Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture.

Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture, by John Lukacs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 255 pp., $20.95)

IN A PUBLISHER'S advertisement for John Lukacs's newest book, we are told: "Not unlike Carl Schorske's Finde-Siecle Vienna, Budapest 1900 offers an intimate history of one of the great European capitals at its zenith." Now, it is true that Lukacs, like Schorske, deals with one of the political capitals of the Dual Monarchy: a constitutional creation set up in 1867, which provided for the internal autonomy of the Hungarian nation within the Austrian empire. Moreover, Lukacs, like Schorske, portrays the Central European bourgeoisie at the beginning of the century as beset by problems, amid a flowering of urban culture.

Even so, these two historians have produced dramatically different books. Schorske writes in a ponderous style, applying psycho-Marxist categories to a bourgeois society he plainly detests. Lukacs, by contrast, writes with verve and affection about his forefathers' world. Indeed, he draws on family memory when he recounts how his grandparents only rarely changed apartments in Budapest or how his grandparents and later his parents as newlyweds took rail trips to Venice from the elegant South Station in Buda. Lukacs scatters evidence (often in footnotes) of his own connections among the gentry, and he is effusively knowledgeable about the way Hungarians tended vineyards, rode horses, and flirted with women. Scenes of wine being made in the hills above Budapest and of pastry-eating and partygoing in the Inner City recall a compliment paid to the French historian Fernand Braudel: "One can taste the olives growing on the vines in his Mediterranean cities." Like Braudel in his reconstruction of medieval Mediterranean society, Lukacs is unstintingly generous with the details of urban life. From the composition of outhouses to the frequency of abortions to the popular reaction to civic monuments, he tells his reader all that he can possibly cram into a 255-page "historical portrait."

Though Lukacs cultivates what seems an impressionistic style, he is a serious historian, shaking his fist at today's pseudo-scientific historiography. We receive the same message from the opening scene-the funeral procession of the Hungarian muralist Mihaly Munkacsy on May 1, 1900-to the close of the book. For Lukacs, what is historically significant is what leaves its imprint on the minds of nations and of generations. History, he says in Historical Consciousness, is not a science but a means of remembering the past, which takes different forms at different times. The funerals of Munkacsy and (in 1894) of the patriot Lajos Kossuth were watersheds in the way Hungarians viewed, and still view, their past. They represented generational change taking place at the high noon of Hungary's political greatness. In describing the districts of Pest (the more populous of the twin cities forming the Hungarian capital), Lukacs pays more attention to where Franz Josef took his oath as Hungarian king than to the appearance of the workers' quarters. He quite deliberately stresses the development of peoples, not of changing forces of production. Workers, like others, belong to nations and share their memories and values.

The text that shaped this work is an impressive cultural study, Three Generations, by the Hungarian social historian Gyula Szekfu. Surveying Hungarian affairs in 1919, after a disastrous defeat in the First World War and a subsequent civil war, Szekfu ascribed his country's downfall to the deteriorating character of three successive generations of Hungarian leaders. It was the genius of the Hungarian Protestant statesman Ferenc Desk that had brought Hungary to the triumph of the Dual Monarchy, within two decades of the suppressed revolution of 1848. The lack of statesmanship among the largely Calvinist leadership of the dominant Liberal Party at the end of the century and Hungary's excessively rapid urbanization contributed to the unraveling of Desk's work.

Though Lukacs does not accept all the twists in Szekfu's interpretation, he praises him more than any other Hungarian social thinker. He gives us Szekfu's portrait of Istvan Tisza, the early-twentieth-century Hungarian prime minister, and, like Szekfu, he depicts Tisza as a morally rigid advocate of a sort of rural nationalism thrust into a position for which he was temperamentally unsuited. On balance, however, Lukacs is more appreciative than critical of those his mentor had chastised. It is not Szekfu's fire and brimstone but his stress on generational and national character that has marked Lukacs decisively. Three Generations helped make him what he remains in this book: our most profoundly philosophical contemporary historian.