CINDERELLA REVERSED
Wynner, Edith
Cinderella Reversed Memoirs of Michael Karolw. faith without illusion. Translated from the Hungarian hy Catherine Karolyi. Dutton. 392 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Edith Wynner THE LIFE of Count...
...He lived the dreary, precarious life of Europe's inter-war political exile on the meager allowance smuggled to him by one or two loyal members of his family...
...Unfortunately, the Allies were so busy quarreling among themselves that Hungary was left at the mercy of local French commanders who played fast and loose with her boundaries...
...Shortly afterwards, the Stalinists, Rakosi and Gero, consolidated Communist power, and Karolyi served them as minister to France, still hoping to promote a Socialist East European Federation...
...At that time Karolyi naively assumed "that the trial would be properly conducted...
...He began to work for universal suffrage, genuine Hungarian independence, and a break from subservience to German foreign policy...
...These Memoirs supply timely background to Hungary's recent revolt...
...Here was a fabulously wealthy lord who wasted his first forty years in the customary pursuits of Hungary's feudal aristocracy—traveling, gambling, wenching—with occasional dabs at conservative politics...
...He returned to Hungary and was fully rehabilitated by the coalition regime of Francis Nagy...
...By the time the Big Four at Versailles took notice of Hungary, Bela Kun was in power, subjecting the nation to its first Soviet experience...
...His own cousin, Imre Karolyi, denounced him as guilty of near treason, and the German secret service tried diligently, but unsuccessfully, to fabricate evidence against him...
...Karolyi resigned rather than accept such drastic loss of national territory...
...Led by a coalition government under Karolyi, Hungary became a democratic republic and sought recognition from the victorious Allies...
...For these activities he earned the undying hatred of his fellow-aristocrats and of the pan-German annexationist elements...
...But as Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested at the time, Karolyi feared his resignation "would have been interpreted as a demonstration in favor of the Cardinal...
...Reviewed by Edith Wynner THE LIFE of Count Michael Karol-yi is a Cinderella tale in reverse...
...In October 1918, amid the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the war-weary disillusionment of the people, Hungary's first peaceful October "revolution of the autumn rose" forced Karolyi into leadership...
...When Karolyi finally resigned, it was over the fabricated trial of Laszlo Rajk, one-time ruthless minister of the interior, who was rehabilitated and reburied shortly before the recent revolt...
...This is the sad and moving story of an idealistic, trusting, well-meaning man, essentially a Tolstoyan figure despite his attempts at Marxist rationalization...
...He is the tragic hero of a realistic modern fairy tale, who, wanting to do good, lived unhappilv ever after...
...The miracle of Karolyi is that in middle-age—just prior to the outbreak of World War I—came his transformation into a leader of progressive reform...
...In exile he continued to move left politically and in his last years "remained an unrepentant socialist" who though not a member of the Communist Party "had been a sympathizer...
...His resignation over Rajk drove him once more into exile although he had told himself that "to become an emigre again was unimaginable...
...At the end of World War II, Karolyi enjoyed a brief moment of happiness...
...During the war he urged negotiation of a separate peace by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy...
...When the campaign against Tito began he wanted to resign...
...For his brief, uneasy reign, subverted right and left by the intrigues of Hungarian aristocrats, Czech and Rumanian nationalists, and the violent Bolshevism of prisoners of war returned from Russia, Karolyi paid with twenty-six years of exile and unrelenting persecution by the counter-revolutionary Horthy dictatorship...
Vol. 21 • March 1957 • No. 3
