On a visit to Budapest in the 1930s, an unimpressed H.L. Mencken remarked that the former imperial capital had the feeling of “an empty ballroom.” Having been shorn of half its territory after World War I, Budapest’s grandeur was an awkward fit for a country of 8 million people caught between the rising totalitarian powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. However, before things took a turn for the worse, the city enjoyed an Indian summer of high living and international intrigue through the 1930s and into the early years of World War II. The strange autumn of Hungary’s capital and the war’s inevitable intrusion are the subjects of The Last Days of Budapest, a vivid new history from the British writer Adam LeBor.

Certain European cities have truly ancient roots, but Budapest’s origin story dates closer to the founding of Chicago than Rome. The city has a few notable ruins — a northbound highway runs right by the old legionary fort of Aquincum — but Budapest only emerged as a major urban center in the late 19th century. Most of the city’s iconic architecture, from its bridges to its Parliament to the grand Neoclassical, Baroque, and Beaux Arts buildings that dot the downtown, is a product of this boom. A worthy companion and prequel of sorts to LeBor’s book is Hungarian American historian John Lukacs’s Budapest 1900, which describes the city at its economic and cultural apogee. Hungary’s fin-de-siecle peak was not a distant epoch but a living memory for many of the city’s World War II residents.

A further legacy of Budapest’s late 19th- and early 20th-century golden age was the city’s cosmopolitan character. As the pre-World War I capital of one-half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest attracted people from across Central and Eastern Europe. Hungarians can boast of many fine qualities (LeBor includes an appreciative aside on the women of Budapest), but entrepreneurship is not one of their outstanding national talents. Industrial and commercial concerns were often managed by ethnic Germans, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, who were considered fully assimilated and patriotic Hungarians, at least for a time.

As Europe hurtled toward war in the 1930s, Budapest seemed to enjoy a charmed life. The conservative autocrat Adm. Nicholas Horthy ruled as regent, but Parliament continued to meet, political parties contested elections, and official censorship was unobtrusive. The anti-Jewish laws of this era were minor inconveniences compared to what was happening elsewhere. Somewhat miraculously, Budapest was basically untouched by the early years of World War II. Though he opportunistically aligned himself with Hitler to recover Hungary’s old imperial territories, Horthy declined to take part in the invasion of Poland and provided generous assistance to fleeing refugees. Allied bombers were given free rein over Hungarian airspace as long as they didn’t bomb Hungarian targets.

Thanks to Horthy’s strategic ambiguity, Budapest became a hotbed of espionage and intrigue. The Polish Underground set up shop, Zionist operatives smuggled Jews out of occupied Poland and Slovakia, and the British Special Operations Executive sent agents to recover downed flyers and aid anti-Nazi resistance fighters. Inevitably, LeBor compares the city’s atmosphere to Casablanca, a film directed by the exiled Hungarian Jew Michael Curtiz (formerly Mihaly Kertesz).

As his cast of characters expands, LeBor runs into a bit of trouble. The Last Days of Budapest suffers from a rare problem for historical nonfiction: a surplus of good material. Entire books could be written about Andor Grosz, the smuggler king of Budapest; the Swiss consul Carl Lutz, who used his diplomatic status to save thousands of Hungarian Jews; and Princess Caja Odescalchi, a leading figure in Hungary’s anti-German underground. Readers unfamiliar with old Mitteleuropa may find it difficult to keep track of all the aristocrats, smugglers, British agents, and Budapesters about town. There are also a few irksome recurring lines; the phrase “demi monde” seems to accompany every reference to Budapest’s brothels, nightclubs, and casinos.

One thing The Last Days of Budapest does well is capture the sense of unease looming over the city, even as it seemed to have escaped the worst of the war. As Hitler tightened his grip on the continent, Hungary’s strategic position became gradually untenable. Shortages and rationing put a crimp on Budapest’s famous nightlife. The Hungarian army was dragged into the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and began to suffer grievous losses. Able-bodied Jewish men were drafted into labor battalions and sent East to work under brutal conditions. Many never returned.

An interesting and under-discussed turning point in World War II was the death of Istvan Horthy, Nicholas Horthy’s liberal, Anglophile son and heir apparent. Istvan, an experienced pilot, was killed in a mysterious plane crash while inspecting Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front. LeBor argues that Nazi sabotage was probably to blame. Istvan’s death likely ended Hungary’s chances of detaching itself from the Axis powers.

More than a few Hungarians still regard Nicholas Horthy as a hero for leading the country through the turbulent 1920s and 30s. The old admiral was an authoritarian but not a fascist like Hitler or Mussolini. Under his rule, Hungary remained a liberal, enlightened place by regional standards. Many of Nicholas Horthy’s diplomatic maneuvers can be excused on the grounds of realpolitik.

However, when the Nazis carried out a coup in March 1944, Nicholas Horthy lost his nerve. He acquiesced to the German takeover, withdrew from public life, and largely rubber-stamped the decrees of the puppet government, including the orders behind the Hungarian Holocaust. A halfhearted attempt to evict the Nazis in October was too little, too late to save the city from becoming a battleground between the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing Red Army.

The fate of Budapest’s large Jewish community is sad even by the standards of a tragic era. In the early 20th century, Hungarian Jews were arguably the most well-assimilated in Europe, present not just in the arts and the professions, but at the highest levels of Budapest society. Before the German occupation, many convinced themselves that they could ride out the war in relative peace. This would prove to be a terrible mistake.

What lessons can be drawn from The Last Days of Budapest? Eastern European readers might conclude that a certain resigned fatalism is the best outlook on matters of foreign policy. Even today, Hungarians lament that they never pick the right side (see current arguments over Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s enthusiastic courting of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin), but it’s not clear there was a path out of their country’s interwar dilemma. Gallant Poland stood up to the Germans, but this did not spare the Poles from years of Nazi occupation, the horrors of the Holocaust, and their country’s subsequent absorption into the Soviet bloc. Small countries caught between major powers rarely have good options.

PRIDE IN BUDAPEST

The precarity of multiculturalism is another lesson of LeBor’s book. Westerners often assume that easy-going liberalism is humanity’s default setting, but Eastern European history suggests otherwise. Far from inaugurating a new era of enlightened tolerance, modernity unleashed prejudice and resentment across the region on a heretofore unimaginable scale. When the old empires collapsed after World War I, fascism and nationalism rushed to fill the void. The destruction of multicultural Budapest was reproduced across Central and Eastern Europe in villages, towns, and provinces that are largely forgotten in history.

LeBor ends The Last Days of Budapest with a hopeful coda, noting that the city’s Jewish community has enjoyed a remarkable revival in recent decades. “Hungary,” LeBor writes, “has proved immune to the explosion of anti-Semitism across Europe that followed 7 October 2023.” The reason for this happy state of affairs is an uncomfortable one. Unlike its Western European counterparts, Hungary is still a very homogeneous place. It has no large, unassimilated communities of first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants. As Western Europe has lately become more diverse, it has also experienced a resurgence of antisemitism. Even in the most putatively enlightened and tolerant places, violence and resentment often lurk just off stage. The history of Budapest, a city that experienced a cosmopolitan era brought to an abrupt end by World War II, is a chilling reminder of this uncomfortable truth.

Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.