The focus of this book is more specific than the title suggests. It is about revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence following the First World War in two central European cities, Budapest and Munich. On May 1, 1919, Vladimir Lenin held up both as examples of the communist revolution beginning to sweep the world. By the time Lenin uttered these words, the Munich revolutionary government under Ernst Toller had already collapsed, and the Budapest revolutionary government under Béla Kun was smashed by Romanian troops in early August. Both were improbable urban revolutions, arising in the middle of conservative, Catholic, and rural populations. Both were replaced by far right counter-revolutionary forces that developed conspiracy theories to explain the events and that carried out bloody reprisals in Munich and even bloodier ones in Budapest. In both cases, the counter-revolutionary forces blamed Jews and Bolsheviks for the revolution. Despite the rhetorical parallels, however, the outcomes of the two revolutions were different. Munich's counter-revolutionary violence gave way to democracy and the rule of law, which, however flawed, helped to contain post-revolutionary violence. Budapest came under the rule of Horthy's nationalistic and militaristic authoritarianism, which at least in the first years set no such limits to counter-revolutionary violence. Opponents of radical revolution in Munich, including Social Democrats, viewed Munich itself as the victim. By contrast, opponents in Budapest seemed to view the multiethnic city itself as guilty, alien, and hostile.
The book does not aim to provide a complete history of the revolutions or new information reframing the basic events. Its goal is rather to describe how “narratives” (12) of revolutions and of new national foundations developed, especially on the far right, to describe what had occurred. These narratives used images of the foreigner and the enemy that were shot through with anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotypes. Ablovatski uses rumors and court cases to show how images of Jews and Bolsheviks were wrapped up with images of degeneracy and female weakness. Her reading builds on the well documented investigations of conservative “political justice” in the case of Munich. Similar cases are less well documented in post-revolutionary Budapest because of censorship under Miklós Horthy's authoritarian regime and because cases were later recatalogued under the state-socialist dictatorship following World War II, according to Ablovatski, making access more difficult. In both cases, she uses a handful of individual cases to support her cultural argument, rather than undertaking a more systematic investigation of the evidence. She supports her observations with literary and other representations of revolutionary actors. For example, a memoir by Cecile Tormay, a Hungarian anti-Semite and conservative, has a leading role in her account of Budapest.
The author asserts that “the script for this revolutionary drama” was well-known to all, a “well-rehearsed and broadly disseminated story that carried in its wake a developed set of expectations that made plausible the circulating rumors and threats that so often provoked violence” (79). But aside from citing actors’ occasional references to someone like Maximilien Robespierre or Lenin, Ablovatski does not describe in detail how the revolutions of 1789, 1848, 1871, or 1917 were understood by the people she is describing, or how they actually shaped what these city-dwellers were living through. She describes the way lawyers and judges in Munich courts provided plot lines to explain how defendants acted, for example, but in practice these seem to be shorthand accounts of motivations intended to lighten sentences rather than invocations of revolutionary scripts. It is interesting that the lack of such regular judicial proceedings in Budapest seemed to contribute to a higher level of counter-revolutionary violence than in Munich.
The book's source base, especially for Hungary, is narrow and not always complex. An author such as Joseph Roth, for example, was almost certainly doing more than showing how “conservative women were portrayed as strong bastions upholding the postwar order” (170) in a 1938 novel written in Paris two decades later. The advantage of cultural history is its ability to work out the contradictory and yet stereotyped images and narratives of a time; Ablovatski does not always make full use of this method.
