The deleterious effect of the postwar settlement was especially evident
in Hungary, where the truncation of the Kingdom of Hungary into “rump”
Hungary inverted the relationship between the Hungarian nobility and
Hungarian Jewry. Prior to the war, the nobility and Jewry in Hungary coex-
isted in a mutually advantageous symbiosis. Until 1920, the Magyars were an
ethnic minority in their own country, comprising only 45 percent of the total
population. Jews made up 8 percent of the total population, and thus the
Magyarization of the Jews was seen as an integral element of Magyar nation-
alism in the face of rival nationalist aspirations. In the overwhelmingly
Magyar rump Hungary, Jews were no longer needed to produce a Magyar
majority. Moreover, the concentration of Jews in commerce and the profes-
sions complemented the concentration of nobles in the state bureaucracy. The
truncation of Hungary to a third of its prewar size substantially reduced the
number of government and civil service positions, driving the nobles into
commercial and professional careers, and thus into competition with Jews. In
addition, prior to the war the nobility had regarded Jews as a loyal ally
against the Habsburg dynasty and local urban elites. The perception of the
communist revolution of 1919 as a Jewish revolution and Béla Kun as a
would-be destroyer of the nobility recast Jews as the mortal enemies of the
nobility’s privileges and property.
Within the space of a few years, the situation of Hungarian and German
Jewry deteriorated rapidly from exceptionally good to exceptionally bad. In
contrast to the decline of mainstream anti-Semitism in Germany prior 1914,
and the lack of anti-Semitism in pre-war Hungary, by the early 1920s
Hungarian and German society and politics were rife with anti-Semitic
polemics and even systemic limitations. This was the background to the rise
of the troubled Weimar Republic.
Born out of the ashes of the second German Reich, the Weimar Republic was
caught from the outset in the contradiction between losing the peace after not
definitively losing the war. The German surrender in 1918 took place when
German troops were not in retreat, but rather were still situated in France and
Belgium. The surrender was signed by civilian, not military, leaders. Some
among the latter would regard the surrender as a premature and cowardly act
by politicians. At the peace negotiations, Germany was forced to cede territory,
including Alsace-Lorraine to France. Germany was also blamed for the war and
forced to pay reparations. The treaty also limited the size of the German mili-
tary, a devastating blow to a society that prized military service.
In retrospect, the survival of the Weimar Republic for more than a decade
was remarkable, given that the Weimar government faced four problems that it
was ultimately unable to solve, and that would eventually be solved by Hitler:
national humiliation, political polarization, paramilitary chaos, and economic
turmoil. The need to explain defeat led Germans to the Dolchstosslegende, the
legend of the stab in the back. This was an image from German folklore:
Siegfried was stabbed in the back by his supposed friend Hagen von Tronje.
210 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45