In one example of the rich images with which Friederike Kind-Kovács illustrates her Budapest’s Children, a compelling study of the “highly visible social consequences of war,” lean, serious, and reservedly expectant uniformly clothed and shod children gaze toward the photographer from the left side of a worn classroom, now turned into a tuberculosis examination station (Fig. 7.2: 216, 307). The central figure is a shirtless youth, illuminated by sunlight streaming through the window, breathing for the examiner’s stethoscope, while concerned adults to his right look on, or direct their attention to the camera. A poster on the paneled wall behind the examinee depicts a map of the pre-World War I Kingdom of Hungary against a dark background featuring the slogan “Nem! Nem! Soha!” (“No! No! Never!”). That well-known protest refrain against accepting the Treaty of Trianon’s extensive reduction of the country’s prewar territory was the basis for Hungary’s interwar right-wing revisionist politics.
The fact that the photo belongs to the collection of the American Relief Administration European Operational Records underscores Kind-Kovács’s thoroughly substantiated and cogent argument for how the nation-states’ interest in child protection became a key part of building the transnational humanitarian cooperation movement in the immediate post-World War I period, and “at times … an ostentatious display of unequal power relations” (306–7) The starved and sick body of the suffering Hungarian child in the aftermath of the Great War became mapped onto the “impaired, truncated national body of Hungary itself” (215).
Budapest was a miserably hungry “displacement hub” in the immediate postwar years. Kind-Kovács captures with empathy and sensitivity the experience of everyday life in a capital city that had become the destination for hundreds of thousands of destitute people who migrated inward from territories now situated outside of Hungary’s redrawn borders. While Budapest had experienced considerable refugee traffic during the war—including Jewish refugees from Galicia and Transylvania, ethnic Hungarians from Transylvania, and other inhabitants of Austria-Hungary crucially classified by citizenship to determine their eligibility for aid amid the wartime privations on the territory on which they sojourned—Kind-Kovács shows how the postwar Hungarian nation-state turned outward to its former enemies to solve the problem of providing relief for the nation’s ingathered children. Children became the eligible group. Hungarian aid activists let the conclusion be drawn that the postwar food crisis derived from the agricultural and economic disruption of territorial loss. Yet it was necessary to “prove” the need of children for food and medical and material relief. Being rated as clinically malnourished, Kind-Kovács argues, allowed access to food relief. The rating process established the “modern management of children’s bodies.” (184–85).
Kind-Kovács periodizes her study between 1918 and the early 1920s to center the “Glocal”—combined global and local—response to overwhelming need in Budapest (17). Thematically organized and beautifully written, her book is based on meticulous Hungarian-, English-, and German-language archival research in wide-ranging collections held in Austria, Britain, Hungary, Switzerland, and the United States, as well as narrative interviews she conducted with people who experienced the “children’s trains”—a primary source treasure of the evacuations abroad and the life-long effects of those experiences. Her work moves through multiple experiences of children’s displacement and liminality from the appalling living conditions of the railway car dwellers by the Budapest train stations to the international dislocation of the “lucky ones” who were sent abroad to foster families in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain, Sweden, and Belgium due their qualifying malnourishment, severe lack of weight, or sickness. We learn about the new science of the body that went hand in hand with creating institutions of child protection. Overall, the book traces an arc from displacement, hunger, and suffering to transnational child welfare and surprisingly symbiotic cooperation schemes for gaining a foothold and skills for self-help through vocational education.
Western humanitarian organizations play an outsized role in this story. The United States in particular displays its newly gained global power “by presenting itself as a winner not only of the war but of the humanitarian war against hunger” (20). US involvement in these efforts to aid a formerly hostile country should demonstrate the practices of peace and rapprochement, US largesse in the world, and the growth of welfare as an expression of power. Students of East Central European history may be left to muse what the twentieth century might have looked like if there had been greater cooperation and rapprochement within the region itself, rather than increasing reliance on external powers for aid and transatlantic humanitarianism.
This work makes valuable contributions to many fields, including the history of humanitarianism, medicine, eugenics, comparative nationalism, refugee and displacement history, in addition to children’s history, twentieth-century European and transnational history, and, of course, Hungarian history. It is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and readers generally interested in how, when, where, and why international aid movements can be successful.
