Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)

Budapest in the First Twenty Years of the Council System (1950-1970)

Apart from the development of public transport, a need for more road work has appeared with the growing car traffic. A motorway surrounding the city and roads leading on to it, are in the process of construction. The core of the road network continues to be the clearly-established, well-arranged network of main roads built in the second half of the nineteenth century. Plans have been made for widening some of these roads and building viaducts, fly-overs and pedestrian subways.

Each generation leaves mark on the life of a city. The past twenty-five years have been a period of radical historical transformation, and the speed of the modern technological revolution is equal to the rate of change of several earlier generations put together. Ours is an “open-ended” society, and the natural changes between each generation have, in this generation, produced something unknown to Hungarian history before. 42 per cent of the white-collar employees are of working class origin, 30 per cent of the factory workers are of peasant origin, the number of women employed in industry has increased by 250 per cent since 1950, and the number of skilled workers has increased by 10 per cent. Occupation no longer determines a man’s position: differences in education have been greatly reduced, and people’s taste and conditions are no longer decided by their social class but by their abilities and ambitions. In 1970, in Budapest, every child went to school, 35 per cent of them completed secondary schooling, and every second citizen over 15 years of age, after the eight years of primary school, has gone on to some form of higher education or training. The proportion of those with higher education amounts to 6.4 per cent of the adult population over 24 years. In the past five years a third of all students entering higher institutions of learning were residents of Budapest.

Despite the fact that large provincial cities, such as Miskolc, Pécs, Debrecen, Szeged are now developing a significant intellectual life of their own, the centre of intellectual and literary life is still the capital. Although in the fifties, almost symbolically, the famous prewar literary cafés of Pest were closed, from 1960 there was a revival of literary life, and the names of Gyula Illyés, László Németh, Tibor Déry and many other Hungarian writers and poets are now known abroad. All the larger publishing houses and the largest printing works are situated in Budapest.

Music also took on a new lease of life, and became accessible to the masses. During the last twenty-five years Béla Bartók, one of the greatest composers of our century has been given the recognition due to him in the country of birth. And as a result of the activities of Bartók’s friend and partner in research into folk music, Zoltán Kodály, the composer and inspirer of music teaching, a wave of musical activity unknown before has developed throughout the country, including the capital. Kodály’s saying: “music belongs to everybody”—is becoming a reality.

The capital city also plays a role in musical life in organizing and encouraging musical activities. This is evidenced by the success of the Music Weeks arranged annually in conjunction with the Budapest Art Weeks, and by the international musical competitions arranged in honour of great musical figures (e.g. Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, Pablo Casals). The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Liberation, and the centenary of the merger of Buda and Pest, with its peculiar positive and vigorous atmosphere inspired a number of composers. It was at the request of the Municipal Council that Emil Petrovics set the Book of Jonah, by Mihály Babits, to music, and György Ránki composed an oratory—The Song of the City—to a text by Tibor Déry.

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