The Phoenix Land

‘One of the most celebrated and ambitious classics of Hungarian literature’ – Jan Morris

‘This epic Hungarian novel, absorbing both for its exploration of human nature and its study of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire … weaves social and political themes into Bánffy’s powerful tale’ –
Daily Telegraph

‘A masterpiece. This very readable translation makes a wonderful book accessible to many more people’ –
New Statesman

‘A genuine case of a rediscovered classic. The force of Bánffy’s
enthusiasm
produces an effect rather like that of the best Trollope novels – but coming from a past world that now seems excitingly exotic’

–
Times Literary Supplement

‘Bánffy’s masterpiece resembles Proust’s [yet] he writes with all the psychological acumen of Dostoevsky’

– Francis King,
London Magazine

‘A huge, historical, romantic novel [with] good story-telling, solid historical background and enjoyable drama’ –
Library Journal

‘Bánffy is a born story-teller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love affairs. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity’ – Patrick Leigh Fermor

‘A wonderful work, an elegy for a lost Middle-European Eden’

– Ruth Pavey,
Independent

PATRICK THURSFIELD
and
KATALIN BANFFY-JELEN
are the translators of
They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting
and
They Were Divided,
winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2002.

The thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary, which formed the major part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the last Habsburg fled in 1918, was finally dismantled by the Western Allies under the terms of the peace treaties following World War I. Phoenix-like the Hungarian people survived the horrors of the war, the disappointment of the first Socialist Republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying Communist rule of Béla Kun and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country
dismembered
by the Treaty of Trianon.

This is the world that Miklós Bánffy describes in his two short books of memoirs. For some thirty years after Miklós Bánffy’s death in Budapest in 1950 it might have seemed as if Hungary had gone into official denial that he had ever lived at all. As for his writings, they too might never have existed let alone have been hailed as a national treasure. At the time of Bánffy’s death the post-war Communist government was at its most repressive; therefore, for the new rulers, the writings of any member of the former ruling class had never officially existed and, indeed, had been removed from the shelves of school and university libraries and were no longer offered for sale in the bookshops. Like their authors, they too might never have existed. Their significance, whether literary or political, was officially held to be of no
contemporary
value and so best forgotten.

In this climate of Communist political correctness, history was being rewritten according to the Party Line, and any
digression
from that was taken as at best subversive and at worst
criminally
traitorous. As a result of this short-sighted policy, several generations of young people of school and university age had no true knowledge of what had brought about the dismemberment
of their once great and powerful country under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, which had been imposed by the Western powers in 1920 and had been punitive rather than corrective of perceived injustice. These had the effect of arbitrarily replacing one set of ethnic imbalances with another in many ways as bad, if not worse, than those that had evolved over the centuries.

By the end of the nineteenth century the kingdom of Hungary, which for a thousand years had been the chief bastion of a Europe menaced by Turkish aggression, had become a vast multinational state whose peoples were of many diverse ethnic origins who spoke a myriad different languages and practised almost as many different religions. The existence of so many minority peoples, some of whom, to be sure, nursed dreams, if not of actual political independence, at least of some degree of autonomy, was to produce its own problems. However, it was not as simple as that. Western Hungary, which comprised the great Hungarian plain and formed the nucleus of the ancient kingdom of St Stephen, was bordered on all sides by very different provinces, each with its own ethnic minority, and some with more than one. To the east lay Transylvania, Hungary’s largest province, in which the population was fairly equally balanced between those of ethnic Magyar origins and language and those of Romanian stock; and here it should not be forgotten that only a minority of these last were indigenous Transylvanians. Their numbers had been vastly increased in earlier years, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by waves of Romanian immigrants from the eastern side of the Carpathians. These had fled their native land to escape the savageries of Turkish rule. It must be remembered that, as a sovereign national state, Romania had not existed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it become a principality, later upgraded to a kingdom and ruled by a German princeling.

It was at this time that learned discussion about the origins of the Romanian people with their Latin-based language so very different from those of their Magyar and Slav neighbours, took flight. Romanian and pro-Romanian scholars offered the view that they were the true descendants of the Dacians, who had inhabited the land when it formed part of the Roman Empire
and who therefore predated the Magyar conquest of Hungary and especially of Transylvania.

This theory provided a convenient and timely argument to reinforce Romanian irredentist ambitions and as such was cynically used to foment discontent among the Transylvanian Romanians (the majority of whom were uneducated peasants) who until then had shown little sign of resenting being ruled by landowning Magyar aristocrats or government officials from Budapest. There were some, usually scions of those ancient landowning aristocratic families (of which Miklós Bánffy was one), who, while still loyal to the crown, cherished the hope that one day they could obtain some measure of independence for their formerly autonomous homeland. To the south lay the Banat in which there were more Serbs than Magyars in the districts just north of Belgrade, while only a mile or two further north there were more Magyars than Serbs. A little further west, but still to the south of central Hungary lay Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Directly to the West lay the Burgenland, with a mixed population of Hungarians and Austrians. There were more Austrians in the narrow strip of land closest to the Austrian border and more Hungarians in the equally narrow strip to the east; but, while the town of Sopron was predominantly Hungarian, elsewhere the two races were inextricably mixed.

To the north was Bohemia, populated mainly by Czechs, with a small minority of Germans in its northern region, while to the east the Slovaks formed the majority. In both these regions there was a substantial minority of Hungarians, particularly on the north bank of the Danube between the Austrian border and Estergom, and it was the same in the Nyitra hills to the
northeast
of Estergom, which now lie partly in the Czech Republic and partly in Slovakia. In 1921 it had all been handed over to the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia. As a result of the new boundaries laid down by the Allies, hardly a metre of the former borders of the Hungarian-ruled part of the former
Austro-Hungarian
Empire remained to her. These new injustices formed the basis of Hungary’s post-1920 demand that the boundaries should be revised if justice were not only to be done but also seen to be done.

This was Bánffy’s first preoccupation when he was appointed foreign minister in István Bethlen’s government in 1921.

Much of the blame for the unjust redistribution of what had for centuries been Hungarian lands must be laid at the door of the baleful influence exercised at the Paris peace talks by the
militantly
pro-Slav British journalist, Seton-Watson. This
meddlesome
but influential journalist had battled tirelessly to reward the Czech leader Benes for his wartime support of the Allies with a high position in the new state of Czechoslovakia, ‘gallant little Serbia’ with Croatia; Slovenia and Bosnia, and the formerly insignificant little kingdom of Romania with the huge province of Transylvania, all of which cost Hungary well over half her former territory and two-thirds of her pre-war peoples. Hungary’s despair and disillusion were most graphically explained by István Bethlen in a series of lectures given at the Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London’s St James’s Square in November 1933 and afterwards published in book form under the title of
The Treaty of Trianon and European Peace
(Longmans, Green and Co, London, New York and Toronto, 1934). Bethlen, who was also a cousin and remained a lifelong friend of Miklós Bánffy, had been in a unique position to discuss these problems, as he had been prime minister of Hungary from 1921 to 1931.

This was the world that Miklós Bánffy was to write about in his two short books of memoirs,
Emlékeimböl – From my Memories
from 1932 and
Huszonöt Ev (1945) – Twenty-Five Years (1945)
, which had never been published before, since the manuscript had only been discovered after the fall of
Communism
among the Bánffy papers deposited in the Ráday Institute by his widow soon after his death in 1950. These two books describe a very different world from that into which Bánffy had been born in 1873 when Hungary had been at her greatest and when it had in effect been ruled largely by a privileged group of hereditary aristocrats.

From my Memories
describes the death-throes of this world. The first part recalls those depressing days in the last months of 1916 when many men of clear sight had realized that the war would eventually be lost, and when all of Austria-Hungary felt
that the death of the aged Emperor Franz Joseph signalled the end of an epoch.

In Budapest it immediately became imperative to crown the new monarch king of Hungary, since, according to the country’s constitution, no parliamentary measures could be made law until there was a properly crowned and anointed sovereign to give his approval. This will explain why, in those desolate days when the casualty lists were daily growing longer and the capital was filled with the maimed and wounded soldiery returning from the front, anyone could have contemplated something so festive as the pomp and circumstance of a coronation.

Bánffy, as the scion of an ancient family whose father held an important office at court and who, moreover, had himself for some years been charged with responsibility for running the state theatres, was an obvious choice to organize the decorations and most of the other technical arrangements both inside and outside the coronation church. Part One of the book tells firstly of the hasty arrangements that had to be completed in a few weeks at a time when few people were available and the city was desperately short of almost everything that would be needed. He then goes on to describe the splendours and miseries of the coronation ceremonies on the last day of December 1916. Bánffy’s account is written with compassion and understanding as well as with an eye to the ironic and occasionally ludicrous aspects of that beautiful but sad ceremony.

In Part Two we move on to the closing days of the war in October 1918, when the monarchy was overthrown in the
so-called
‘Aster Revolution’ and in its place there was established a short-lived socialist republic with Count Mihály Károlyi – Bánffy’s cousin and, when they were both younger, an intimate friend – as its first president. This in turn soon gave way to a Communist regime under Béla Kún. Bánffy, who had been in Budapest at the time of the Aster Revolution and who, along with István Bethlen and others of a like mind, was only too
conscious
of Károlyi’s inadequacy and obvious inability to
withstand
the growing Communist threat, decided to go to England to explain, to any open-minded and influential people he could find, the menace to world peace that was inherent in what was
happening in Hungary as a result of Allied policies. He decided to go, as a private citizen, at his own expense and under the auspices of the Szekler National Council, to London to raise support and sympathy for his suffering country. Before leaving in the first days of January 1919, Bánffy went to see Károlyi and, while explaining why he wished to go and also making it clear that he was not asking to be sent officially as he felt he would have more chance of success if he remained independent, obtained permission to take out the necessary funds.

At this point Bánffy takes the opportunity to insert a
fascinating
pen-portrait of the unfortunate Károlyi, which is different from all others as it is written by someone who knew the man intimately from the days of their shared childhood and
schooldays
. In this it differs from most of what was later to be written about Károlyi both in its depth of psychological understanding and sympathy and in its freedom from the sort of sycophantic appreciation that pervades so much of what has been written about Károlyi by his wife and other admirers.

As it happens, Bánffy was never then to reach England as he found himself stranded in Holland with no money and, as a
well-known
aristocrat of independent means, was unable to return to Communist-ruled Hungary.

Bánffy’s account of his adventures in passing through a Germany reduced to chaos by the Spartacist workers’ revolt and finding himself so short of funds that he had to try to make a living as a portrait painter, is hilarious. When Béla Kun, in his turn, was forced to flee, and the Communist domination came to an abrupt and ignominious end, Bánffy received word to return from Bethlen, who was in Vienna heading a spirited group of exiles. He left at once for Austria. From there they would soon be able to go home and try to rebuild what remained of their shattered country.

Although written many years later when Hungary had
suffered
a second defeat in 1945, Bánffy still manages to keep up an urbane tone from which his good humour and irrepressible sense of the ridiculous has not been submerged either by the new tragedies to which Hungary had been subjected or by the bleak circumstances in which the book was written. When the war
drew to a close the castle of Bonczhida had been reduced almost to a ruin, burned and looted by the retreating German armies as an act of revenge for Bánffy’s attempt, made a year before, to persuade Romania, together with Hungary, to desert the Axis and sue for a separate peace. Countess Bánffy and their then teenage daughter, the future co-translator of her father’s memoirs, had returned to Budapest because word had reached them that their townhouse had been occupied by the Russians and all their belongings thrown into the street. Miklós Bánffy had stayed in their Koloszvár house hoping to regain what was left of their forestry holdings from which their fortune derived. Although unsuccessful in this, he was prevented from rejoining his wife in Hungary because the frontier had been closed by the Romanian army. Nothing daunted, Bánffy, although his papers and archives had been destroyed by the German army, set to work to tell the story of his eighteen months as Hungary’s foreign minister.

These were by no means uneventful and started after the fall of Count Pál Teleki’s government following the first of the new young king’s two failed attempts to return to Hungary to reclaim his throne in Budapest as a springboard from which to regain his other title as emperor of Austria. Teleki, who had not handled the attempted
coup
well, was forced to resign, and István Bethlen was appointed prime minister in his place. It was he who asked Bánffy to help him by accepting the onerous post of minister for foreign affairs.