This meddlesome but influential journalist had battled tirelessly to reward the Czech leader Benes for his wartime support of the Allies with a high position in the new state of Czechoslovakia, ‘gallant little Serbia’ with Croatia; Slovenia and Bosnia, and the formerly insignificant little kingdom of Romania with the huge province of Transylvania, all of which cost Hungary well over half her former territory and two-thirds of her pre-war peoples. Hungary’s despair and disillusion were most graphically explained by István Bethlen in a series of lectures given at the Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London’s St James’s Square in November 1933 and afterwards published in book form under the title of The Treaty of Trianon and European Peace (Longmans, Green and Co, London, New York and Toronto, 1934). Bethlen, who was also a cousin and remained a lifelong friend of Miklós Bánffy, had been in a unique position to discuss these problems, as he had been prime minister of Hungary from 1921 to 1931.

This was the world that Miklós Bánffy was to write about in his two short books of memoirs, Emlékeimböl – From my Memories from 1932 and Huszonöt Ev (1945) – Twenty-Five Years (1945), which had never been published before, since the manuscript had only been discovered after the fall of Communism among the Bánffy papers deposited in the Ráday Institute by his widow soon after his death in 1950. These two books describe a very different world from that into which Bánffy had been born in 1873 when Hungary had been at her greatest and when it had in effect been ruled largely by a privileged group of hereditary aristocrats.

From my Memories describes the death-throes of this world. The first part recalls those depressing days in the last months of 1916 when many men of clear sight had realized that the war would eventually be lost, and when all of Austria-Hungary felt that the death of the aged Emperor Franz Joseph signalled the end of an epoch.

In Budapest it immediately became imperative to crown the new monarch king of Hungary, since, according to the country’s constitution, no parliamentary measures could be made law until there was a properly crowned and anointed sovereign to give his approval. This will explain why, in those desolate days when the casualty lists were daily growing longer and the capital was filled with the maimed and wounded soldiery returning from the front, anyone could have contemplated something so festive as the pomp and circumstance of a coronation.

Bánffy, as the scion of an ancient family whose father held an important office at court and who, moreover, had himself for some years been charged with responsibility for running the state theatres, was an obvious choice to organize the decorations and most of the other technical arrangements both inside and outside the coronation church. Part One of the book tells firstly of the hasty arrangements that had to be completed in a few weeks at a time when few people were available and the city was desperately short of almost everything that would be needed. He then goes on to describe the splendours and miseries of the coronation ceremonies on the last day of December 1916. Bánffy’s account is written with compassion and understanding as well as with an eye to the ironic and occasionally ludicrous aspects of that beautiful but sad ceremony.

In Part Two we move on to the closing days of the war in October 1918, when the monarchy was overthrown in the so-called ‘Aster Revolution’ and in its place there was established a short-lived socialist republic with Count Mihály Károlyi – Bánffy’s cousin and, when they were both younger, an intimate friend – as its first president. This in turn soon gave way to a Communist regime under Béla Kún. Bánffy, who had been in Budapest at the time of the Aster Revolution and who, along with István Bethlen and others of a like mind, was only too conscious of Károlyi’s inadequacy and obvious inability to withstand the growing Communist threat, decided to go to England to explain, to any open-minded and influential people he could find, the menace to world peace that was inherent in what was happening in Hungary as a result of Allied policies. He decided to go, as a private citizen, at his own expense and under the auspices of the Szekler National Council, to London to raise support and sympathy for his suffering country. Before leaving in the first days of January 1919, Bánffy went to see Károlyi and, while explaining why he wished to go and also making it clear that he was not asking to be sent officially as he felt he would have more chance of success if he remained independent, obtained permission to take out the necessary funds.

At this point Bánffy takes the opportunity to insert a fascinating pen-portrait of the unfortunate Károlyi, which is different from all others as it is written by someone who knew the man intimately from the days of their shared childhood and schooldays. In this it differs from most of what was later to be written about Károlyi both in its depth of psychological understanding and sympathy and in its freedom from the sort of sycophantic appreciation that pervades so much of what has been written about Károlyi by his wife and other admirers.

As it happens, Bánffy was never then to reach England as he found himself stranded in Holland with no money and, as a well-known aristocrat of independent means, was unable to return to Communist-ruled Hungary.

Bánffy’s account of his adventures in passing through a Germany reduced to chaos by the Spartacist workers’ revolt and finding himself so short of funds that he had to try to make a living as a portrait painter, is hilarious. When Béla Kun, in his turn, was forced to flee, and the Communist domination came to an abrupt and ignominious end, Bánffy received word to return from Bethlen, who was in Vienna heading a spirited group of exiles. He left at once for Austria. From there they would soon be able to go home and try to rebuild what remained of their shattered country.

Although written many years later when Hungary had suffered a second defeat in 1945, Bánffy still manages to keep up an urbane tone from which his good humour and irrepressible sense of the ridiculous has not been submerged either by the new tragedies to which Hungary had been subjected or by the bleak circumstances in which the book was written. When the war drew to a close the castle of Bonczhida had been reduced almost to a ruin, burned and looted by the retreating German armies as an act of revenge for Bánffy’s attempt, made a year before, to persuade Romania, together with Hungary, to desert the Axis and sue for a separate peace. Countess Bánffy and their then teenage daughter, the future co-translator of her father’s memoirs, had returned to Budapest because word had reached them that their townhouse had been occupied by the Russians and all their belongings thrown into the street. Miklós Bánffy had stayed in their Koloszvár house hoping to regain what was left of their forestry holdings from which their fortune derived. Although unsuccessful in this, he was prevented from rejoining his wife in Hungary because the frontier had been closed by the Romanian army. Nothing daunted, Bánffy, although his papers and archives had been destroyed by the German army, set to work to tell the story of his eighteen months as Hungary’s foreign minister.

These were by no means uneventful and started after the fall of Count Pál Teleki’s government following the first of the new young king’s two failed attempts to return to Hungary to reclaim his throne in Budapest as a springboard from which to regain his other title as emperor of Austria. Teleki, who had not handled the attempted coup well, was forced to resign, and István Bethlen was appointed prime minister in his place. It was he who asked Bánffy to help him by accepting the onerous post of minister for foreign affairs.

Twenty-five Years (1945) tells the tale of Bánffy’s period of office, starting with his first attempts to come to some agreement with the new neighbouring states so as to alleviate the minority problems brought about by the arbitrary fashion in which the Western powers had redrawn the map of Europe. These preliminary negotiations were brought to an abrupt end with King Karl’s second and more serious attempt to return. Although this putsch also failed, and had its comic-opera aspects, it was nearer succeeding than the first and had more serious and long-lasting effects. The young king had been misled by unscrupulous courtiers who had told him tales of totally mythical support that would be forthcoming not only from the Western powers but also from the newly independent republic of Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian government under the self-appointed ‘Regent’ Admiral Horthy, a war hero who had been an aide-de-camp to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph, acted swiftly to stifle the revolt and so avoid a new Central-European war. However, it had a further and more deleterious result in bringing about an unbridgeable rift between the newly formed Legitimist Party and the supporters of Horthy’s government. This deprived the country of the services of a whole generation of educated young men from the gentry and the great aristocratic families without putting anyone else in their place as candidates for government office or the diplomatic corps.

Twenty Five Years (1945) was published posthumously by Puski, Budapest in 1993 and later reprinted together with From My Memories in one volume.