The Burning of the World Read online

  BÉLA ZOMBORY-MOLDOVÁN (1885–1967) was born in Munkács (now Mukachevo), in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he established himself as a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Wounded in action in 1914 as a junior officer on the eastern front, he served the rest of the First World War in non-combatant duties. He was a successful painter, especially of portraits, during the interwar years, and was the principal of the Budapest School of Applied Arts from 1935 until his dismissal by the Communist regime in 1946. Out of official favor and artistic fashion in the postwar years, he devoted himself to the quiet landscapes in oils and watercolor that are his finest work. The writing of his recently discovered memoirs probably also dates from those years of seclusion.

  PETER ZOMBORY-MOLDOVAN has co-translated Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen and is working on a new version of Bertolt Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches for the English stage. A grandson of Béla Zombory-Moldován, he lives in London.

  Béla Zombory-Moldován, Self-portrait, 1915. Graphite pencil.

  The collar insignia denote the rank of second lieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian infantry.

  THE BURNING OF THE WORLD

  A Memoir of 1914

  BÉLA ZOMBORY-MOLDOVÁN

  Translated from the Hungarian and with an introduction and notes by

  PETER ZOMBORY-MOLDOVAN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2014 by the Estate of Béla Zombory-Moldován

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2014 by Peter Zombory-Moldovan

  All rights reserved.

  The works reproduced as the frontispiece and on p. 139 are copyright © by the Estate of Béla Zombory-Moldován.

  Maps: Ted McGrath

  Cover image: Béla Zombory-Moldován (seated front, left) and companions on the beach at Novi Vinodolski, July 25, 1914

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zombory-Moldován, Béla, 1885–1967.

  The burning of the world : a memoir of 1914 / by Béla Zombory-Moldován ; translated from the Hungarian by Peter Zombory-Moldovan.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-810-2 — ISBN 978-1-59017-809-6 (paperback)

  1. Zombory-Moldován, Béla, 1885-1967. 2. World War, 1914-1918—Personal narratives, Hungarian. 3. World War, 1914-1918—Social aspects—Hungary. 4. Soldiers—Hungary—Biography. 5. Veterans—Hungary—Biography. 6. Artists—Hungary—Biography. 7. Hungary—History—1867-1918—Biography. I. Zombory-Moldovan, Peter. II. Title.

  D640

  940.4'13439092—dc23

  [B] 2014017711

  ISBN 978-1-59017-810-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  1. Novi

  2. Budapest at War

  3. Veszprém

  4. The March

  5. Deployment

  6. Into the Fire

  7. Back to Life

  8. Home Again

  9. The Hospital

  10. Leave

  11. Sajóvárkony

  12. Lovrana

  Epilogue

  Maps

  Notes

  A page from the autograph manuscript of The Burning of the World.

  The text is from chapter 7 and corresponds with the passage on page 72 beginning “Then he gathered himself together” in the second paragraph and ending “Yes, far away” in the penultimate paragraph.

  INTRODUCTION

  SUMMER. Friends pose for a photograph on a beach. They are tanned and at ease in their outfits of white linen and cotton. The men cover their heads against the bright sun, the women wear their hair bobbed or tied back. They look in the prime of life, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties: young professionals (lawyers, publishers, teachers, a couple of artists) on a group holiday at the Mediterranean coast. They smile or gaze at the view; a small child in its mother’s lap waves to the camera. The photographer—no doubt a local, working the beach during the season—has carefully inscribed the plate with his reference number and the date: 25/vii/1914.

  The beach is at Novi Vinodolski, on the Adriatic. The confident man of twenty-nine sitting at the bottom of the photograph is my grandfather Béla Zombory-Moldován, a young artist oblivious to the fact that his carefree holiday is about to be cut short. In three days his country, Austria-Hungary, will be at war. A week from now he will be in uniform, and in just over a month he will be a thousand kilometers away, watching in horror as his comrades are torn apart by Russian artillery in the forests of Galicia.

  Béla’s birthplace, on April 20, 1885, was the small and ancient city of Munkács, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It lay in the east of what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy ruled by Franz Joseph I, the emperor of Austria and holy apostolic king of Hungary.

  The Carpathians are still there. All the rest is gone.

  The city continues to exist in a physical sense, but these days it is called Mukachevo, and after a thousand years, give or take, within the former Kingdom of Hungary, eighteen in the former Czechoslovakia, and forty-six in the former USSR, it is now in Ukraine. These have not been merely changes of administration. In 1910, three-quarters of its inhabitants were native speakers of Hungarian;[1] in 2001, fewer than one in ten were.

  Hungary would remain a kingdom until 1946, but in name only. A short-lived Communist revolution in 1919 gave way to a nationalist regime under Admiral Miklós Horthy, who installed himself as “regent” whilst conniving in the removal from Hungary of Franz Joseph’s successor, Karl. This was against the background of Hungary’s dismemberment under the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, imposed by the victors of the First World War, in which the country was shorn of almost three-quarters of its prewar territory, two-thirds of its prewar population, and five of its ten largest cities. Having lost, among other things, its access to the sea at the Adriatic port of Fiume (now Rijeka), Hungary became (as one wag put it) a kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral without a fleet. Worse was to come in 1944 and after.

  This remarkable memoir—published here for the first time in any language—is a record, through the eyes of one man caught up in the maelstrom, of the fateful year when everything fell apart.

  Three centuries of subjugation—first to the Ottoman Turks, then to Austria—had stoked a spirit of nationalism in Hungary, which erupted into revolution against Hapsburg rule in 1848. That revolution was suppressed; but by the Compromise of 1867, Hungary was granted home rule and (at least in principle) equal status with Austria in what was henceforth known as the dual monarchy. Hungary now had its own parliament, government, and institutions of statehood; only its foreign policy and defense were controlled from Vienna, which became the joint capital with Budapest. The Kingdom of Hungary then extended over a land area almost equal to that of today’s Germany; it stretched from the Adriatic coast to the Tatra mountains in the north, and from what is now the Austrian district of Burgenland in the west to Transylvania in the far southeast.

  An efficient railway system soon extended to the farthest reaches of the empire.
The decades of stability after 1867 saw a sustained economic boom in which industry, trade, and construction took off at a rapid rate—above all, in Budapest, which was formed in 1873 with the unification of the twin cities of the ancient Buda on the west bank of the Danube and the vigorously expanding modern Pest on its east bank. This confident new metropolis built the world’s second underground railway system, public buildings that rivaled (and, in the case of the vast neo-Gothic parliament building, surpassed) those of Vienna in magnificence, and entire quarters of well-appointed and elegant apartment buildings to house the mushrooming bourgeoisie and their servants.

  Three sections of society, in particular, enjoyed the fruits of this age of national confidence and economic growth. The first was the aristocracy of great landowning magnates, whose economic interests were assiduously protected (largely at the expense of the peasantry) by successive governments. The second was the gentry,[2] a class of particular prominence in Hungary, large numbers of whom moved from genteel impecuniosity in the provinces to populate the new national political class, or (as in the case of Béla’s father) to take up suitably gentlemanly appointments in the burgeoning civil service. Perhaps the most notable and visible beneficiaries were Hungarian Jews, who were granted equal civil and political rights in 1867. The decades of political liberalism and religious tolerance that followed saw the emergence of a mainly Jewish urban upper middle class that was prominent in industry, business, the professions, and the intelligentsia.

  When, in old age, people of my grandparents’ generation referred to “peacetime” (a béke), it was to this pre-1914 period, rather than to the years between the wars, that they looked back with the keenest nostalgia. The reality is that the final decades of the monarchy were no long halcyon summer, any more than was the Edwardian age later so mythologized in the English-speaking world. Prewar Hungary was, in many respects, a troubled polity. A quarter of the population were landless peasants, trapped in abject neo-feudal servitude scarcely distinguishable from serfdom; a law of 1898 permitted owners of large estates to practice corporal punishment on agricultural workers who went on strike and to resort to press-gangs at harvest time, and the threat of starvation was never far away. Meanwhile, the growing urban proletariat endured working and living conditions far worse than those of their western European counterparts, sometimes bordering on destitution. By 1914, the stirrings of political unrest and radicalism, though routinely suppressed, were hard to ignore.

  The greatest political tension in pre-1914 Austria-Hungary, however, stemmed from the refusal of the Magyar (the ethnically Hungarian) political establishment to meet the aspirations of the kingdom’s minority nationalities—especially the Slovaks in the north, the Serbs in the south, and the Romanians in the southeast—to a measure of cultural and political autonomy. Hungarians were fearful of becoming outnumbered in their own country, of losing their privileged position within the empire, and, worst of all, of the prospect of the historic Magyar lands being parceled out among the various nationalities that had settled in them, mainly after Magyar depopulation during the Turkish occupation. These fears caused Budapest vigorously to resist the idea, gaining ground in Vienna, that the only stable future for an increasingly fissile empire would be some kind of multinational confederation. Hungarian governments insisted, instead, on a policy of “Magyarization”—the use of the Hungarian language (which is linguistically unrelated to the Slavic languages spoken by most of the kingdom’s other nationalities) in all schools and for official business. This intransigence provoked increasing resentment and, eventually, calls for full independence among some of the minority groups. There was a growing sense of crisis as such demands received support and encouragement from neighboring states such as Romania and—as it turned out, fatefully—Serbia, with the backing of its fellow-Slav patron, Russia.

  Then there was the nagging question of the future of the monarchy itself. Franz Joseph, on the throne since 1848, was held in general affection as the paternalistic guarantor of Hungary’s privileged place in the empire; but he was about to turn eighty-five, and even he would not live forever. That his heir, the archduke Franz Ferdinand (shortly to visit the recently annexed province of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its capital, Sarajevo), loathed all Hungarians was a poorly kept secret. What would the future hold for Hungary once the shrewd old patriarch of the “brotherhood of nations” was gone?

  Such anxieties simmered just below a surface of apparent stability and confidence in material progress. Cultural and intellectual life in Budapest—a city widely admired for its elegance and modernity—was in vigorous ferment; it was centered on Pest’s many and famous coffeehouses, some of which, like the one called the New York, were of glittering magnificence.[3] Artists, writers, journalists, actors, boulevardiers, and hangers-on (overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, male) occupied regular tables, sometimes all day and late into the night, where conversation, debate, gossip, and badinage flowed freely. In an age when most unmarried men lived with their parents, it was a familiar, convivial place to meet friends; for family men it offered a refuge from domesticity for a brandy, a cigar, and a game of chess. Newspaper articles and sometimes entire novels were written at corner tables, literary journals were edited and the occasional revolution was planned amid the clink of espresso cups. For those in search of fresh air and a refreshing spritzer or cold beer, charming old taverns in the hills of Buda offered outdoor tables under the welcoming shade of trees.

  The Sezession style in architecture and design of the turn of the century, which had recently left its distinctive, faintly exotic mark all over Pest, was being superseded by the first waves of twentieth-century modernism in the visual arts: fauvism, cubism, expressionism—a dizzying torrent of “isms” that stirred intense debate and divided the artistic and critical community between traditionalists (like Béla and his circle) and enthusiasts for the avant-garde (many of whom were Jewish). Similar developments were afoot in literature and music, with the poetry of Endre Ady and the challenging tonalities of Béla Bartók. In a society like that of Budapest in 1914, in which culture (in an age when that word needed neither quotation marks nor qualification) held an almost sacred place in the lives of the educated classes, these controversies, and the increasing polarization of opinion around them, counted for a great deal.

  Still, the material lives of the upper middle class and the gentry were comfortable and seemingly secure, with summers spent away from the oppressive heat of the city on the shores of Lake Balaton, the pleasant Adriatic coast (a day’s travel by fast train), and in the Alps, with Baedeker in hand; or, for the wealthy, perhaps in Italy, or the smart resorts of the French Riviera and the Atlantic coast. These people, on the whole, encountered courtesy and deference wherever they went; like Béla, they could tip their way through life. Modern conveniences—the telephone, the electric tram, the motorcar, the espresso machine, aspirin—had become part of everyday life. Yet conversations turned, again and again, to seemingly insoluble political problems and threats, internal and external, to the established order. It was a society that managed to combine deep complacency with an uneasy sense that things could not go on as they were.

  The one thing that practically nobody foresaw was what actually happened: a continent-wide “total” war lasting for four relentless years, by the end of which Austria-Hungary’s human and material resources would be utterly exhausted, its institutions wrecked, and its very existence as an entity coming to an abrupt end.

  The terrible toll of human lives and physical suffering imposed by the war of 1914–1918 on all of the combatant nations is its defining feature in our historical imagination. The losses suffered by Austria-Hungary are, nonetheless, still shocking. In just the first two weeks of fighting, the monarchy’s casualties—killed, wounded, or captured —numbered 400,000;[4] by the end of 1914, over 850,000. The first three months of 1915 added another 800,000 to the casualty lists. More than 40 percent of these losses were from the Hungarian lands.[5] By the end of the war, Austr
o-Hungarian casualties were almost 7 million out of a population (in 1914) of 51 million. (For the sake of comparison, British casualties were 2.5 million out of a population of 46 million.)[6] An average of more than 4,500 Austro-Hungarian men in uniform were killed, wounded, or captured every single day of the war.

  This recently discovered memoir covers a period of eight months, from the day that news of Austro-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia reaches the little Adriatic resort where Béla is holidaying with friends to the day when—after brief military training, the hell of battle against the Russians on the Galician front, serious injury, and slow recuperation—he returns to Budapest in early April 1915 to report once more for duty. Vivid, acutely observant, and intensely personal, it offers a rare insight into a long-lost world and a largely forgotten theater of the Great War, and into the engagingly skeptical and subtle mind of a man—and an artist—who is at once a product of his age and privileged background, and a quietly sardonic critic of the jingoism, folly, self-deception, and hypocrisy that he sees all around him, as the country is first caught up in enthusiasm for the war and then increasingly in denial of its realities.

  At the heart of the narrative is the description of combat in the sandy hills and forests of northern Galicia, deep inside what the historian Timothy Snyder has called eastern Europe’s “bloodlands”—the scene of human slaughter on a vast scale in the twentieth century, including the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry. (Oblivious, of course, to what was to come, the author observes a remote Jewish shtetl with a mixture of fascinated curiosity and the faint disdain characteristic of his class and age.) There is no shortage of writing about life at the front in the First World War (although firsthand accounts of the Galician campaign of 1914 are rare);[7] nonetheless, this record of the experience of battle stands out for its subjective intensity, self-awareness, and richness of detail. It makes for terrifying reading. It is no wonder that the writer emerged from the experience bearing, in addition to his physical wounds, psychological damage (diagnosed, in the terminology of the day, as “traumatic neurosis,” but otherwise untreated) that haunts him and blocks his artistic creativity during the months of his slow recuperation, and left him inwardly scarred to the end of his long life.