The Phoenix Land

by Miklos Banffy

  These gymnastic displays of fantasy and extraordinary ideas formed a deep impression on us both, and we would listen for hours sunk deep in great leather-covered armchairs.

  It was at this time, under the spell of Uncle Sándor’s ideas, that I wrote a short essay on the credit-unions in Transylvania, as my uncle’s views had had the immediate effect of crystalizing for me their possible implications for the land of my birth. Unfortunately, later – it was my own fault – I was to separate myself from the circle over which my uncle presided.

  Sándor Károlyi’s early teaching was to have more lasting effect upon Mihály who, as I was often to remark, due to his exceptional birth and circumstance, was later to become a political leader. When he became chairman of the OMGE and principal spokesman for the radical Independence Party, I frequently heard echoes of Uncle Sándor’s utopian ideas for the world’s future, although in other forms – and unfortunately with quite other effects – than he would ever have imagined. All the same it is equally clear that in Mihály there was a clash of many opposing ideologies and that he believed in them all with equal passion. One of these was an ineradicable Hungarian patriotism, another a hatred of all things German; and a third the inward-looking ‘Hungarian Globe’ mentality which I have already mentioned; and yet in contrast he believed firmly in the ideal of world citizenship, and the germs of all these beliefs had been bred in him years before in the memories of Uncle Sándor’s talk – but the sown seed brings different harvests depending on ground upon which it has fallen24.

  When Mihály was growing into a young man, he left his grandparents’ house and went to live in the Károlyi Palais in Egyetem utca in the old quarter of Pest25. He had a huge allowance – two thousand crowns a month – although this barely covered the cost of keeping his twelve horses. I understand that in his will, Mihály’s father had indicated that he wanted his son to be brought up as a horseman. The five hundred or so crowns that were left for him to spend were quite inadequate to pay for the style of living expected of a young man in his position, owner of vast country estates as well as the great townhouse, with all the claims so many people had on him. This was the time we both first joined the Kaszino Club.

  In those days the Kaszino was not the somewhat sleepy club it was to become after the Great War. Then it throbbed with life. Nightly there was lavish entertaining in what was one of Budapest’s most expensive eating-places. There was continual cigány music and social revelry in the great rooms on the ground floor, while upstairs, on the first floor, there was gambling for enormously high stakes.

  In such surroundings five hundred crowns soon disappeared, and in such surroundings too, it was impossible to call a halt. The only way to avoid spending money was to stay away. This, however, required the steadfast character of a Cato, and neither of us had such a character. Soon we were drawn into the game and, no matter whether our luck was good or bad, somehow we always had money, from our winnings or from moneylenders.

  As far as I was concerned, this phase did not last long as I was soon sent first to Fiume and then en poste abroad. Afterwards I only weakened once or twice, but Mihály, who had inherited a truly immense fortune as soon as he came of age, continued without a pause.

  It was in those last years, when we were nearly always in each other’s company, that Mihály’s character was finally fixed forever. And it was then that those peculiarities, which had hitherto been suppressed, started to emerge for all to see.

  One of these was daredevilry, which must have had its roots in his childhood when he had been so overprotected. From this sprang the assertive spirit of ‘I’ll show you!’ of which I will give two examples.

  The one I recall now happened at the end of the 1890s in Vienna, when he insisted on going up in a newly designed balloon whose inventor wanted to try it out for the first time. This inventor, I understand, had created a balloon that, if one wanted to come down, had to have the skin torn. The balloon would then transform itself into a parachute and, according to its eminent inventor, gently deposit the passengers on the ground. Mihály Károlyi and a friend, Stanislaus Deym, volunteered to fly with him at their own risk so as to try out this excellent invention. The takeoff went well, and the wind took them way over the borders of Bohemia. Then the inventor ordered them to climb out of the basket and cling to the lowest part of the net which covered the balloon and which was much wider than the basket itself. So there they were, at a height of one thousand metres, hanging by their hands alone and with nothing between them and the ground. A charming situation! Then the inventor tore the hull, upon which balloon, basket and its three passengers dropped like a stone to the ground – how far and how long it took, no one knew. Despite all this, the experiment was in one sense a success since no one was killed; but not much of a success, for all three were found unconscious in a field and carted off to a hospital in some neighbouring town. I well remember how astonished his uncle Sándor and my aunt Clarisse were when they received a telegram from Mihály, whom they had thought was in Vienna, saying that he was in Budweis, that he had flown there and was well. I don’t think he ever entertained them with the balloon trip’s more delightful details, nor anything of the famous inventor.

  I was with him on the occasion of the second adventure. We were both staying at Abbazia with our families when we heard there was to be some famous party that night in Fiume.

  Abbazia, just down the coast, was a favourite winter retreat for the Hungarian aristocracy. I do not recall if it was to be a masked ball or some informal hop-and-skip dance. We didn’t tell anyone, but that night when all the others had gone to bed, we went down to where there were small sailboats kept for hire by those who wanted to go bathing up the coast. We woke up the boatmen; but no one was willing to take us as far as Fiume because there was a strong wind over the Quarnero and the red warning flag was hoisted above the mole. However, nothing would daunt Mihály and he finally, for a horrendous sum of money, persuaded one of the men to take us across; and so off we went. By the time we were barely four hundred metres from the shore the wind had become so strong that we would have capsized if we had not hauled down the sails of that miserable little boat and rowed instead. We rowed, all three of us, all night, arriving at Fiume some time after dawn when all the revelry had long been over. I was never so close to drowning.

  Wildly excessive daring characterized all his activities. He drove a car at breakneck speed, in spite of only seeing with one eye, and having to wear glasses at all times. Twice he was picked up for dead and suffered from severe concussion. He hunted, bought prize-winning show-jumpers and started to play polo, which is a dangerous game even for good horsemen, and Mihály was a poor rider and violent with it. That he survived at all was due only to the fact that from a puny child he had grown into a big strong man.

  All these characteristics were caused by his innate need to play with fire, seeking danger so as to show everyone not only that he was not weaker or more awkward than other people but, on the contrary, was outstandingly courageous and, indeed, braver than anyone else, and especially to show those who had looked down upon him in childhood that he could now do better than any of them. So that everyone should marvel, he made a point of being different from others, unusual, and a man to be feared. It was also important to him that by will alone he could overcome all difficulties and cope with any challenge. It was all ‘I’ll show them!’ and stemmed from that pampered childhood when everything was permitted to him. All his life, from a baby, as a child and then as a young man growing up, he had been the centre of everything. As a grown man with an immense fortune and surrounded by flatterers, how could he have turned out differently?

  With such a background and upbringing, reared in an hothouse atmosphere of abstruse confusing ideology, itself far removed from reality by its heady mixture of violent chauvinism and ideals of international cooperation, and violently self-willed withal, he stepped onto the platform of Hungarian politics.

  At first he surprised everybody with his en
ergy and his determination to get his own way. However, little by little he became wilder and wilder and more and more unpredictable, veering off in unexpected directions and down dangerous unexplored paths … on and on he went but never as a leader imbued with new ideas but rather one who was carried away by bombastic slogans and by the dizzying height of the role in which he had cast himself.

  ***

  The government was lavish with numerous declarations during the first hours of the revolution. Among so many, the most famous was the message issued by Károlyi on the 2 November, which he addressed ‘to all the nations of the world’ no less and in which he declared that Hungary was now a neutral state and from that day on was at peace with the whole world.

  ‘As of today Hungary is a neutral state!’ shouted all the newspapers in black type on their front pages, and their more gullible readers were all thrilled, saying to themselves: ‘We are neutral! How wonderful! How marvellously simple! We’ve said it, and immediately it is so. What a wonderful statesman that Károlyi is. Fancy knowing just what everyone longed for!’ They had the example of those happy neutral states before them who had not only avoided the bloodletting but also had grown so rich that they were now the envy of all. ‘Let the Germans, the French, anybody, everywhere, go on fighting! It’s of no matter to us! We are not interested any more. Perhaps it will even do us some good. Perhaps we can even make some money from it, like the other neutral states!’ the poor things were saying happily to each other.

  Perhaps some wise rabbi of the ancient faith was the only man who, sitting in his room in the Orczy court of Budapest’s old ghetto, surrounded, I imagine, by copies of the Talmud, torahs, and other holy books, would have smiled at the thought of this folly. What is this sudden transformation of a state that lost the war into a neutral power, the holy man may have reflected, but a legacy of an old ceremony still practiced by some orthodox Jews? According to their custom, when a family member is sick and likely to die they send for the rabbi. He, in his turn, does away with the dying man’s name (let us call him Moise) by pronouncing the words: ‘You are no longer Moise. No one here is called Moise; from today your name is Ephraim.’ This is necessary so that, when the Angel of Death enters the house and calls to the dying man ‘Moise! Come with me!’ they can reply: ‘What Moise? There is no Moise here. Moise must be somewhere else!’

  ‘But this sick man here in his bed,’ asks the Angel of Death, ‘isn’t he the Moise I seek?’

  ‘Oh no!’ they can all reply truthfully, ‘This is Ephraim, with whom you have nothing to do!’

  So the Angel of Death can only say, ‘Excuse me’, take his leave and seek Moise elsewhere. Echoes of this arcane custom could well have occurred to our old rabbi as he pondered the Károlyi government’s message to the world, smiling ruefully as he weighed up its historical significance while possibly even despising it a little as just one more example of the goyim, as so many times in the past, once again following an archaic Hebrew tradition.

  We should not be surprised, therefore, that this noisy declaration of neutrality by Károlyi was received with confidence and joy not only by the general public, who in those days understood foreign affairs even less than they do today, but also by those who had some claim to know better. Today we know everything that followed. We know that Károlyi’s foreign contacts were to prove quite worthless, with the result that he was completely uninformed about the power and also the real condition of the victorious nations, and so his bold enterprise was not solidly based on any security of contract either by an exchange of official documents or even by a verbal promise. His ideas were all based, on the other hand, on erroneous suppositions which sprang, like empty phantoms created only in his own mind in the likeness of some wishful theory, from some visionary fantasy by which all nations were now ready to embrace and love each other – and were prepared to do so with unthinking haste so as to be prepared for some imminent apocalypse.

  This is the only reasonable explanation for all the Károlyi government’s actions, from the first days of power until the last moment when they handed over that power to the Communists. It can only have been a firm conviction that world revolution was even then about to break out at once, immediately and everywhere. They gambled everything on this single ticket, on this one possibility – just as a punter at the races will risk his entire fortune on the win of a single horse or on just one number at roulette. All their decrees, including those ‘people’s laws’ they were to issue, came from the convictions of just ten men that this idea was not fantasy but reality, never for a moment understanding that they would be valid only if such a dream actually came to pass. In all other circumstances their actions would prove at best harmful and at worst fatal. But none of this bothered them, so hypnotized were they by this single improbable theory. They cared nothing for any other ideas; indeed, they did not even consider the possibility of anything different.

  This degree of recklessness and ignorance could only have been believed possible by anyone who did not know the new leaders well and, especially, Károlyi himself. Indeed, anyone who witnessed the confidence with which they publicly expressed their guiding principles, who heard the decisiveness with which they declared their infallibility and sensed the Olympian height from which they smiled down in pity on any mere mortal who might voice some warning or hint at misgivings, could be forgiven for taking it as read that behind all this self-confidence there had to be some secret agreement with the Great Powers, probably starting with France, and that, for the new Hungarian government, everything they were doing today was but the first phase of a plan that, once successfully achieved, would be followed tomorrow by untold benefits for all. That no one then realized what was actually happening is difficult to credit today; but it must be accepted that those new leaders were truly extraordinary. As it turned out, they managed to destroy everything that would have ensured the nation’s real strength. The minister of defence saw ‘no need for soldiers’ while the minister of finance declared he would raise taxes to a level ‘the world has never seen’! They adopted a whole sheaf of contradictory slogans which could be brandished in coffeehouse debates to confound their hearers but which, when put into effect, proved merely destructive of essential institutions. It was as if they had all eaten from the ‘Tree of Ignorance’! The foreign minister named only one ambassador: Roza Bédi-Schwimmer was to be sent to Bern – a woman to Switzerland, whose government was at that moment engaged in a battle over female suffrage! Of course, she was not received. Similarly, as soon as the minister for finance had declared his intentions all capital went into hiding or disappeared abroad. At the same time, although the minister of defence’s speech was generally applauded, the army melted away.

  Even those highly disciplined army divisions that returned in good order from the Italian Front, disintegrated as soon as they were across the Hungarian border. Examination of the details of how the army was to dissolve itself so disastrously reveals ever more inane stupidities. Once the government had declared its policy of disarmament, officials were sent to the border posts to await the arrival of the troops and to direct them, still fully armed, back to their home villages. Thus, instead of being disarmed, the men still possessed their weapons and were free to fire them off at will, which they did to conduct whatever vendettas they had a mind to. All violence went unpunished, for the old officials no longer had any authority and the new government’s agents no power. And, with no one possessing either power or authority, there was anarchy everywhere.

  That anarchy spread so rapidly was characteristic of the times. One result of this was that, when Károlyi wanted to go to Belgrade to attend the armistice discussions, nobody, not the government, nor the ministry of defence, nor even the commanding officer of the Budapest garrison, could find the twenty or thirty men needed as guards on the special train. As a last resort, they were forced to turn to the Soldiers’ Council, which was gracious enough to furnish the necessary guard. This happened on 6 November, barely a week after the glor
ious revolution when Károlyi’s personal halo was as yet untarnished26.

  This trip to Belgrade was to prove the Budapest public’s first great disappointment.

  Everyone had assumed that Károlyi would be received as a welcome friend. This belief had been fed and nourished by the government itself who had assured the public that that ‘good Mihály Károlyi’ would go to Belgrade and bring back news that Hungary’s threatened borders would remain intact. It was just about this time that I remember seeing a poster at the corner of Kristoff Square on which was a poem extolling the great success of the Belgrade mission. It was a sort of ballad in antiquated language purporting to be by that ‘good Mihály Károlyi’ himself and telling how he had faced the enemy all on his own. In spite of the government’s general gullibility, I do believe that there could have been reason for this. When the so-called Diaz Armistice had been signed by Austro-Hungarian representatives in Verona, it had been specified that the Hungarian armies should withdraw only as far as the existing Hungarian border, no further. Therefore it may well have seemed justified to prophesy the good news the mission would bring back. They may well have assumed that General Franchet d’Esperey would not be empowered to go further than the terms to which Diaz had put his signature. Therefore, it was safe to attribute this success to the new order. However, their calculation was wrong. The reason was simply that Károlyi, playing the part of the representative of newly independent Hungary, never identified himself with the contract made by the Dual Monarchy’s military leaders but insisted on starting new negotiations. But new negotiations could entail new conditions, and this is what happened in Belgrade. The new conditions were much harsher for, in between the signature of the Diaz Armistice a few days before and Károlyi’s trip to Belgrade, the Hungarian army had disintegrated. The new defence minister’s remark about not needing soldiers had its effect here too. It is clear that the French commander of the Allied armies knew all about it and probably knew better than did Budapest what it meant; and so, if he was to be enabled to discuss new terms, it meant that these could be infinitely tougher and more cruel than those they replaced.