BULGARIA AND HUNGARY IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY 21st -Century Studies in Humanities Editor: Pál Fodor Research Centre for the Humanities Budapest–Sofia, 2020 BULGARIA AND HUNGARY IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY Editors GÁBOR DEMETER CSABA KATONA PENKA PEYKOVSKA Research Centre for the Humanities Budapest–Sofia, 2020 Technical editor: Judit Lakatos Language editor: David Robert Evans Translated by: Jason Vincz, Bálint Radó, Péter Szőnyi, and Gábor Demeter Lectored by László Bíró (HAS RCH, senior research fellow) The volume was supported by theBulgarian–Hungarian History Commission and realized within the framework of the project entitled “Peripheries of Empires and Nation States in the 17th–20th Century Central and Southeast Europe. Power, Institutions, Society, Adaptation”. Supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences NKFI-EPR K 113004, East-Central European Nationalisms During the First World War NKFI FK 128 978 Knowledge, Lanscape, Nation and Empire ISBN: 978-963-416-198-1 (Institute of History – Research Center for the Humanities) ISBN: 978-954-2903-36-9 (Institute for Historical Studies – BAS) HU ISSN 2630-8827 Cover: “A Momentary View of Europe”. German caricature propaganda map, 1915. Published by the Research Centre for the Humanities Responsible editor: Pál Fodor Prepress preparation: Institute of History, RCH, Research Assistance Team Leader: Éva Kovács Cover design: Bence Marafkó Page layout: Bence Marafkó Printed in Hungary by Prime Rate Kft., Budapest CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................... 9 Zoltán Oszkár Szőts and Gábor Demeter THE CAUSES OF THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR I AND THEIR REPRESENTATION IN SERBIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY .................................. 25 Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics ISTVÁN TISZA’S POLICY TOWARDS THE GERMAN ALLIANCE AND AGAINST GERMAN INFLUENCE IN THE YEARS OF THE GREAT WAR................................. 87 László Szarka EXPANSIONISM OR SELF-DEFENCE? THE PLANS OF AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN DIPLOMATIC CIRCLES AGAINST SERBIA (1913–1915) ................ 101 Gábor Demeter ISTVÁN TISZA AND AUSTRIA–HUNGARY’S BALKAN POLICY, 1913–1914 ......................... 133 Imre Ress ALBERT MENSDORFF’S 1915 MISSION TO SOFIA ........ 199 Iván Bertényi Jr. WHEN BULGARIA AND AUSTRIA–HUNGARY WERE NEIGHBOURS: AGREEMENTS AND DISAGREEMENTS ON THE NEW BULGARIAN WESTERN BORDER, 1915–1918 ............ 239 Martin Valkov NATIONALISM IN THE BULGARIAN ARMY ON THE EVE OF AND AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1913–1915). 265 Kalcho K. Kalchev THE ENTRY OF BULGARIA INTO THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS REFLECTED IN THE HUNGARIAN PRESS ............. 277 Csaba Katona ENTHUSIASM FOR WAR IN THE HINTERLAND: A CASE STUDY OF THE NATIONAL SZÉCHÉNYI LIBRARY, BUDAPEST ......................................... 321 Zoltán Oszkár Szőts EXTERNAL MIGRATION POLICIES AND THEIR EFFECT ON THE MECHANICAL MOVEMENT AND TERRITORIAL DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN BULGARIA (1912–1920) ........................... 339 Penka Peykovska THE INVASION OF THE HUNGARIAN TERRITORIES OF AUSTRIA–HUNGARY BY THE RUSSIAN ARMY AND THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE SLOVAK POPULATION ......... 381 István Janek ‘THE MAN WHO UNLEASHED THE GREAT WAR’: THE SHOW TRIAL OF DRAGUTIN DIMITRIJEVIĆ-APIS ................ 405 Árpád Hornyák THE WAR IN PICTURES: PETER DARVINGOV’S FUND AS A SOURCE OF VISUAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE FIRST WORLD WAR ................................. .421 Ruja Simeonova and Chavdar Vetov 6 DAS KAISERLICHE UND KÖNIGLICHE 11. HUSARENREGIMENT „FERDINAND DER ERSTE, KÖNIG DER BULGAREN” IM ERSTEN WELTKRIEG ........ 435 Tibor Balla THE MILITARY BRILLIANCE OF THE BULGARIAN CAVALRY IN DOBRUDZHA IN 1916: THE RESURRECTION OF THE MILITANT NATIONAL SPIRIT ........................... 451 Angel Dinev 7 INTRODUCTION Zoltán Oszkár Szőts and Gábor Demeter The centennial of the outbreak of the Great War has prompted the generations who were not directly affected by that cataclysm to reacquaint themselves with—and to reevaluate—the events associated with it. Over the last five years, a host of conferences and publications have dealt with the military, diplomatic, and everyday circumstances of World War I.1 Scholars have produced numerous analyses written from novel perspectives,2 and the interpretive disputes which divided the historians from the two former European power blocs have begun to fade. In an essay published in French in 2004 and in English in 2005, Jay Winter and Antoine Prost divided the researchers who have studied World War I into three generations: those who experienced the war, those of the 1950s, and those of the 1990s. In 2009, Winter then expanded this taxonomy to include a fourth generation—those of the present era.3 In the first of these eras, analyses of military and diplomatic 1 For a survey of the war-related books published in Hungary in 2014 and 2015, see Szőts “Volt egyszer egy évforduló,” 120–46. 2 See, for instance, Rumpler, Die Habsburgermonarchie, vol. 11/1., especially the studies by Imre Ress, Dániel Szabó, and Ágnes Pogány. See also Clark’s The Sleepwalkers. 3 Winter and Prost, Penser le Grande guerre; Winter and Prost, The Great War in History; Winter, Approaching the History of the Great War. 9 ZOLTÁN OSZKÁR SZŐTS AND GÁBOR DEMETER history predominated;4 a significant number of diaries and memoirs appeared as well. The genres of history and memoir were quickly muddled. The historians of this era typically applied an event-centered approach, focusing almost exclusively on the four and a half years of military confrontations, and generally examined the war from above—that is, from the perspective of military and political leaders and diplomats. In the interwar period, the question of responsibility for the war was primarily the concern of the former Central Powers, insofar as the treaties negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference assigned all blame for the war to them. In hopes of having the terms of these agreements revised, they made a priority of denying their culpability; even so, the notion of shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war was barely discussed in France and Great Britain before 1939.5 Soviet historians, in accordance with Leninist theory, emphasized the responsibility of all the capitalist states. According to Lenin, both of the belligerent coalitions involved in this conflict were fighting an imperialist war (or war of conquest, or pillage, or theft) in which the goal was to divide or re- divide the world into colonies or “spheres of influence” for financial capital. Correspondingly, the parties responsible for the war were those responsible for imperialism—that is, the capitalist class which ruled the globe, including all of the belligerent countries.6 In Hungary, the publication of official documents, written reflections, memoirs, and other relevant materials began during the war.7 In accordance 4 See, for example, Pollmann, “A Nagy Háború magyarországi historiográfiája,” 93–103; Rom- sics, “Az első világháború – 100 év távlatából,” 11–24; Farkas, “Die ungarische kriegsgeschicht- liche Forschung,” 345–62; Balázs, “A ‘sakktáblától’ a lövészárkok mikrovilágáig,” 109–31; Pók, “Az első világháború értelmezésének fő tendenciái,” 22–41; Szőts, “Hauptrichtlinien in der Historiografie,” 13–33; Szőts, “Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia felbomlása,” 51–58; Szőts, Az első generáció. 5 For more on the causes of—and reponsibility for—the war, see Szabó, A háborús felelősség kérdése; Bencsik, “Az első világháború okairól,” 5–23. For an account of British historiography on the subject, see Révész, “Egy ellentmondásos centenárium,” 725–36. For a survey of con- temporary Western European historiography, see Kramer, “Recent Historiography,” 5−27 and 155−77. 6 Lenin, Az imperializmus, 437–531. 7 For more on this subject, see Szőts, “Témaválasztások,” 487–500. 10 INTRODUCTION with Gergely Romsics’ research on memoirs, the material written between 1920 and 1945 can be categorized into several groups.8 One can begin by classifying them along a spectrum from the elites to the people, and thus the first group includes everything written “from above”: the journals, memoirs, analyses, speeches, and commemorative orations of political, diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and military leaders. The other end of this spectrum involves anything which originated “from below”: the journals and recollections of ordinary soldiers, as well as collective expressions of mourning.9 Another axis along which to arrange Hungarian war literature was that of political belief— that is, whether an author accepted or opposed the political arrangements of the Horthy era. In disputing the legitimacy of the Horthy regime, leftists and Octobrists10 emphasized that the old elites of the Monarchy had been responsible for the war. Their opponents, on the other hand, ascribed Hungary’s collapse to the “crimes” of the Károlyi government and the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which served as the basis of their demands for a new form of government for Hungary. This binary system was later expanded to include a third narrative, that of the populist writers who did not agree with either side.11 The latter did not consider the events of the fall of 1918 as the source of all evil, nor did they question the viability of the Dual Monarchy. In their opinion, the collapse—and possibly even the war—could have been avoided if Hungary’s political elites had not aligned themselves with German policies. They believed that Hungary’s post-1920 political system perpetuated this legacy, and that liberation from it would require Hungarians to form alliances with