A distinguished historian and Budapest native offers a rich and eloquent portrait of one of the great European cities at the height of its powers. Budapest, like Paris and Vienna, experienced a remarkable exfoliation at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of population growth, material expansion, and cultural exuberance, it was among the foremost metropolitan centers of the world, the cradle of such talents as Bartók, Kodály, Krúdy, Ady, Molnár, Koestler, Szilárd, and von Neumann, among others. John Lukacs provides a cultural and historical portrait of the city—its sights, sounds, and inhabitants; the artistic and material culture; its class dynamics; the essential role played by its Jewish population—and a historical perspective that describes the ascendance of the city and its decline into the maelstrom of the twentieth century. Intimate and engaging, Budapest 1900 captures the glory of a city at the turn of the century, poised at the moment of its greatest achievements, yet already facing the demands of a new age. “Lukacs’s Budapest, like Hemingway’s Paris, is a moveable feast.” —Chilton Williamson “Lukacs’s book is a lyrical, sometimes dazzling, never merely nostalgic evocation of a glorious period in the city’s history.” —The New York Review of Books “A reliable account of a beautiful city at the zenith of its prosperity.” —Publishers Weekly

John Lukacs, distinguished historian and native of Budapest, here offers a rich and eloquent depiction of one of Europe's great cities at its height. He provides a cultural and historical portrait of Budapest - its sights, sounds, and inhabitants; the artistic community; its class dynamics and politics; the essential role played by its Jewish population - and a historical perspective that describes the ascendance of the city and its decline into the maelstrom of the twentieth century. -- Publisher's description.

At the point of its creation in 1873, Budapest was intended to be a pleasant rallying point of orderliness, high culture and elevated social principles: the jewel in the national crown. From the turn of the century to World War II, however, the Hungarian capital was described, variously, as: Judapest, the sinful city, not in Hungary, and the Chicago of the Balkans. This is the first English-language study of competing metropolitan narratives in Hungarian literature that spans both the liberal late Habsburg and post-liberal, 'Christian-national' eras, at the same time as the 'Jewish Question' became increasingly inseparable from representations of the city. Works by writers from a wide variety of backgrounds are discussed, from Jewish satirists to icons of the radical Right, representatives of conservative national schools, and modernist, avant-garde and 'peasantist' authors. Gwen Jones is Hon. Research Associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.

Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low. What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. While Budapest succumbed to the patriotic imperatives of a nation threatened by war, revolution, and fascism, New York, free from such pressures, embraced the variety of its people and transformed its urban ethos into a paradigm for America. Budapest and New York is the lively story of the making of metropolitan culture in Europe and America, and of the influential relationship between city and nation. In unifying essays, the editors observe comparisons not only between the cities, but in the scholarly outlooks and methodologies of Hungarian and American histories. This volume is a unique urban history. Begun under the unfavorable conditions of a divided world, it represents a breakthrough in cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary historical work.

Documenting the city of Budapest through the eyes of two photographers who lived and worked a century apart from each other, this volume leads a fascinating walk through time. Recollecting the last third of the 19th century, this history is captured by Klösz György, who earnestly recorded the daily life of the Hungarian capital during this era. One hundred years later, Lugosi Lugo László followed in his footsteps, chronicling the same streets and sights in order to bring this unique reconstruction to fruition. This bilingual edition includes English and Hungarian.

A groundbreaking, brilliant urban history of a vibrant Central European metropolis--Budapest--and of its now-forgotten assimilated Jews, who largely created its modernist culture in the decades before World War I.

"By the dawn of the twentieth century Budapest was on its way to becoming a cosmopolitan metropolis. The 'Pearl of the Danube' boasted some of Europe's most beguiling architectural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics, fostering its centrality as an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. As historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture-including a robust homosexual subculture. Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 is her riveting story of non-normative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the its capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality between East and West, Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 demolishes myths identifying queer life with the failures of late-twentieth-century liberalism and instead recuperates queer sociality as an integral part of Budapest's-and Hungary's-modern incarnation"--

In the 19th century Hungary witnessed unprecedented social, economic and cultural development. The country became an equal partner within the Dual Monarchy when the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was concluded. Architecture and all forms of design flourished as never before. A distinctly Central European taste emerged, in which the artistic presence of the German-speaking lands was augmented by the influence of France and England. As this process unfolded, attempts were made to find a uniquely Hungarian form, based on motifs borrowed from peasant art as well as real (or fictitious) historical antecedents. "Motherland and Progress" – the motto of 19th-century Hungarian reformers – reflected the programme embraced by the country in its drive to define its identity and shape its future.

This book documents the physical aspects of the lives of Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the way they looked, the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked. The many historical photographs—there is at least one picture per page—and related text offers a virtual cross section of Hungarian society, a diverse group of the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy. Regardless of whether they lived integrated within the majority society or in separate communities, whether they were assimilated Jews or Hasidim, they were an important and integral part of the nation. We have surprisingly few detailed accounts of their lifestyles—the world knows more about the circumstances of their deaths than about the way they lived. Much like piecing together an ancient sculpture from tiny shards found in an excavation, Koerner tries to reconstruct the many diverse lifestyles using fragmentary information and surviving photos.

The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. Moreover, national historiographies in Central and Southeast Europe have either marginalized eugenics and racial nationalism or deemed them incompatible with their respective national traditions. Accordingly, this volume has a two-fold ambition: to excavate the hitherto unknown eugenic movements in Central and Southeast Europe and to explain their relationship with racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective substantiated in this volume connects developments in the history of racial anthropology, genetics and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing these phenomena in Central and Southeast Europe by arguing that concerns with eugenics and race were as widely disseminated in these regions as they were in Western Europe and North America. Book jacket.