Budapest - the pearl of the Danube;
Budapest - brings tears to fairies;
Budapest - a beautiful dream city.
There is nothing more wonderful...
... are the words of a once popular sweet and sentimental song. However, this painful, biased love for the city also permeates the works of the greatest writers, such as Krüdy, Kosztolanyi, Karinthy and Móricz. They, who in their youth experienced the glorious boom of turn-of-the-century Budapest, then lived through the devastation of the First World War and the following social catastrophes, watched the revival of the city’s vitality as a curious miracle. “Budapest was in its best form at the time (...) Full of splendour, full of glittering patisseries; an Italian-type promenade on the left bank of the Danube, opposite the Royal Palace, where the most elegant women of Europe flaunted,” was how Ferenc Fejtö remembered the 1930s. That world was swallowed up by World War II, it seemed for ever. Six decades had to go by before photographs and newspaper texts of the time preserved in museum collections could be arranged in an album, and we could observe the thus conjured city with both its lighter and its darker shades.
The photographs of Rudolf Balogh, Mór Erdclyi, Karolv Escher, Imre Kinszki, Zoltan Seidner and Kalman Szöllóssy show the faces of the city with the eye of a contemporary: Apponyi Square preserving the national romantic style atmosphere of the turn of the century, Üjlipótvaros and Lagy- manyos under construction at the time, unaltered village-like Old Buda and petit bourgeois Ferenc- varos. New signs of modern life appear in the pictures: short skirts, bobbed hair and daring makeup. I he pictures reveal the lyrical beauty of the city, the lights of the Danube panorama, the inner city at dusk, the snowy streets of Buda and the varied life of the capital. Beside the Baroque-like splendour and Western modernity of high society , the painfully deep destitution of the lower classes is also portrayed here. Paging through this volume we can experience the city’s dense reality in a way its inhabitants of the time could not really do: ladies shopping in Vaci Street would have never gone near the smoking rubbish tips in Pestszent- lörinc and the Teleki Square labourers could have never sat at the marble tables of the New York Coffee House.
While we are quite at home in the Budapest of a century ago due to the photographic volumes, calendars and picture postcards published in recent decades, the photographs in this book are the first to illustrate the life of the capital between the two world wars.