Come down the Danube through a “painters’ paradise” of low hills, past a “bosky island,” around a bend where suddenly the spires and parapets and bustling quays spread before you “in a pearly, blue-gray light.” Glimpse the Royal Castle, its cupola “studded with stony warts, a suggestion of an old Magyar warrior’s semibarbaric helmet.” Debark at the promenade, check your bags at the Hungaria, and take the subway (“an inimitable smell of varnished wood and of the ozone of direct-current electricity”) out Andrássy Avenue—an East European Champs-Elysées—to the park and the zoo. Or rub elbows with artistes at the Japan coffeehouse. In the Inner City breathe the “fresh cool paper-smell and warm burnt coffee-smell, occasionally enriched by a whiff of lilac water.” Or swim at St. Luke’s Baths, “the salty smells of steam and cabin-wood mixing with the pleasantly bitter odor of freshly tapped beer.” If it is winter, try the Skating Club, where the clubhouse is “warm as an oven . . . reeking of oiled leather, coal-smoke and . . . melted ice.” Chances are it’s winter, for “winters came earlier than they come now. They were colder and snowier.” But then, you are in “a city of distinct anticipation and of distinct seasons, more distinct than now.” This is turn-of-the-century Budapest, and your guide is John Lukacs.

It was R.G. Collingwood who speculated that a historian could reexperience Caesar’s thoughts by careful scholarly concentration; is Lukacs, by concentrated description, replaying the pleasures of a vanished time? “Budapest 1900 was not inspired by nostalgia,” he curtly states. And later: “We must watch for the symptoms of an uncritical and, therefore, unhistorical nostalgia.”

Then the book is, perhaps, about the city’s phenomenal transformation after the 1867 compromise with Vienna. In the empire revived under the name Austria-Hungary, Hungary got the long leash it fought for in Kossuth’s revolution of 1848, and Budapest went from sleepy cow town to thriving metropolis in 30 years. By 1900, 733,000 people lived in the place, the very name of which impressed a contemporary correspondent as “big with the future.” Uprooted by land reform, peasants poured in from the countryside, while their former feudal lords struggled to pay taxes for the first time in the country’s history. Business boomed. The middle classes burgeoned, and with them came democracy. Hungary’s Parliament building was the world’s largest.

But it was populated by loudmouths, scoundrels, and plain ignoramuses: by 1901 the Catholic People’s Party proposed a stiff tax on stock transactions. A respected literatus proclaimed: “Free competition is a fraud.” Anti-Semitic and pro-“Christian” sentiments sprang up in tandem with a redneck nationalism; intellectuals looked not to laid-back Vienna of the doddering Habsburgs, but to Germany. Yet “this is not a political history of Budapest, let alone of Hungary,” warns our author.

Just what is it? Well, a sometimes pleasing, sometimes exasperating cross between a coffee-table book and a chamber of commerce commemorative. Only don’t expect Lukacs to say so. “The theme of this book is not the history of a city but its historical portrait at a certain time, a portrait of its atmosphere, of its peoples, of their achievements and troubles.” But a city cannot sit still for the historian as it could for Monet. One cannot capture “achievements and troubles” with oils and brushes. History is drama—likely as not, tragedy—enacted in time. The focus of a particular year, 1900, immediately becomes blurred as Lukacs, despite self-imposed limitations, plunges into the “history of a city” with a capsule history of Hungary and of Europe. He does a passable job; certainly nobody without his grasp of Hungarian is going to call him on fine points. One might, however, question whether such a thing exists as “Magyar pessimism,” and whether anyone ought to brag that “the Hungarian mind is very observant and sensitive to every psychic nuance.”

History, Lukacs says, should be told hierarchically. First come sense impressions, then people, politics (yes, despite his own disclaimer), intellectual and artistic enthusiasms, and finally “less tangible but nonetheless evident mental and spiritual inclinations.” Sure enough, the chapters fall out this way, and as soon as we begin to drift toward nostalgia or cause and effect we are told that that’s not the point of the book. History isn’t science, but the retelling of events imprinted on the collective mind of a nation. It isn’t nostalgia, but a detached means of remembering. That is Lukacs’ argument in Historical Consciousness, where it made a great deal of sense. But in Budapest 1900 this philosophy amounts to little more than an organizational framework that relegates many illuminating particulars to eye-wrenching footnotes. Speaking of the city’s new buildings, the text says: “Their ornamentation is surely excessive, with strange, twisted ornaments on their roofs and parapets.” Footnote: ” ‘What are these ornaments for?’ someone asked Lechner. ‘Who will see them?’ ‘The birds will see them,’ Lechner answered.”

There is a wild indulgence in literary diction, as in “The year 1900 was the noon hour of Budapest, even in winter. Summer was galloping in its skies and in its heart.” In such passages our author is attempting to do the novelist’s job. Here is Gyula Krúdy:

He saw . . . those heart-rending days in spring when the new frocks bedeck the pavements like flowers in the meadows; and the lilting, snowy days in winter ‘ when the sun comes out at noon on Andrássy Avenue to encourage the poor office girls to step out with the gait of duchesses. . . .

Lukacs (using his own excellent translations) quotes generously from Krúdy, enlivening the narrative every time, though the result is not history. It is to historians that we turn for the concrete origins of “atmosphere.” Budapest 1900 shorts us explanations in favor of a dreamily inert historiography. Readers charmed by Lukacs—and there will be many—ought to consider the fate of those who refuse to analyze the past: they are condemned to relish it.

Hornak_Review

[Budapest 1900, by John Lukacs (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 225 pp., $20.95]