Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930.

Edited by Thomas Bender & Carl E. Schorske (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994. xiv plus 400pp.).

The fourteen parallel essays in this collection, half by Hungarians on Budapest, half by Americans on New York, deal in turn with politics, public spaces, residential neighborhoods, popular entertainment, journalism, painting, and the novel. Originating in a conference held in Budapest in 1988, they reveal, according to the editors, as much about "differences in historiographical traditions and practices that derive from two different intellectual cultures that have had little previous contact" (p. xii) as they do about Budapest and New York. They also reflect the changes that were taking place in those traditions and practices in the 1980s. For the Hungarians, Nation has supplanted Social Class both as dominant concern and favored explanation to a degree that may well have perplexed the American participants. The Americans' treatment of ethnic variety as constituting other than a dangerous obstacle to national cohesion may have seemed equally strange to the Hungarians.

Bender and Schorske, in seven probing and suggestive essays, ask large, significant questions--about nationality, ethnicity, modernity, urbanity, and much more--which the other contributors, by and large, fail to answer. In their conclusion the editors account for the failure on the basis of differences in the intellectual climate of the two countries. Yet certain similarities in approach lend a surprising coherence to the collection. The contributors share a pride in, or at least affection for their respective cities; when, as the Hungarians in particular must, they deal with anti-metropolitan sentiments, it is with disapproval or regret. In addition there is less hand-wringing than is customary in urban studies. "The city" emerges from these studies not as a malign force or indeed, even as a force at all, but as something that people have made, something that is to a degree responsive to the wishes and actions of politicians and voters, property-owners and tenants, professionals and workers, reformers and rioters. No single dominant group, and certainly no single historical force explains the complex reality of the two metropolises. The citizens of Budapest and New York appear less as passive victims than as active and effective agents, responding with ingenuity and imagination to the challenges their city presents. Groups, variously defined, and even individuals sometimes manage to bring about significant change. That such changes do not necessarily move in the same direction or fit a single pattern need not dismay us. It is not so much the absence of anonymous forces as their comparative inconspicuousness that distinguishes this book from most attempts at comparative urban history.

David G. Hammack's characterization of New York City politics as "contentious, competitive, contingent, fluid, and unstable" (p. 73) could be applied to all aspects of both cities as here presented. He places less emphasis on corruption and alienation than on an alert, informed, well-organized electorate, one that used the political process to good effect. In Budapest, Zsuzsa L. Nagy argues, despite the economic crisis, political upheavals, and conservative national regime after 1918, an expanded electorate and an energetic leadership achieved significant improvement in urban conditions.

Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig seem at first to be producing yet another account of "social control", but ultimately show how the unruly masses of New York successfully resisted the attempts of Olmsted and Vaux to convert them to bourgeois respectability, and appropriated Central Park for purposes more to their liking. Gabor Gyani similarly indicates the ineffectiveness of attempts to impose rigid standards of decorum on the streets and parks of Budapest.

Deborah Dash Moore sees New York's various ethnic groups working to transform "the gridiron into an ethnic mosaic", achieving genuine if "imperfect manifestations" of their respective "vision[s] of the ideal urban neighborhood." (p. 157) Tn a careful evocation of a now vanished fragment of society Istvan Teplan shows how, in St. Imre Garden City, civil servants displaced from areas of the kingdom lost by the Treaty of Trianon created for themselves a villa suburb that embodied their vision of Magyar culture.

Robert W. Snyder argues that "vaudeville and related . . . cultural forms . . . were not simply imposed on blacks and,ethnics," who instead used them to create "a new urban language . . . that . . . challenged and subverted the Victorianism of middle-class . . . Americans." (p. 186) Peter Hanak believes that operetta as created in Vienna and Budapest "contributed to the formation of a common mass culture" in the Dual Monarchy. (p. 215) Geza Buzinkay sees the comic weeklies of Budapest as helping to achieve "the long-term victory [at least until 1918] of the metropolitan, middle-class attitude and the speeding up of social unification and cultural modernization." (p.244) Neil Harris demonstrates what a lively, varied, and influential press New York enjoyed in the years before 1930.

Wanda M. Corn documents the incorporation by advanced artists of specifically New York images--skyscrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, street crowds--into their painting. Philip Fisher contrasts the New York novels of the 1890s in which "the city is seen as an array of problems that require action" (p. 334) with those of the 1930s that view it as an array of possibilities to be exploited. Eva Forgacs and Miklos Lacko describe, but clearly regret, the anti-metropolitan values of Budapest's painters and writers. Forgacs speaks wistfully of "the few pictures . . . with Budapest cityscapes" as suggesting "those possible paths of Hungarian painting and culture that might have been followed, and might have led somewhere . . . " (p. 330) Lacko laments that "Hungarian literature . . . has retained its provincial character to this day, though its capital city . . . has long been the center of literary activity." (p. 352) Painters and writers alike seem to have ignored or denigrated Budapest because they chose to do so: neither were mere passive instruments for the achievement of some transcendent historical purpose.

Rather than machines of oppression or the creations of vast, overriding anonymous forces, New York and Budapest seem, on the evidence of these scholars, to have been bastions of freedom--freedom both from traditional constraints and, perhaps, from historical determinants. At the very least, the move away from our customary self-regarding parochialism that this book represents leads one to hope for a future volume in which Americans will write about Budapest, Hungarians about New York.