conscription in Yugoslavia but not in Austria may also have played a part. If they could have seen into the future, when Austria became part of Nazi Germany, and Slovene children were forced into German schools and Slovene identity largely suppressed, would they have voted differently?30
The Yugoslav army made a dramatic march into the disputed zone immediately after the result was announced but withdrew without fuss two days later. The Slovenes in Yugoslavia complained bitterly about the “amputation” of national territory and suspected, probably correctly, that Serb leaders had never really been prepared to go to the wall, that they were far more concerned with Serbia’s borders in the north and in the east.31 Yet another grievance entered the catalog in the new Yugoslav state and yet another bitter memory was left between neighbors.
Austria asked for another concession from the Allies, a strip of territory from the western edge of Hungary. (In shape, it was close to the proposed corridor between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which the Peace Conference had turned down.) The Austrians argued that the inhabitants were mainly German. Unfortunately, they had never lived under Austrian rule and appeared to see themselves as part of Hungary. Of course, said a British expert, it was no use asking them because the communist revolution in Hungary had thoroughly confused them. (The Austrian government found this a useful argument when the question of a plebiscite was raised by Hungary.) Austria also used strategic grounds—Vienna, along with crucial roads and railways, was too close to the Hungarian border— and, rather plaintively, nutritional ones. The area had always supplied food to the Viennese, who had been lacking vegetables and milk ever since Hungary became an independent state. The Hungarians produced their counterarguments but the peacemakers listened to the Austrians. Most of the area, with the exception of one city, went to Austria. Hungary tried unsuccessfully to persuade Hitler to hand it back in 1938 as a reward for staying neutral during the Anschluss. Austria thus became the only defeated nation to gain new territory at the Peace Conference. It signed the Treaty of St. Germain in September 1919.32
Austria’s first experience with independence was not happy. In the 1920s its economy staggered from crisis to crisis, tided over by parsimonious loans from the powers. Even before the Depression unemployment ran at well over 10 percent a year. In March 1938, when Hitler, with the connivance of the Austrian Nazis, moved in, Austrians, if they were not Jewish or communist, greeted Anschluss with relief. Hitler made a triumphal march from his birthplace just over the Austrian border to Vienna as ecstatic crowds cheered and threw flowers. Even rational men such as Renner were briefly swept up. In 1945 a chastened Austria regained its separate existence and an old Renner became its president. There has been little talk of Anschluss since.
20
Hungary
ON MARCH 23, 1919, as the first signs of spring were appearing, two American experts walked glumly in the Bois de Boulogne. “We had just learned,” one wrote in his diary, “of the outbreak of troubles in Hungary, which, if they spread, may make waste paper of our conventions for a while to come.” 1 If Austria had been causing mild concern in Paris, Hungary had been setting off alarm bells, especially when Béla Kun, an unknown communist, seized power in Budapest. Suddenly Bolshevism appeared to have taken a giant step into the rich Hungarian plain, with its key strategic position. With a short hop, it could be in Austria, already under a socialist government, or the Balkans, and with another step still, into Bavaria, where the communists were edging toward their brief moment in power. Kun himself sent out contradictory signals, with reassuring messages to the Allied leaders but fraternal greetings to their working classes. More worrying, he sent an offer eastward to Lenin, asking for a treaty. Perhaps the two communist states could establish a link through the disputed territory on the eastern edges of Poland and Czechoslovakia, where there were said to be local Bolshevik forces on the march.
Even before Kun arrived on the scene, the peacemakers were suspicious of Hungary. With its great landed magnates, its cowed peasantry and its history (the Magyars had stormed out of central Asia in the ninth century), there was something not quite European about Hungary. Liberals tended to blame the worst faults of the old empire on the Hungarian oligarchy. “There has been much talk of suppressing the revolution in Hungary,” Lloyd George told his colleagues on the Council of Four when they first heard the news. “I don’t see why we should do that: there are few countries so much in need of a revolution. This very day, I had a conversation with someone who has visited Hungary and who knows it well; he tells me that this country has the worst system of landholding in Europe. The peasants there are as oppressed as they were in the Middle Ages, and manorial law still exists there.”2
This time Lloyd George was not far wrong. Budapest was an elegant, modern capital, but the countryside, which produced much of Hungary’s wealth, was a different world. Serfdom had been finally abolished in 1848, but much of the land was still held in large estates, by aristocrats, the gentry or the church. In 1914 Prince Esterházy owned 230,000 hectares; one of his ancestors had had a uniform on which all the buttons were diamonds and the seams were marked out in pearls. The grand families were worldly and international, with houses in Vienna and Paris, English nannies and grooms, French cooks and German music masters. They spoke easily in French or Latin, less so in Hungarian. They produced the political leaders, the generals, occasionally even liberal reformers, but most were deeply conservative and uninterested in anything outside their own world. They distrusted Jews, although rich Jewish industrialists and bankers were starting to marry their children; they believed in keeping the non-Magyars, the Croats, Slovaks or Rumanians who probably made up more than half the population of prewar Hungary, firmly under control.3
The man Béla Kun overthrew in March 1919 was one of the greatest landowners of them all. Michael Károlyi, who took over in the last chaotic days of the war, owned 60,000 acres, a glass factory, a coal mine, a superb country house, a mansion in Budapest and several shooting lodges. When he tipped a Gypsy band in a restaurant the usual amount, his tutor, he recalled, reprimanded him. “I should pay at least double the amount given by anyone else, for I must never forget that I was a Count Károlyi.” Fate had given him much but not everything. He was a lonely, ugly child with a cleft palate. Surrounded by protective relatives and servants, he was deeply hurt when, on his first forays into Hungarian society, people laughed at him and women rejected his timid advances.4
The young Károlyi reacted by throwing himself madly into various pursuits. He forced himself to become an orator and took up politics. He gambled, he drank, he drove fast cars very badly. He became the foremost dandy in Budapest, then the wildest man-about-town. He played polo recklessly, he fenced compulsively, he took one of the first flights over the city. He raised eyebrows by finding shooting parties boring, and doubts about his manhood when he refused the young peasant girl in his bed (supplied by custom to all male guests along with the game). His ideas, at least by the standards of his world, were radical. Before the war he was seen with strange people: socialists, middle-class politicians, intellectuals.5
When the war started, Károlyi joined up. (His regiment was held back from active service until his wife gave birth to their first child.) By 1918, he was demanding a separate peace with the Allies and, finally, the end of the union with Austria. On October 31 Károlyi became Hungary’s prime minister; two weeks later, he proclaimed a republic. “He seems a very good fellow,” reported an American, “but nervous and permanently worried, which is perhaps not surprising.”6 The army no longer obeyed orders, the civil administration had broken down, the transport system had collapsed and money was rapidly losing its value.
The Hungarians, with their territory melting away, cast about for protection. A cousin of the emperor, now calling himself Joe Habsburg, wrote to George V in London suggesting that Hungary become part of the British empire. Perhaps, Hungarians hoped, they could borrow an English prince. Like the Germans and the Austrians, they also hoped that their republican revolution would soften the Allies. The Hungarian Academy appealed to distinguished Allied scholars not to let Hungary be dismembered. Károlyi dispatched a prominent feminist as his representative to contact the Allies in neutral Switzerland, calculating, wrongly as it turned out, that this would demonstrate the new, liberal face of Hungary. (She shocked the conservative Swiss and spent most of her time quarreling with her own staff.) A leading Budapest restaurant named a dish in honor of Marshal Foch. (Unfortunately, in Hungarian it came out as “diarrhea soup.”)7
Like everyone else, the Hungarians looked to the Americans. His peace platform, Károlyi assured American representatives in Budapest, was “Wilson, Wilson, Wilson.” The city was festooned with Wilson’s photograph and the slogan “A Wilson Peace Is the Only Peace for Hungary.” What that meant, at least to Hungarians, was not self-determination for the minorities within Hungary but that their country should keep its historic boundaries. There was much talk of Switzerland, a favorite analogy in Central Europe, of regional autonomy, and of language and other rights. The Károlyi government set about passing laws to this effect.8
The Hungarian appeals were futile. The Allies remained suspicious of Hungary. Was Károlyi really as liberal as he claimed? He was, after all, an aristocrat, related to the men who had led Hungary into the war. If the British and the Americans were cool, the French were actively hostile. Only the Italians were sympathetic, simply because they hoped to use Hungary against Yugoslavia. That both Czechoslovakia and Rumania were able to present their demands as Allies did not help Hungary. Nor did the fact that Hungary’s borders were drawn piecemeal, in the Czechoslovak commission and the one on Rumania and Yugoslavia. As Nicolson, who represented Britain on both, admitted, “it was only too late that it was realised that these two separate Committees had between them imposed upon Hungary a loss of territory and population which, when combined, was very serious indeed.” 9
Thanks partly to the French, whose troops made up the bulk of Allied forces in Central Europe, Hungary had already lost control of much of its territory before the Peace Conference started. When Károlyi and his colleagues had arrived in Belgrade in November 1918 to surrender, they had come full of optimism, with postcards for the French general Louis Franchet d’Esperey to autograph. He had greeted them coldly, dismissing their claim to represent a new, liberal Hungary. “I know your history,” he said. “In your country you have oppressed those who are not Magyar. Now you have the Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Yugoslavs as enemies; I hold these people in the hollow of my hand; I have only to make a sign and you will be destroyed.” The French allowed the Serbians to move north into Hungarian territory, the Czechs to take over Slovakia, and the Rumanians to advance westward into their coveted Transylvania. When the Hungarian government complained to Colonel Ferdinand Vix, the head of the French military mission in Budapest, he refused to pass on their complaints.10
The Hungarians feared that temporary occupations would harden into permanent possession. They had resigned themselves to the loss of Croatia, even Slovakia, although in both cases they had hoped for more generous boundaries than the ones they finally got. Transylvania was something else again. Over the hills dividing the Hungarian plain from the highlands, it lay sheltered within the arrowhead of the Carpathians where they point down toward the Black Sea. Transylvania was almost half the old kingdom of Hungary; it was rich; and it was woven into Hungarian history.
Geography gave Transylvania natural defenses, but over the centuries outsiders—Romans, Germans, Slavs, Magyars—found their way there. By the eleventh century, it was under Hungarian control and it remained so, in various forms, until 1918. Rumanian scholars dismissed this history, claiming that Rumanians had been there long before anyone else. “It was in this territory,” Brtianu told the Supreme Council in February, “that the Rumanian nation had been constituted and formed; and all its aspirations for centuries had tended towards the political union of that territory.” (Brtianu did not mention that the Rumanian claims went well beyond the old boundaries of Transylvania, into Hungary proper.) Rumania, he went on, had been promised Transylvania under the Treaty of Bucharest when it entered the war in 1916. This was not persuasive, because everyone remembered how Rumania had made a separate peace with Germany in 1918. In fact, Brtianu had a much better argument: even according to Hungarian statistics, Rumanians made up more than half the population in Transylvania; Hungarians constituted only 23 percent, with Germans and others accounting for the rest. At the end of the war, an assembly of Transylvanian Rumanians had voted overwhelmingly for union with Rumania. The local Germans eventually added their support. The Hungarians, of course, remained opposed. The peacemakers expressed some concerns over the Hungarian minority—Brtianu said they would be treated in the most liberal fashion—but did not question that Transylvania should go to Rumania. Indeed, the French had made up their minds long before they had heard the Rumanian case.11
The peacemakers asked the Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs to draw the new border between Hungary and Rumania. The French and the Italians wanted to give Rumania a generous swath of Hungary as well, while the British and the Americans followed ethnic lines, which would have kept the border further east. As one of the British experts said, “The balance must naturally be inclined towards our ally Rumania rather than towards our enemy Hungary.” The commission came up with a compromise report in March, which went a long way toward satisfying Rumania’s demands. When rumors of its contents reached Hungary, they caused consternation. Posters with maps of a Hungary divided into four asked “Voulez-vous faire quatre Alsace-Lorraines?” (“Do you want to create four Alsace-Lorraines?”) Before the Supreme Council could decide what to do, the revolution in Hungary broke out, adding the stigma of Bolshevism to the beleaguered country.12
Károlyi’s government had been under attack from the right, which bitterly resented attempts at land reform, and the left, which felt it was not going far enough. The peacemakers did little to help. Where Austria received 288,000 tons of food and clothing for relief in the first six months of 1919, Hungary got only 635 tons. “Our difficulties,” Károlyi recalled bitterly in exile, “were multiplied a thousand times by the ill-will and inefficiency of the different foreign missions in Budapest.” On March 20, Colonel Vix delivered the final blow when he presented Károlyi with a decision from the Supreme Council establishing a neutral zone between Hungary and Rumania. Hungary had ten days to withdraw all its troops to the west of this area, while Rumania could advance to its eastern edge. This, according to the peacemakers, was to prevent clashes between the two nations. The Hungarians did not see it in that light.13
As Károlyi pointed out to Vix, the Hungarians were being asked to withdraw from almost exactly the territory claimed by Rumania, while Rumanian troops were being allowed to move westward by a hundred kilometers. What was to stop them from going still farther into Hungary? If he agreed to the neutral zone, he added, there would be a revolution and his government would fall. Under his breath, he muttered: “As far as I am concerned, I should be glad to be rid of it.” Vix was unmoved; it was not, he kept repeating, a matter of politics. The Hungarians must calm down and accept the ultimatum from Paris. He was sure that the Allies would keep Rumania in check. They might as well occupy the whole country now, said Károlyi: “Make it a French colony, or a Rumanian colony, or a Czechoslovak colony.” Vix shrugged. The following day Károlyi’s government fell and he went into exile.14 He died on the French Riviera in 1955.
Károlyi’s successor was, as he predicted, a revolutionary. Béla Kun came from a tiny village in Transylvania and was the son of a drunken, shiftless notary. (His father was a nonpracticing Jew, a fact later seized upon by anti-Semites as proof of a widespread Jewish-Marxist conspiracy.) A dandy and a poseur, Kun was vain, hot-tempered and self-centered. He was also, it was generally agreed, ugly, with a huge head supported on a wiry small body, a flat nose and enormous ears. Before the war he had made something of a name as a radical journalist. In 1914, he joined up and fought against the Russians on the Eastern Front, where he was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought a rapid change in both his politics and his fortunes. By 1918 he was free and in Moscow, meeting with Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, and the leader of a new Hungarian communist movement. At the end of the war, provided with gold and fake documents by his new friends, Kun traveled back to Hungary to spread the revolution. His timing was perfect.15
Kun moved through Hungary’s chaotic politics like a whirlwind, issuing manifestos and demands, calling strikes and demonstrations. When the police in Budapest beat him up, he achieved martyrdom. On March 21, the day after the Allied ultimatum, Károlyi’s socialist allies in the government came to see Kun in prison; they were prepared to hand over power to the communists. Béla Kun got his freedom, his revolution and his power that day, all without a shot being fired. The next day he declared Hungary a Soviet republic. 16
In the opinion of a young American officer in Budapest, the revolution was more nationalist than communist: “The Hungarians who are united in their conviction that Hungary must not be dismembered, have made use of Bolshevism as a last desperate resort to preserve the integrity of their country.” In Paris the Council of Four hesitated. Clemenceau and his military advisers were for reinforcing the Rumanians and letting them loose on both the Russian and Hungarian Bolsheviks. Foch appeared with a large map to demonstrate how Rumania was the key to preventing a solid Bolshevik front in the center of Europe. Forget the White Russians in southern Russia, he said brutally; they were already lost. “This is why I tell you: build upon Rumania, because there you have not only an army, but also a government and a people.” Wilson admitted that he was uncertain about the right course of action. “What exactly is our position with regards to the Bolsheviks?” Perhaps it had been unwise to establish the neutral zone between Rumania and Hungary: “It doesn’t seem this method has produced the desired result.” Should the Peace Conference be choosing sides? “Nominally we are friends of the Hungarians and even better friends of the Rumanians.” Clemenceau responded sharply, “The Hungarians are not our friends but our enemies.” Of all the peoples in Austria-Hungary, they had been the most reluctant to surrender.17
