Krónika, 1944 (1. évfolyam, 2-12. szám)
1944-08-15 / 8. szám
1944 augusztus 15 “KRÓNIK A” 7-IK OLDAL city, Pozsony, her paper mills and one-third of the Magyars; the new border brought foreign territory within 28 miles from Budapest, the capital. An inflation destroyed all savings, military control prohibited conscription, fighter planes, and even the use of gas masks in an army limited to 35.000 men. An organization of the neighboring states, similar to the Balkan League which watched over Bulgaria, was created in order to “police” Hungary and to intervene in her inner affairs. Hungary was also forbidden to let its royal family return; the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, so flagrantly violated in the determination of borders, was also disregarded in connection with the free choice of Hungary’s form of government. Rum-Hungary became a monarchy but only in theory, not in fact. After having been a republic without republicans she became a monarchy without a monarch. The members of the royal family are accorded all honors due to their position but the hereditary king himself was forced to live abroad. A regent rules in his place. That this situation was not only to the liking of the Little Entente but also of the Protestant minority which, in 1921, took the attitude of the Allies as a welcome pretext to frustrate the restoration of King Charles IV, father of Archduke Otto the hereditary King is an interesting sidelight to the situation. The strong stand of the Linie Entente had perhaps a certain justification; the return of the Habsburgs would have caused among Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians and the Austro-Germans a landslide which would have buried the pseudodemocratic “police cordon” of the Little Entente under its debris. When Germany started heir eastward drive in 1938 Czechoslovakia and Rumania surrendered without firing a shot. The Yugoslav army resisted as a working unit for just a week. It is necessary to insert here a word about the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Germany. Central- Europe can be compared to a cage containing a tiger and a lion. While the tiger, Germany, was humiliated, beaten, its tail and ears clipped, the lion was slaughtered, carved up into pieces, broiled and the remains put on platters in the cage, which was safely locked. The tiger was then exhorted to be a good tiger, not to expect much food from outside and to refrain from touching the appetizing steaks of his former cell mate. The civilized world was astonished when the tiger did not conform to the pious command. More even than in the case of Bulgaria, it was evident that Hungary could only follow one course in her foreign policy, i.e„ to collaborate with the powers who promised to remedy the in» justice of the dictate of Trianon. All efforts of the Hungarian government to persuade the league of Nations to do its duty, to revise the criminally unjust borders of 1920, were in vain, although it was one of the tasks of the League to administer justice even if it involved revision of the treaties. But the League, which had always flatly refused to expose itself and to act without strong backing by large powers, remained in the case of Hungary as mute as in the case of the Bulgar minorities. The silence of Geneva, London, Paris and Washington literally forced Hungary to seek protection and cooperation from nations for which she had no political sympathies; the country with the oldest parliamentary tradition and the most anglo-phile upper class on the Continent had no other choice but to trade with Berlin and Rome. The catastrophe of Trianon was a fatal as the defeats of Mohi, when the Tartars triumphed, or of Mohács, when the Turks were victorious. It has helped to fashion the Magyar character which always inclined toward melancholia. “The Magyar amuses himself with tears in his eyes,” says a poverb. The whimsical sadness of Magyar gypsy music is well known in foreign countries. The Hungarian hymn ezpresses, like its Bulgar counterpart, sorrow and mourning. "After all misfortunes which pursued this nation, bring, oh Lord, years of gladness. This people has truly atoned for all the sins of the past _and_the future.” All the more one has to praise the iron determination of the Hungarians not to be paralyzed by their grief but to work grimly for a better future. The handicaps were naturally immense; there were thousands of refugees from the lost territories mostly professional men and civil servants, who demanded pensions, and finally the problem of the “dry bread.” Since almost all the Hungarian industry was in areas surrendered in 1920, the price the peasant and the urban masses had to pay for manufactured goods was prohibitive. In 1930, a farmer had to sell three times as much wheat as in 1910 to get a pair of shoes. A new artificial industry, which sprung up with state help, had to import the raw materials from abroad. The plains were producing predominantly grains, corn and wine, which could not compete in Western Europe on account of the high tariffs; the dairy centers were in the mountains and although nobody starved in Hungary, the country was literally drowned in wheat. In addition, there was the brutal policy of the Little Entente which wanted to bring Hungary to her knees by a hostile economic policy similar to the one pursued by the Weimar Republic against Poland. This economic policy tended to increase the dissatisfaction of the peasant masses and to force the government to accept the Trianon order morally, i.e., to stop all propaganda for revision, M. Hugo Vavrecka, Czech minister in Vienna, told me plainly that his government was waiting for the “peasants of Hungary to march on Budapest in order to stop that silly resistance.” The Hungarian peasants marched, not into Budapest, but headed by military bands into Czechoslovakia, in October, 1938. The Hungarian sectarian Liberals were swept from the scene in 1919 and although the punishment of the Hungarian Communists was more draconic than necessary or compatible with Christian charity, the nation became acutely conscious of its shortcomings in the past and adopted a program of Christian reconstruction. Sharp criticism was raised in all quarters of the nation about the policy of the past in cultural and religous matters; secularistic legislation, which had made such headway in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was drastically curtailed, and civil marriage (making divorce possible) is the only remainder of that period. The policy of denationalization to which the three million Magyars were now exposed in the countries oof the Little Entente made the people also conscious of their mistakes in past generations in the same field. The circumstance that the nationalities (Slovaks, Ruthenes, Transylvanian Rumanians, Croats, Northern Serbs and Suabians) were by no means happy under their new masters served only as a meager consolation. The military activities, .cut almost entirely by the Trianon Treaty, were replaced by an intensified educational program which tended to increase Hungary’s cultural superiority over her neighbors. The pen had to substitute the sword. Hungary had looked rather to Italy than to Germany for the fulfillment of her legitimate aspirations. The leading Hungarian circles, which had always been accused by the “progressive” elements of the Western World to be “reactionary” and “fascist,” may have been the former but never the latter. The Magyar loves tradition, pageants and paternal authority; he is skeptical of mass-movements and revolutionary tendencies. Italy was at least a monarchy and Fascism less revolutionary than Nazism. The Germans were, furthermore, always disliked in Hungary and Magyar poetry is full of unkind references to the German character. The Italians, too, were very unlikely to become the masters of the Danubian basin. The Anschluss was always dreaded by Hungarian statesmen as a terryfing menace, whereas Dr. Benes, a politician rather than a statesman, regarded the Habsburgs as an infinitely greater danger to his makeshift republic than Hitlers’ entry into Vienna. The Hungarians knew that the Germans, who are a Danubian nation like them, would then dominate all of Central Europe. Dr. Benes, fearing immediate dissolution for his country in case of a restoration. hoped to appease Hitler by cooperating with him fully in the efforts to thwart a Habsburg restoration and to menace Austria as well as Hungary with military sanctions should these two countries take steps to restore their ancestral ruling family and to unite. The Austrian State, as expected, gave in to Nazi threats and the Germans moved into Vienna. Hermann Goering assured the Czechs that the Fuehrer had no designs on their country, but half a year later the Munich Pact was signed and a year later the Reichswehr marched into Prague without having fired a shot. The Hungarians tried desperately to recover all of Slovakia which had been their for more than 1,000 years, but the Germans permitted them only to regain a fraction of their former possession. The bulk of Slovakia became a German protectorate and put the Reichswehr 45 miles from Budapest. The ceding of Southern Slovakia, ‘populated almost exclusively by Magyars, to Hungary was a clever step of the Germans. It served to alienate the Slovaks from the Hungarians and prevented the latter from gaining too much strength. The Hungarians were able to use the occupation of Prague by the Germans to retake Carpatho- Ruthenia very murch against the will of the Nazis who desired all of Northern Hungary for their impending drive against Poland. This new move of ehe “reactionary and clerical” Magyarscaused a new wave of indignation among our "liberal” publications, who decried the ghastly deeds of the Magyars who “robbed the prostrate body of Czechoslovakia.’ They never informed their readers that Hungary had owned these areas from 897 till 1919 and that she seized them with the tacit approval of Great Britain and France since such action forestalled a grab by the Germans. (To be contiuned) APOSTOLOK Szabolcska Mihály Pesti urak jártak A mi kis falunkba, Gyűlést is tartottak Nagy mulatságunkra. Kezdete és vége, Az volt a beszédnek. Hogy a népnek jog kell, Hogy “jogot a népnek!” A jogot ráhagytuk, De mikor azt mondták, Hogy hazát szeretni Szegénynek bolondság, S bántani, gyalázni Kezdték a hazánkat: Az egész gyűlésben Nagy riadal támadt. Nem tudni, hogy támadt? Nem tudni, ki kezdte? Felriadt egy nóta, Az, hogy “azt üzente......” S szomorú vége lett Az apostolságnak: Most is szaladnak tán. Ha még meg nem álltak.
