Modernitás, modernizmus és identitásválság: a fin de siècle Budapest
Modernity, modernism, and identity crisis: the fin de siècle Budapest

Summary/Abstract: Carl Schorske’s typology taken as basis, the dialectics of modernity and modernism can be illustrated in three, chronologically subsequent stages, dividing history according to the metaphors of city as virtue’, ’city as vice’, and ’city beyond good and evil’. The magnification of city as virtue in time laid the basis of the relationship to modernity, when liberalism and nationalism were still working in close fusion with one another. This is what rached its peak at the time of the Millennium, in 1896. The optimistic love of city was expressed most clearly by historicism and the cult of historicizing. Blaming the city gained ground along with fast urbanisation and the progress of market capitalism both on the right (conservatism) and on the left (liberalism, socialism). On the right, it sprouted anti-liberalism (political anti-Semitism and exaggerated nationalism), on the left it resulted in socialliberalism intent on reforms. The latter was exemplified by the activity of Mayor Bárczy, with the „sociologists”, that is, the sociologist political intellectuals around Huszadik Század working in the background. Finally, alienation originating from Nietzsche also appeared, calling serious modernist cultural movements to life, such as the literary movement of the journal Nyugat, or the scholarly movement represented by the aesthetes (philosophers and art-critics) of Vasárnapi Kör. They gave voice to the attitude of alienation, which was in stark opposition with liberalism (as well as assimilation), but, at the same time, turned away from traditional Hungarian nationalism, and appropriated rebellious ideas. The second and third generations of the Jewish middle classes as well as the modernist artist-intellectuals in Budapest, coming from the provincial nobility, deeply felt this profound crisis of identity.

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