Flipping through the pages of Pesti Hírlap for this week a century ago,
global politics is always in the background. The National Assembly was preparing
for its summer recess.
The Treaty of Trianon, which divided up much of Hungary among
the newly independent neighbouring nations after World War I, was just coming
into force. The sounds of denial accompanied the collective trauma surrounding
it, but the country's economic vulnerability and smuggling were the main topics
for discussion.
Fear of Bolshevism was also potent. The attempted assassination of Serbian
Prince Regent Alexander, crowned of the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes the following month, was considered a red plot, with a certain Róbert
Libisch thought to be the culprit.
An expelled Russian aristocrat decried his
woes in a long interview. The Tisza trial, investigating the assassination of
Hungary’s own Prime Minister three years before, dragged on, ultimately to no conclusion.
In Germany, Hitler was elected president of the NSDAP, forerunner of the Nazi Party, on 29 July, but this news hardly appeared in the paper at all. There were ladies’ ankles, illegal pálinka and new beauty creams to write about...
Pesti Hírlap
Pesti Hírlap, published between 1878 and 1944, had its heyday around the time of World War I, when it
sold close to half a million copies, almost half the urban population. It was
the first newspaper in Hungary to be produced a smaller format, with permanent columns and
positions. Owners, the Légrády brothers, always decided on the direction of each edition, and left out party politics if it meant selling more copies. This allowed
their contributors to be paid above the going rate, so prominent
representatives of Hungarian literary life such as Ferenc Herczeg, Dezső
Kosztolányi, Ferenc Molnár and a young Sándor Márai all had their bylines in the
paper.
On 26 July, the splash was all about Pál Teleki’s trip to America. The recent Hungarian prime minister, a “gracious gentleman”, carried with him the glass-painted maps depicting the population compositions of former Greater Hungary, presumably hoping to persuade re-elected president Woodrow Wilson to help in Hungary’s attempt to reverse the Treaty of Trianon. Teleki arrived two weeks later, on 6 August, but the border question would haunt him until his suicide two decades later.
The inside pages contain real gems in the small news sections. On 29 July, after almost three years of litigation, the small farmers of Somogy County could breathe a sigh of relief as they were pardoned for their illegal production of pálinka.
Meanwhile, in a heat wave similar to today’s, morals were slipping. Feverish trysts in cafés were duly detailed. In one, a lady “deftly shows her shaking
ankles and delicate legs all the way to her knees”.
In another report, Mrs Ignác
Beyer tried to bribe the registrar in Debrecen with 30 kilos of flour to redraft
her daughter’s certificate of baptism as if she had been two years younger. A slighted
lover from Körmend fired a gun at his unfaithful sweetheart, a chief tax
officer, whose promise of marriage had gone up in smoke.
In culture news, “illustrious opera singer” Boriska Pálffy was enjoying great success in the Dutch East Indies and the first lines of Terka Lux’s new racy novella Love were not considered thrilling enough for the reader to keep turning the page.
Classics among the classifieds include a certain Mr Kármer looking for “unemployed young people sell songbooks” at Nagymező utca 46, the Broadway of Budapest. Margit Földes' cream and powdered soap “immediately beautifies” while merchant Samu Fleischmann of Károly körút was urging parents to buy the necessary underwear for their children before boarding school started.
In Buda, the Erzsébet Bridge café opened, “with excellent food and fair prices” and, topically, “The best protection against the heatwave can be found on the Park Terrace of the Gellért Hotel”, in the form of “military music until midnight” and “garden pavilions”.
To the comfort of those now suffering from the heat, Budapest was also boiling
a hundred years ago. On a warm Sunday afternoon, the temperature was said to have reached 52 degrees, perhaps with a little poetic licence, although Monday’s thunderstorm
had provided slight relief.
Articles painted post-apocalyptic pictures of a depopulated
city and residents resting in darkened rooms. A drawing shows a devil’s chariot
driven by the hot wind outside the Café Gerbeaud. Conspiracy theories about the
extreme heat were rife – was it the work of ice-cream vendors?
So, a hundred years ago, Budapest was as lively and diverse as it is today. A city of heat waves and illicit romance, political intrigue and under-the-counter pálinka. Plus ça change...
