Hungary -- History -- Revolution, 1918-1919 -- Personal narratives; Tormay, Cécile, 1876-1937 -- Diaries
It is now impossible to patch up the country’s misfortune. It is the
Government which has patched itself up. Albert Bartha, the patriotic
Hungarian soldier, has left, and so has Batthyány. The socialists had
intended the Ministry of the Interior for the communist Eugene Landler,
but they did not succeed in that. All the same, the victory of the
socialists is complete—they have got the War Office! For the present
Károlyi is temporary Minister of War, but it is obvious that a little
Jewish electrician, the social-democrat, William Böhm, stands behind him,
though not so long ago he was repairing the typewriters and electric
installations of the office.
“Good, you have come at last; just repair my machine!” the girl-clerks
said to him when they saw him in the passages of the War Office. “I am
the Minister of War,” Böhm answered proudly, and sat down at Bartha’s
desk. Already he calls himself Hungary’s Minister of War. Károlyi still
masks him, but the game is obvious. When Károlyi formed his government on
the 1st of November he started with five Jewish Ministers, but as he was
afraid of public opinion he confessed to three only: Jászi, Garami and
Kunfi, while in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diener-Dénes, and in the
Ministry of Finance Paul Szende were hidden behind his own name.
They advance with frightful rapidity. The powers of destruction are
putting into practice with ruthless logic the pronouncement of Kunfi to
the National Assembly on the day the republic was proclaimed under the
cupola of the House of Parliament: “After the institutions we shall have
to change men; we must put into every place in this country men who are
inspired by the spirit of our new revolutionary ideas.”
It is clear now who these are, for the military and civilian
administrations are already filled with people who used to work behind
the counters of shops or banks, or in editorial offices, and used to mock
at the unpractical Hungarian intellectuals who struggled for starvation
wages in the public offices. Now they are taking their places, getting
sudden rises in their salaries, and pursuing a racial policy such as,
alas! the Hungarian race has never been able to pursue.
“We are wiping out a thousand years,” is their cry, and they find
fault with all the old institutions; but so far as they themselves are
concerned, no criticism is allowed.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BÖHM. TYPEWRITER AGENT. PEOPLE’S COMMISSARY FOR
(1) HOME AFFAIRS; (2) WAR OFFICE. LATER A COMMANDER OF THE RED ARMY, AND
FINALLY ‘AMBASSADOR’ AT VIENNA.
(_To face p. 196._)]
“Do you know, we have now come to this,” a tradesman said to me
in his shop, looking round cautiously as he spoke, “that it is
counter-revolution to push a Galician Jew by accident in the street.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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