[...]

Miklós Wesselényi, in his above-cited book on the crisis of the aristocracy, observed that the future of the upper class would largely depend on the outcome of the war. As it turned out, the social and political changes that swept over Hungary in the wake of the Second World War were tantamount to a landslide. Those who had been active National Socialists or members of the Szálasi government—Count Fidél Pálffy and Baron Gábor Kemény, for example— had to answer for their deeds before people's tribunals, and were executed. Other aristocrats with a political "past" managed to flee the country in 1944–45. They were joined by many who had not been politically active in the Horthy era, but who believed that Bolshevism would enter Hungary along with the Soviet army. This was the first wave of aristocratic emigration.
Those who stayed—and they were the majority—found themselves in a totally changed socio-political milieu. The coalition parties, which formed the government and had a parliamentary majority, passed laws which led to the end of the aristocracy as the ruling class. The land reform of 1945 did away with the economic basis of their influence: great estates of over 1,000 holds were expropriated; while of estates under 1,000 holds, at most 100 holds were left in the hands of the landowning aristocrat. Roughly 1,500 chateaux and manor houses were seized by the state. Once it was divested of its economic clout, the aristocracy lost its social prestige as well. The laws passed by the four-party coalition sent a clear message to Hungarian society: the aristocracy, its traditional privileges notwithstanding, was entitled to no special consideration or esteem. It was a sentiment which found legal expression in Act IV of 1947, which did away with the use of noble and aristocratic titles. Overnight, the aristocracy as such disappeared from public life.

[...]

Aristocrats were branded the reactionary enemies of the people. In 1946, they were put on the so-called "B-list", and, in consequence or coincidentally, lost their civil service posts and army commissions one by one. It was in the foreign service that they were tolerated the longest: here, class cleansing started only after the Treaty of Paris was signed, in February of 1947.
Though they suffered crushing losses, most aristocrats accepted their fate with stoic resignation. It is a telling fact that no one was ever taken to court for breaking the law outlawing the use of aristocratic titles. Prince Pál Esterházy, who lost all his Hungarian estates as a consequence of the land reform, did not move to one of his estates in Austria, but married a prima ballerina and lived quietly in a modest apartment in Budapest until 1948 when he was arrested and, though in no way implicated, was condemned as one of the accused in the Mindszenty trial.²¹ (In 1956, friends and retainers fetched him from gaol and took him to Austria across a canal which bordered his former estates.) The aristocracy still had hopes of somehow finding their new place in Hungarian society, for the restrictions on their activities at this time still touched only the public sphere, and not their private lives. Putting their education and knowledge of languages to practical use, they were, for a time, able to make a living for themselves and their families: many of them found jobs with some firm or other, or themselves went into business. They were also able to socialise with one another, and keep up old ties, albeit now informally.
The Communist Party's aggressive takeover from 1947 on and the ensuing sovietisation of Hungary set off a new wave of emigration among the aristocracy; those who stayed risked utter annihilation. In terms of Communist ideology, the aristocracy was the class enemy who had to be swept out of the way, to the very periphery of society.

[...]

The post-1989 decades have been a time of growing public interest in the aristocracy, and those concerned have themselves proved more and more willing to share with the public certain details of their lives and family histories. Numerous interviews, articles and memoirs attest to this willingness to communicate. Péter Esterházy's recent autobiographical work, Celestial Harmonies, is an outstanding literary example of such coming face to face with the past.
In the first few post-1989 years, there were social scientists who expected that the energetic aristocratic returnees would become a social force to reckon with, and one of the pillars supporting the Antall government. They became neither. Though an integral part of Hungarian society, the aristocracy of today has no social position to compare with that of their grandfathers in the early 1900s, or their fathers in the Horthy era. Nor do they show any sign of their forebears' sense of cohesion, or of their aloofness from the rest of society.

Levente Püski
teaches at the History Department of the Kossuth Lajos University, Debrecen.
His field of research is inter-war Hungarian history.