Language Change in Budapest

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 198-199:

Demographics as well as politics were changing on both sides of the Danube, principally the rapid decline in the use of the German language – a victory for the cause of Hungarian nationalism. The German populations almost everywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe maintained their German heritage and their separation from the other, mainly Slavic, populations surrounding them – in the Czech lands, Galicia and parts of Romania. In Buda and Pest, if not the rest of Hungary, things progressed differently. The German-Austrian populations in Pest and Buda merged with, and then were absorbed by, the Magyars into a linguistic, political and cultural ‘Hungarianness’.

Another big demographic factor was the rapid influx of immigrants, mostly Jews, into Pest, who adopted the Hungarian language to assimilate into Magyar life. The main political manager of the unification was a prominent son of immigrants whose family had moved to Pest in the 1820s, the vastly experienced (and wealthy) Moritz Wahrmann. In 1869 he was the first Jew elected to the Hungarian Parliament, for the Leopoldváros (Leopoldtown) district of Pest, an area of large town houses and a few commercial businesses in the finance sector, populated by many better-off Jews. A close associate of Andrássy and a moderate Liberal, he steered the legislation uniting the city through Parliament. By then, though, the population of Buda was in decline compared with that of Pest. In 1848 the population was nearly even, with 46 per cent in Buda. Twenty years later this proportion fell to 25 per cent. By 1900 only one in six of the city’s inhabitants lived in Buda.

There was snobbery and parochialism on both sides of the river for decades after the unification. The writer Sándor Márai could be happy only in Buda, close to the Castle district where he lived, until he emigrated to the US after the Second World War. A Pest loyalist profoundly disagreed: ‘The Danube flows along the edge of Budapest, because Buda is not really one half of the capital city but merely a place for excursions,’ wrote Adolf Ágai, founder and long-time editor of the humour magazine Borsszem Jankó and author of the classic Travels from Pest to Budapest. ‘It is naturally right to rejoice in the dawn of tomorrow even while looking back wistfully to yesterday,’ he wrote. ‘Pest represents dynamism of the present and future…the other side is sleepy and secretive…I think highly of Buda but I am not familiar with it. My imagination remains baffled by its monotonous hills and valleys…I have travelled through all the great capitals of Europe but Buda remains a foreign place to me.’