Something hurts. Something that's missing.

On the centenary of the Treaty of Trianon and the end of the Kingdom of Hungary

"A Hungarian is one for whom Trianon still hurts; the rest are only citizens" or so says this quote that keeps popping up every year on June 4. My feed has been full of this for the past week or so. I hate this quote and everything it stands for. In this post I explain why and propose a better one.

The peace treaties that ended World War 1 were signed near Paris, in former royal palaces. Each of the Central Powers got a different one, the more powerful the belligerent, the more prestigious the palace in which they signed their respective treaties. Germany got the Palace of Versailles, the grandest palace of Europe and thus the German Empire formally ended in the same room Wilhelm I had proclaimed it in 1871. Austria got the Palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a French royal palace since the 12th century, Louis XIV's birthplace. Hungary, by this time a separate entity, got the Grand Trianon, the palace Louis had built for his favorite mistress.

While for Louis, Trianon was a place of pleasure and escape from strict court etiquette, for Hungarians, the name is synonymous with national disaster. However, while other popular national disasters are often discussed in context, Trianon is not. Take the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, where Suleiman the Magnificient crushed the Hungarian and Bohemian forces and went on to conquer or vassalize two thirds of the Kingdom of Hungary which the Ottomans held on to for 150 years. Most Hungarians understand that the kingdom was in a pretty bad state, due, in part, to its internal problems. Or take the 1943 Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh Offensive (known in Hungary as the Battle of the Don Bend), where Soviet forces destroyed the Hungarian army, then, upon winning World War 2 went on to occupy all of the country for 45 years. Most people who discuss this battle or the participation in World War 2 understand that not only was Hungary completely outmatched in the war but, to put it mildly, they were not exactly on the side of the good guys there.

The same nuance is completely missing from our collective conversations about Trianon. It is near-universally seen in terms of black and white, as an event forced on the nation by the unjust, ungracious, and opportunistic victors of World War 1. In the rest of this piece I try to find this nuance.

The (in)justice of Trianon

Peace treaties, by their very nature, are not meant to be just. Their main purpose is punishment to the defeated, gains for the victor, and a guarantee that future conflicts don't happen - or if they do, the former victors would have the upper hand in them. There is always a trade-off with leniency on the one hand in order to cultivate stability and better future relations against punishment and direct gain, both territorial and economic, on the other. The Entente struck a balance between them by using two frameworks: the creation of homogeneous nation-states when it comes to Europe, and colonial conquest when it comes to everything else.

If we're looking at the lost non-colonial territory (72%), lost non-colonial population (64%), ethnic population stuck in foreign borders (31%), or economic damage (the loss of almost all domestic industrial production from Bohemia and the loss of domestic markets for agricultural products) as the result of the treaties, then it's obvious that Hungary had by far the worst of any Central Power. This is both because (Austria-)Hungary had no overseas colonies to give up and thus their empire had to be dismantled in Europe rather than in Africa as for Germany or in Asia as for the Ottomans, and because of the Empire's multi-ethnic composition which allowed for the new borders to be drawn along ethnic lines.

It is in this final part that Trianon could never succeed. Not only did ethnic lines not follow natural geographical boundaries (the Eastern Carpathians, the former, natural border of Austria-Hungary, bisected the Romanian-majority territories of Transylvania and the rest of Romania, the Danube and the Drava rivers which became border rivers bisected Hungarian-majority territories), in many cases there were no ethnic lines at all. Upper Hungary and Transylvania in particular had mixed populations who lived side by side for centuries with no more significant ethnic incidents than, for instance, those in Britain or France. Therefore, to even attempt to guarantee stability, borders had to be drawn with geographic and strategic considerations often in spite of ethnic ones.

The grave injustice of Trianon is that on every single occasion where geographic or strategic considerations clashed with ethnic ones, the Entente favored Hungary's neighbors. Major mixed or outright Hungarian cities a stone throw's distance away from the new Hungarian border that had rail connection such as Pozsony (today Slovakia's capital Bratislava), Komárom (Komarno), Kassa (Kosice), and Munkács (today Mukachevo, Ukraine) thus went to Czechoslovakia, Szatmar (Satu Mare, Romania), Nagyvárad (Oradea), Arad, and Temesvár (Timisoara) went to Romania, Varasd (Varazdin, Croatia), Eszék (Osijek), and Szabadka (Subotica, Serbia) went to Yugoslavia. Entire regions with majority Hungarian populations further from the border such as Szekelyland (North-East Transylvania) and Vojvodina (Northern Serbia) were now outside Hungary so that the countries could look more convex.

I agree that this isn't just, although, as I outlined above, this is not a reasonable expectation from a peace treaty. However, many in Hungary go on to make the claim that this peace treaty created conflict in the region which contributed to the escalation of World War 2.

And this is a huge stretch. The only grain of truth in the matter is that Hungary allied itself with Germany in the hope to receive some of its lost territory, while Romania allied Germany, rather reluctantly, to guarantee some of the territory it gained. However, there was no version of events where Germany, given that it starts World War 2, would not seek to ally and/or control the successor states of Austria-Hungary. In fact, Trianon ensured that, when Nazi Germany eventually secured the region in 1940-41, its power was a mere shadow of what a united Austria-Hungary had wielded in World War 1. Seeing how close the Third Reich came to taking out the Soviet Union and win the war, how horridly both them and the allied Hungarians treated not only the people they occupied but also their own citizens (more on that later), it seems fortuitous at very least that (Austria-)Hungary was neutered in 1920. Trianon, if retroactively, did pay off for the Entente.

Entente betrayals Little and Big

There is an additional layer of the Hungarian sentiments about Trianon in the disdain they feel towards the Entente victors, particularly towards Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia. Much like Germany, Austria-Hungary officially ended the war with all of its frontlines running through enemy territory, and much like in Germany, many citizens felt and still feel baffled by how and why Austria-Hungary was forced to accept unconditional surrender.

For that we need to look briefly (I promise) at the tactical situation in the final stages of the war. The Central Powers lost the war in 1918 much the same way as Hemingway describes going bankrupt: "Slowly, and then suddenly". As late as September 1918 there were no signs of the war ending any time soon. The Entente was grinding down the Central Powers' resistance inch by inch, planning to finish the war in a series of major offensives in 1919 on the Western front. Then, a victory in the otherwise quiet Macedonian front broke the Bulgarian lines. His country in imminent danger of being overrun, the Tsar sought a separate peace. This started a cascade in which one by one all the battlefields turned quickly in favor of the Entente and one by one each of the Central Powers capitulated. “Disgraceful! 62,000 Serbs decided the war!" wrote the Kaiser to the Tsar of Bulgaria.

As of early November, the time of the armistice, there were no enemy troops present in the Kingdom of Hungary. And yet, in the South, the Five Nation Army (Serbian-French-British-Greek-Montenegrin) was still moving towards Hungary through Serbia, the Romanians who had re-entered the war five minutes before its end were gearing up to move in from the East, while the Czechoslovak legions who had fought for the Entente (most notably in Italy and Russia) started securing territory for themselves in the North. Although the fighting stopped and Hungary was now under armistice, these armies continued to make their way towards Budapest from all directions in an effort to secure ever more territory and strengthen their positions at the final negotiation table. Romania unilaterally declared the annexation of Transylvania in December 1918 even though the peace treaty hadn't even begun to take shape.

In spring and summer of 1919, Hungary, now under a communist government and supported by Soviet Russia (a huge no-no in the eyes of the Entente), fought two campaigns in an effort to stop the Czechoslovaks and Romanians from advancing through the ceasefire lines. These they quickly lost, with the Romanians going on to occupy and loot Budapest in August.

The events of 1919 contributed to the severity of the Treaty of Trianon as it became clear that the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia) was going to squeeze Hungary for every square centimeter of land they could get their hands on and the Big Entente (France and Britain) couldn't stop them unless they went to war with their own allies. Which of course they would never do. Not only was Hungary their enemy from yesterday, it just went communist, potentially joining with their enemy of tomorrow.

It is fully understandable that Hungarians feel betrayed by the Big Entente and unfairly taken advantage of by the Little. Most Hungarians expected that their territorial sovereignty would be respected because, much like Germany, their civilians didn't realize the extent by which their army has lost the war. But now, 100 years from now, perhaps we can say it without controversy that the defeat was complete and foreign occupation, although not fair, was something to be expected.

Especially after what Hungary had been a part of during the Great War itself.

The atrocities of the war and reaping the whirlwind

Sir Arthur Harris, the Commander-in-Chief of the British RAF Bomber Command, known mostly for carrying out the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, assumed his tenure in 1942 with the following speech:

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

I see a close analogy between those Germans or German-sympathizers who condemn the bombing of Dresden and the Hungarians who complain about the unfairness of Trianon.

The Kingdom of Hungary was an equal partner in the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and as such bears responsibility for starting a war of aggression against Serbia. Which, of course then snowballed into the second biggest war of all time, killing upwards of 20 million people, about half of whom civilians. Those who are outraged about the 31% of all ethnic Hungarians stuck outside the national borders should be significantly more outraged that the war killed up to a quarter of all Serbian civilians and up to a half of all male Serbians.

It is very hard to disentangle combat deaths, deaths from anti-partisan activity, deaths from neglect, and excess deaths from other war-related causes (such as famine and disease) but it cannot be denied that the Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces who occupied Serbia between 1915 and 1918 committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in the whole war.

The occupiers used mass executions, concentration camps, systemic terror, torture and rape in what the German-Swiss criminologist and writer R. A. Reiss, reporting on the Central Powers' war crimes in Serbia, called a "system of extermination". Neither the Austro-Hungarians nor the Bulgarians made the slightest attempts to conceal their atrocities: Austro-Hungarian officers staged the executions to be as public as possible, then ordered the distribution of the images of the slaughter across Serbia in order to deter partisans. Ordinary Austro-Hungarian soldiers literally lined up to have their picture taken with the executed civilians which then also made their way to be propaganda posters to inspire the homefront. In 1914 shortly before joining the war, Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand said, rather candidly: "the purpose of my life is the destruction of Serbia".

Mass executions of Serbians by the Austro-Hungarian army.

I don't think that Hungary, Austria-Hungary, or the Central Powers for that matter, should bear complete responsibility for the 20 million dead of the war. But it is clear that they bear at least half of the responsibility. And they certainly bear all of the responsibility for the war crimes of their side, which, both individually and collectively, were significant. The Germans' rape of Belgium, Turkey's genocide against the Armenians, and Bulgaria's ethnic cleansing of their occupation zone of Serbia are all some of the very worst that humans have ever done to each other. You can't start a war of aggression, exterminate people, be friends with others who exterminate people and then cry foul when your enemies and former victims aren't considerate with you at the negotiating table.

Conclusion

We all understand that centenaries are arbitrary celebrations, but yet they are often quite powerful. They invite us to reflect on past events with the benefit of hindsight and cooler heads. To understand history from a distance and learn from it.

The quote "Az a magyar akinek fáj Trianon" (A Hungarian is one for whom Trianon [still] hurts)" is attributed to two Hungarian interwar poets, Frigyes Karinthy and Gyula Illyés but neither said it. It was said much later, in 2000 by the president of the Hungarian World Association (whom I won't name even though he makes his second appearance on my blog and I point out again that it's not a global association but an extreme right fringe group). It is a quote that doesn't invite reflection. It mandates grief and it excludes those who would put the events in context. It denies the national identity for people who seek to contribute positively to that national identity.

Karinthy's real quote is very similar and yet totally different:

"valami fáj, ami nincs. (Something hurts. Something that's missing.)"

It's personal, honest, respectful, and beautiful. And, most importantly, open to many people and many feelings. For me, the hundreds of thousands of dead Hungarian soldiers cut down in the prime of their lives, the millions more, soldiers and civilians from all other nations, hurt immeasurably more then any line on any map. For me, the loss of the idea of a (slowly) federalizing Austria-Hungary, a flawed but beautiful melting pot of all peoples of the region, also cut down in its prime and replaced by half a dozen feuding nation-states, is more tragic than the particular injustices of the treaty.

But that's just me. You may feel differently, perhaps feel nothing whatsoever because it was so long ago.

And that's fine.

June 4, 2020.

Notes:

• The Grand Trianon that stands today which hosted the signature of the treaty is actually an extension of the pavilion Louis XIV had built.

• Some Hungarians will be quick to point out that Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza was opposed to the harsh ultimatum on Serbia and the war. This was true in July 3, 1914 but on July 14 he gave his nod of approval and the invasion went ahead on July 28. He was assassinated by disgruntled soldiers in his home on October 31, 1918, the day Hungary revolted and seceded from Austria. His successor was Mihaly Károlyi, whose management of the crisis is heavily criticized to say the least. Sigmund Freud had this to say about the succession.

I was certainly no adherent of the ancien régime, but it seems doubtful to me whether it is a sign of political shrewdness to beat to death the smartest of the many counts [Tisza] and to make the stupidest one [Károlyi] president.

This quote has nothing to do with the topic I just find it funny.

• Karinthy was no frothing nationalist. In the same text the quote is from (and others) he describes himself as a citizen of the world. If you read Hungarian, feel free to check out the rest of his work if you think you can find a better quote than what I propose.

• Although the Treaty was signed on June 4, 1920, it took a year for it to come to effect and several more years to be enforced and finalized. Rump states existed, skirmishes and small campaigns were fought in the region all the way through 1920-1922.

Links:

• Austro-Hungarian war crimes

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/occupation_during_and_after_the_war_south_east_europe

https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/war-crimes-habsburg-army-between-soldateska-and-court-martial

• Karinthy's letter to his son on Trianon.

https://irodalmijelen.hu/05242013-1547/karinthy-frigyes-level-kisfiamnak-trianon-emleknapjara

Comments and questions should be addressed to peter.bayer7@gmail.com.