A summary of two rival careers, including international travel and differing outlook in the 1848 Revolution.

How did Munich and Budapest come to host soviet revolutions in 1919? This chapter presents the rapid growth of the two cities in the nineteenth century and looks at the dynamics of class and ethnic conflicts leading up to World War I. The chapter argues that although the cities were considered “bourgeois” the roots of the revolutionary labor movements and also the racial tensions of antisemitism were present in them both before the war.

This chapter examines how the police and courts became the main audience for competing revolutionary narratives of guilt and victimization. People wanted to punish others and rehabilitate themselves. The courts functioned both as a sounding board for narratives through which one found resonance and affected verdicts and sentencing and also as a transmitter of new narratives to the public, as court verdicts seemed to be the official or “true” story of the revolutions. The transnational comparison of Budapest and Munich shows that the narrative developed in each was quite different and led to differential severity of verdicts and sentencing, with the courts in Hungary being more punitive. This situation in turn further radicalized Hungarians on the Left and the Right in the interwar period, with the “judicial terror” added to the fraught narrative of revolution and counterrevolution. In Bavaria, though memoirs such as Ernst Toller’s sought to rally supporters with examples of legal mistreatment, the revolution did not play as central a role in the symbolic world of Weimar German politics, overshadowed by even limited events such as the January 1919 Spartacus Uprising and the martyrdom during that revolt of the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

This chapter examimes the acute crisis of the world war and its role in destabilizing the political balance in both cities and in the overthrow of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire (as well as its constituent state, the Bavarian Monarchy). It compares the revolutions and counterrevolutions and the violence that accompanied the political struggles in both cities.

This chapter analyzes rumor and terror, both shaped by revolutionary scripts, and the political violence that erupted after the creation of council governments. These new governments, namesakes of the revolutionary government in Russia, deployed a revolutionary vocabulary that seemed to make concrete all the ideas of radical political discourse. Rhetoric about class warfare appeared to transform into reality with the appearance of armed workers' brigades patrolling the streets. This embodiment of previously theoretical concepts was empowering to those playing the roles of revolutionary heroes and was terrifying to those who suddenly found themselves cast as enemies in a dramatic new reality. As we explore events in Budapest and Munich we will see how expectations of violence shaped by revolutionary scripts influenced the ways in which residents of the two cities understood political events and provoked new rounds of violence.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of Hungary’s operetta scene and analyses the contrasts between shows written for a Hungarian audience and those created with an international public in mind. In Budapest, operetta shared the Hungarian lyric stage with the népszínmű (‘folk plays’ with music), a genre descended from the Austrian Volksstück, usually featuring more rural plots and simpler music. As time went on, operetta increasingly displaced népszínmű but continued to support shows with local plots. The latter did not serve composers well if they wished to expand their horizons beyond Hungary. I discuss Kálmán’s use of contrasting character types, such as the sophisticated European and exotic Hungarian and Gipsy, and contrast his approach with that of other Hungarian composers who wrote shows that were popular in Hungary but did not travel well. An example of a Hungarian work that draws on the operetta and népszínmű traditions is Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János. Generally labelled as a singspiel ‘symbolizing the poetic power of folklore’, using ‘genuine’ Hungarian folksong materials, it was, in fact, written and performed for the opera house rather than the commercial theatre. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Hungarian operetta since World War II.