The Phoenix Land
Page 48
Professor Tomás Masaryk (1850–1937): Founded the Czech People’s Party under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1900. He was leader of the Czech People’s Party in Paris from 1916 and later, president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1935.
Count Mensdorff (1861–1945): Cousin of King Edward VII and was immensely popular during his time as ambassador in London.
Count János Mikes (1876–1943): Archbishop of Szombathely at the time of King Karl’s two attempts to regain his Hungarian throne. A colourful character and a lifelong monarchist, he was well known to Bánffy as a fellow Transylvanian.
Andor Miklós: A well-known newspaper proprietor.
Miskolc: An industrial town in north-east Hungary.
Ferenc Molnár: Internationally renowned novelist and playwright.
Monnet-Sully: Nineteenth-century French actor known for the exaggerated theatricality of his performances.
Traian Mosoiu (1868–1932): Commander of the Romanian army of occupation and in 1920 minister of defence in Bucharest.
Field Marshal Pál Nagy (1864–1927): Commanded the Miskolc garrison and was called to Budapest after Rezsö Willerding had refused to take up arms against King Karl during the second putsch.
Lord Newton: Spoke about the Hungarian question in the House of Lords on 20 March 1920. He visited Hungary in 1921 and was the leading figure in an organization called the Oxford League for Hungarian Self-Determination. Friend and supporter of István Bethlen.
Parád: Area in the Tatra hills some one hundred kilometres east of Budapest.
Nicola Pasic (1846–1926): Serbian statesman and several times prime minister of Yugoslavia.
Ivan Fiodorovich Paskievich (1782–1856): Duke of Warsaw, led the Russian armies that invaded Transylvania in 1848, chief of staff to the Imperial Russian army in 1849.
Gyula Peidl (1873–1943): Hungarian politician. Joined Social-Democratic Party in 1909 and emigrated soon after his brief spell as prime minister in 1919. His government lasted six days, and on 6 August a coup d’état by the National-Clerical Party made István Friedrich prime minister and named Archduke Joseph as Regent of Hungary.
Raymond Poincaré (1869–1934): After holding several ministerial posts, he became president of France from 1913 to 1920.
Caserio Princip: Killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, thus precipitating the start of World War I.
Vilmos Pröhle (1871–1946): Professor of linguistics and an expert on the Far East. Bánffy and István Bethlen helped finance the publication of his From the East in 1922. A National Christian Unity Party member of parliament, he resigned as a result of the party’s attitude to King Karl. Author of a Turkish grammar and editor of an anthology of Japanese literature.
Pál Prónay (1875–1945): Lieutenant-colonel in the Hungarian army, was forced to retire from active service after his support for King Karl’s second putsch.
István Rakovszky (1858–1931): politician in the People’s Party, active during the opposition coalition from 1906 to 1910, president of the first National Assembly from 1920. He and Gratz arrived in Sopron on Thursday 20 March, where King Karl appointed a new ‘government’ with Rakovszky at its head.
Walter Rathenau (1867–1922): Industrialist, writer and politician. Appointed foreign minister in January 1922 and assassinated later the same year.
Prince René of Bourbon-Parma: Born 1894, the twelfth child and fifth son of Robert, Duke of Parma. He was brother to the Queen-Empress Zita. One of Prince René’s older brothers, Prince Sixtus, born in 1886, was well known to have played a prominent part in acting as his brother-in-law’s envoy during secret talks with the Allies when the war was at its height.
Vilmos Röder (1881–1969): A colonel at the time of King Karl’s second putsch, Röder went on to head the department of strategic planning and was later Chief of General Staff from 1930 to 1935 and minister of defence from 1936 to 1938. He was one of Bethlen’s most trusted supporters and at the end of the Second World War, at the Crown Council in 1944, it was he who advised on the ceasefire arrangements.
Johannes Schober (1874–1924): Chief of police in Vienna from 1918, chancellor from 1921 to 1922 and from 1929 to 1930, foreign minister from 1930 to 1932.
Count Antal Sigray (1879–1947): Much in evidence in 1922 when King Karl made his second attempt to return to Hungary and regain his throne (see Chapter Six of Bánffy’s Twenty Five Years [1945] in this volume). He was a lifelong supporter of the Legitimist cause. In 1943 he openly advocated the withdrawal of Hungary from its alliance with the Axis and in revenge, was arrested by the Germans and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. After his release, he left the country and died in New York in 1947.
Sándor Simonyi-Semadám (1864–1946): Briefly prime minister in 1920. Retired from politics in 1922.
Colonel Tihamér Siménfalvy: A member of several extreme right-wing organizations. Admiral Horthy had great confidence in him.
Slovensko: Province of Hungary awarded to the new State of Czechoslovakia the Treaty of Trianon.
Field Marshal Jan Smuts (1870–1950): South African soldier and liberal politician, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and again during the Second World War. Close friend of Winston Churchill.
Károly Soós (1869–1953): Served in Austro-Hungarian army, promoted to general and field marshal. Served as Chief of General Staff and minister of defence in 1920. Commanded army of the south.
Spandau: Berlin’s military headquarters and principal barracks situated about ten kilometres northwest of the city centre.
Aurél Stromfeld (1878–1927): prominent left-wing politician with a distinguished army background.
István Szabó of Nagyatád (1863–1924): Founder of the National Independent and Holders Party in 1909, which led to the formation of the National Smallholder’s Party in 1919. After the fall of Communism, he became finance minister and later minister of agriculture. He was largely responsible for the 1920 law that distributed land to the peasantry.
The Szeklers: A race of disputed origin but with largely Magyar traditions and language who had settled in Transylvania some time in the Dark Ages, and who formed an important section of the (then) Hungarian community in the population of that province. They were fiercely anti-Romanian, claiming to have come there centuries before immigration was to bring many Romanian peasant families seeking refuge from the Turkish domination of what was in 1866 to form the independent principality (and from 1881, kingdom) of Romania with an appointed German sovereign, Prince Charles of Hohenzollen-Sigmaringen. The Romanians claim descent from the Dacians of Roman times, and the whole question of the origins of the several ethnic groups in Transylvania has for many years been the subject of bitter dispute between scholars of Magyar and Romanian origins.
Szovata: Located in Transylvania, 152 kilometres south of Kolozsvár – now Cluj – with hot and cold salt lakes.
Count Pál Teleki (1879–1941): Born of an ancient Transylvanian family, geographer and scientist, president of the Society of Turan, 1913, foreign minister and minister for agriculture in Count Gyula Károlyi’s government founded in Szeged to combat Communist rule in Budapest. In 1920 he again became foreign minister and then, in 1921, prime minister. He worked hard for the revision of the Treaty of Trianon, opposed the growing influence of the Soviet Union and was one of the first Hungarian politicians to recognize the threat posed by the Nazis. Appointed once more to the office of prime minister in 1939, he killed himself when Hitler tried to make Hungary enter the war on the German side.
Kálman Thaly (1839–1909): Poet and historian. He wrote about the ‘kuruc’ spirit and helped create the national veneration for Rákóczi’s part in the 1848 freedom fight. He founded the Hungarian Historical Society and the magazine Centuries.
Imré Thököly: one of Transylvania’s greatest and most successful military leaders. Earned the admiration of France and other opponents of the Habsburgs and played a decisive part in attaining a measure of independence for Hungary in the late
seventeenth century.
Viorel Tilea: Romanian diplomat. His posthumous memoirs, Envoy Extraordinary (Hagerstown Press), were edited by his daughter Ileana Tilea in 1998. His unpublished correspondence – some of it with Bánffy – shows that the two men had become friends.
István Tisza (1861–1918): Several times prime minister of Hungary. Although opposed to the war, he kept this office at the request of Emperor Franz Joseph and was assassinated in 1918. Bánffy gives a sympathetic portrait of this most honest and upright of Hungarian politicians in his trilogy, The Writing on the Wall.
Nicolae Titulescu: Romanian ambassador in London in 1922 and foreign minister from 1927 to 1936. His compatriot, the diplomat Viorel Tilea, refers to Titulescu in his posthumous memoirs, Envoy Extraordinary (London, 1998) as ‘a wise and highly respected statesman who had avoided being embroiled in local politics yet was often a foreign minister in reserve’. In 1934 he was responsible for establishing diplomatic relations between Romania and the USSR.
Tokaj: Located at the centre of the district producing Hungary’s most famous wine of the same name. Pope Pius IV expressed his appreciation of it at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) at which the Roman Catholic Church planned the Counter Reformation. King Louis XIV of France is recorded as saying: ‘Tokaj is the wine of kings and the king of wines.’
Alexandru Vajda-Vojvod (1872–1950): One of the leading figures of the Romanian National Front in 1918, prime minister from 1919 to 1920 and from 1932 to 1933. He was a Transylvanian landowner of ethnic Romanian origins with property not far from the Bánffy castle of Bonczhida.
Colonel Vix: Commander of the French Military Mission, which then occupied Hungary, and was all-powerful. He was a real thorn in the flesh to Mihály Károlyi, who was later to write of him that he turned down all Károlyi’s requests but not those from ‘Germanophile’ members of the ‘ancien régime’ who ‘busied themselves with drawing up unfavourable reports on the new Hungary, reports which Colonel Vix … was only too pleased to forward to Versailles’.
Warnemünde: A small port on the Baltic just north of Rostock.
Kaiser Wilhelm II (1851–1941): Grandson of Queen Victoria and Emperor of Germany from 1888 until the end of World War I, when he abdicated and went to live in retirement at Doorn in Holland. Known to all Englishmen as ‘The Kaiser’ and much hated as being responsible for the war.
Queen Wilhelmina: Queen of Holland from 1890 to 1948 when she abdicated in favour of her daughter Princess Juliana.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924): From 1913 to 1921 he was president of the United States, and entered the war on the Allied side in 1917. He was present at the peace talks in Paris which led to the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, but his Fourteen Points, which were just and moderate, failed to be incorporated into the final draft of the treaty, due largely to the Allies’ desire for vengeance against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Empress Zita (1892–1989): Princess of Bourbon-Parma. Married to Archduke Karl in 1911. He died in exile in 1922, while she went on to survive him by over fifty years.
By the Same Author
The Writing on the Wall, the Transylvanian Trilogy:
They Were Counted
The Were Found Wanting
They Were Divided
Copyright
First published in the United Kingdom in 2003
by Arcadia Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Miklós Bánffy 1932, 1945 and 2003
Translation from the Hungarian © Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen
The right of Miklós Bánffy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978-1-908129-67-3