The new book by Robert Nemes, Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives, represents a departure from his previous monograph, the highly praised The Once and Future Budapest (De Kalb, 2005), in which Nemes narrated the nineteenth-century rise of the Hungarian capital as a modern metropolis. In his new book, by contrast, Nemes sets his sights on the provinces, the small towns in not just any region but—to sharpen his argument—the underdeveloped northeastern corner of Hungary. (The degree of the relative, perceived, and real “backwardness” of this region is a point to which Nemes frequently returns.) New as well is his scope: Instead of a nuanced large canvas depicting nation-building, Hungarian nationalism, urban development, and the broad urban spaces of Budapest, he chooses the more intimate setting of microhistory and biography.
In other ways, however, the new book can be regarded as a companion to the first one: Here, Nemes tells the story of the people who made Budapest, were irresistibly drawn to its cultural, political, and economic opportunities, moved there to contribute to its emerging modern culture and economy, or at the very least were conscious of its pull. But this would be to simplify and underestimate the ambition at the core of Another Hungary: to go against the Budapest-centered grain of the historical scholarship of Hungary and hand back some agency to the small towns. They may not have been given their due by historians and treated with condescension by the educated public, yet their backwardness, argues Nemes, may have provided the very impetus for bold reforms. This is an argument that sits well with the observation that leading members of the Hungarian fin de siècle's splendid modernist political and cultural movements from Endre Ady to Oszkár Jászi, Mihály Babits, Zsigmond Móricz, and Dezső Kosztolányi, to mention just a few names from the book, all came from similar small towns.
To accomplish his task, Nemes carefully crafted a set of eight biographies of people hailing from the northeastern region of pre-1918 Hungary. This is a region that was noted for its extreme ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity at the time and, since the end of World War I, has been divided between the many countries that had replaced the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and—more recently—the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.
The collective life span of the eight protagonists—two women and six men—stretches from 1725 to 1918, generously covering the long nineteenth century. They come from a wide range of backgrounds. The three Jews, two Roman Catholics, one Calvinist, one Lutheran, and one Greek Catholic are representative of the unusual religious diversity of the region, while their socioeconomic backgrounds place them in the diffuse swath of Hungarian society that encompassed the middle and upper-middle class and the gentry. The region was also known for its higher than average migration in both directions, and, in various ways, the eight protagonists exemplify this high geographical and social mobility.
Nemes is mindful of his limits when it comes to a full-fledged socioeconomic tableau: He settles, he says, on “hard-working, educated, public-minded, outspoken men and women. These are the provinces’ thinkers, writers, and doers” (4). Each of the eight biographies, from the crusty country gentleman and poet Count József Gvadányi (1725–1801) and the Jewish merchant Ráfáel Kästenbaum (1750–1829) to the water engineer Pál Vásárhelyi (1795–1846), the neolog rabbi Ármin Schnitzer (1836–1914), and the tobacco buyer and enthusiast Vilmos Daróczi (1836–1912) offer wonderfully lively portraits grounded in a richly nuanced social and cultural context of the larger Hungarian and, indeed, European trends. This is a remarkable feat, all the more so when considering the unevenness of available sources: the dearth of testimonies on Kästenbaum (in his case, the rare source—his exceptionally generous will—becomes the story) or the loss of the personal papers of Vásárhelyi, and, in contrast, the embarrassment of riches, in terms of personal, autobiographical, and secondary sources on Margit Kaffka (of which the useful studies of Anna Borgos, Judit Szilágyi, György Bodnár, and Judit Kádár are all more recent than the ones cited).
Two of the subjects are women; separated by more than half a century, both the educator Klára Lövei (1821–97) and the writer Margit Kaffka (1880–1918) were trailblazers in their respective fields and, by implication, women's emancipation at large. Nemes treats them sensitively, mindful of the intricate relationship between liberal nationalism and women's education in Lövei's case. Yet women's emancipation is but one of the larger themes to which the study contributes: The eight lives reflect—and the protagonists frequently comment on—the evolution of Hungarian nationalism and the relationships between Hungarian citizens—divided by ethnicity, religion, class, and gender—that were so profoundly affected by it. The Romanian nationalist journalist Iosif Vulcan—who embodied Hungary's ethnic diversity, with his Hungarian liberal gentry and Romanian intellectual elite background—makes perhaps the least comfortable fit with the rest. Yet his case is important because it demonstrates one of Nemes's main arguments: the agency and creativity of provincial actors in confronting Hungary's great ethnic and regional diversity.
At the same time, the biographies of the three Jewish protagonists offer insight into the trajectory of Jewish emancipation, the debates of the second half of the nineteenth century ultimately dividing Hungarian Jews along orthodox and neolog lines, and, importantly, the rise of antisemitism in the 1880s, the last exemplified in the Tiszaeszlár blood libel case, in the very region at the focus of the study. (Here, György Kövér's majestic study, A tiszaeszlári dráma – Társadalomtörténeti látószögek [Budapest, 2011], which is crucial not only for its discussion about the trial but also for its analysis of social history and education in the northeastern provinces, should have been considered beyond the brief reference in a note. And while Victor Karády's studies on Jewish assimilation are indispensable, Nemes may have acknowledged the debate that developed around Karády's thesis on the “social contract of assimilation” in the last twenty years.)
In an overwhelmingly successful attempt to keep an internal cohesion, Nemes frequently cross-references the lives and social and cultural contexts of his protagonists. The other unifying device—the “imagined geography” of each subject at the close of the chapters—is carefully set up, but the repeated assurance on the continuing strength of “the myth of the provinces” becomes somewhat forced and, especially in the cases of Schnitzer and Kaffka, less than convincing.
Lastly, one cannot help but wonder about the possible reception of the book in Hungary and hopes that a Hungarian edition is in the works. After all, there, some of the characters are iconic political and/or literary figures and even the others would be known to specialists. But by breathing new life into them, Nemes has already succeeded in accomplishing the task that some of his subjects had set out to do: He acted as the intermediary between cultures and languages, and introduced these characters, along with a faraway corner of the former Austria-Hungary, to the English-speaking scholarly and general public.
