The famine that followed World War I in Europe was one of the worst in the history of the twentieth century. Budapest’s Children presents a multi-specific case of postwar social disaster. The book focuses on urban famine in the post-empire context of central Europe in the Hungarian capital, and on child hunger and the international and national struggle to overcome it. Based on extensive archival research, this ground-breaking book is written by Friderike Kind-Kovács, a researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Divided into nine major chapters, this exciting and enlightening book tells the story of how children became targets of transnational humanitarian aid between the Armistice (November 1918) and the mid-1920s.
The setting of the book is particularly interesting, as it shows how western countries (such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain and the US) began to help the children of the former enemy, who were seen as innocent victims of the war. The book deals with the specific case of urban starvation, which was a consequence of the destruction or collapse of previous food supply chains resulting from the Entente’s blockade. Kind-Kovács presents Budapest humanitarian relief as a laboratory in which the protocols and instruments of relief were developed. Her book sheds very sharp light on how Budapest was becoming a starving city, even though food was easier to come by in the countryside. The humanitarian disaster that followed the war was compounded by the forced migration that peace brought, as refugees from the annexed territories could only be accommodated in railway carriages. Tens of thousands fled after the war and lived in wagons for years. The majority of these families had previously belonged to the middle class a few months earlier.
One of the great advantages of Budapest’s Children is that it does not rely solely on written sources, but pays attention to how children’s suffering has become a media product and gained mass publicity. The book demonstrates that researching visual sources is essential to understanding the entirety of postwar humanitarian relief. It was the images that appeared in the various magazines that represented hunger and suffering to donor countries. The impact of starvation on the child’s body was key to the development of this visual language, making the need for international aid visible and demonstrable. The visual language, composed of photographs, which encouraged donor countries to show solidarity, was understandable both locally and to the distant reader.
The fight against hunger also had very important ideological and political dimensions. The US action in Hungary was motivated primarily by strong anti-Bolshevik sentiment and support for the Horthy regime, which ultimately aimed to stabilise the region. While Western aid and the international visibility of child hunger were used by the Miklós Horthy regime to consolidate its power and undermine the peace treaty that ended WWI, in which Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory. In both domestic and especially foreign propaganda, the Hungarian government portrayed the post-war famine and social catastrophe as the visible consequence of the peace that ended WWI.
The chapter that discusses how foreign and local Hungarian aid agencies controlled and exercised power over children’s bodies is extremely important. Clinical studies that basically revealed the effects of starvation and malnutrition on the body played an important role in creating the narrative of the child’s body. Budapest’s Children also reveals that the main tool for disciplining children eligible for aid was in fact starvation itself. The most privileged food was milk, which was seen as exceptionally important, even vital, for infants and young children. This was closely linked to medicalization, so research was carried out into how childhood mortality and the availability of milk were linked.
In one of the last excellent chapters, Kind-Kovács explores the personal and collective memories of the children’s trains that were designed to take children from the starving capital to the food-rich countryside. The first attempts to do this—for the length of a summer inland holiday—appeared as early as WWI and the subsequent Soviet Republic. After the war, this was transnationalized and trains with children started to run to western European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain. One of the great novelties of this volume is that the author has managed to interview elderly people who were children on longer and shorter stays in England and the Netherlands. The interviews suggest that these childhood experiences had lifelong impact. The book points out that long stays abroad have made it difficult for children to reintegrate at both family and institutional levels after their return to Hungary.
Kind-Kovács concludes that as a result of the aid agencies, parents effectively transferred their own responsibility for child care to the state, which acquired the right to feed and care for the child. Budapest’s Children is essential and not to be missed for anyone examining child welfare in post-war contexts or working on the local history of aid in central Europe. It is also essential reading for researchers who study the history and origins of international organizations and international aid. A great advantage of the book is that it provides, through the analysis of interviews, the voices of some of the children who had been helped, thus making understandable and perceptible the effort of international aid cooperation to bring to life individual, personal life journeys.
