Hungarian history

Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’. He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project.

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944. LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show how history felt on the ground. He is particularly concerned with the fate of Hungarian Jewry.