When I started researching the Treaty of Trianon’s effect on Satu Mare, it felt like I had inadvertently opened a pandora’s box of problems. Trianon was bad for the city, but so were many other things during the first half of the 20th century. Satu Mare was affected by numerous catastrophes between the end of the First and Second World Wars. Invasions, occupations, communism, fascism, toxic nationalism, shifting borders, vanished empires, Hungarian, Romanian, German, and Soviet Armies. The city kept switching hands. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hungary to Romania, then back to Hungary, and finally part of Romania, Satu Mare was handed back and forth. At times, it was a chip between demagogues and dictatorships. The situation in Satu Mare went from bad to worse to awful between 1918 and 1945.
After World War II, the city’s shifting geopolitical fortunes finally settled down. Unfortunately, communist Romania was not any kinder to the citizens of Satu Mare. Ethnic Hungarians were not trusted and treated in discriminatory fashion. The regime flooded the citizens with Romanians, but they did not fare much better. The Ceausescu government held all of Romania’s citizens in contempt and treated them with utter disdain. The apparatchiks and security services made out like bandits at the expense of everyone else.
Survivor – Satu Mare
Holding Pattern – Murmurs of Discontent
With the collapse of communism in Romania at the end of 1989, it looked like Satu Mare’s fortunes would finally take a turn for the better. The city had weathered extreme turbulence for seventy-one years. Perhaps it could now enjoy a bit of prosperity. Many of its citizens did this by migrating abroad. The opening of Romania’s borders sent thousands of Satu Mare’s citizens fleeing westward in search of better job prospects. Between 1992 and 2021, Satu Mare lost 40,000 people. Joining the European Union in 2007 did not stem the flow of outward migration. Since then, Satu Mare has lost 17,000 of those 40,000. The phrase, “cannot win for losing comes to mind” when considering the past one hundred years in Satu Mare.
The conflicts and consternation of the 20th century have left deep scars. Judging by past performance, who would dare think Satu Mare might get better. The best that can be said is the situation in Satu Mare has stabilized. It is neither poor nor prosperous. Economically the city is stuck in between. This holding pattern presents an upgrade from past experiences.
While researching the city, I began to wonder how any place could have survived all the cataclysms that struck it. I have seen this film before in other parts of Eastern Europe and it still manages to frighten.
Repeat performances do not make it any easier to contemplate. I have spent time in many Romanian cities asking myself how those horrors could happen in the place where I was standing. One of the most unsettling experiences is to be in a city where the people are going about their daily routines without so much as a murmur of discontent, then to think about how it was radically different only a few generations ago. Normalcy feels like a success in such places. The people might not be rich, and they might not be poor, but they are now able to earn a livelihood without fear of recrimination or reprisals from their government. Daily life may be dull, but that dullness is liberation from the past.
Daily reminder – Administrative Palace in Satu Mare built during the Ceausescu era
(Credit: Andrasfi1027)
Scripted – Role Playing Games
It has often been said that people can get used to anything, but I am not so sure anyone in Satu Mare ever got used to the continual geopolitical upheaval that befell the city. I imagine that many tried to get on with life and ignore politics. The problem was that they might not have been interested in politics, but politics was interested in them. The amount of contortions a citizen of Satu Mare did to avoid being on the wrong side defied the laws of physics. To say the situation was fluid in Satu Mare for almost thirty years states the obvious. How did people manage to survive among so much tumult? They had to be extremely clever or conniving, very lucky or totally anonymous.
War was a different matter altogether. Impossible to ignore because of its lethality. Interestingly, war in Satu Mare did not always mean shots were fired. War might mean being targeted for one’s ethnicity, class, political affiliation, or religion. Depending on the period, being a Hungarian, Romanian, German, or Jew made you a live target. Being an aristocrat, fascist, socialist, or communist was the same. Definitions of who was an enemy of the state changed along with regimes. The insanity of it all meant just minding your own business could make you a target.
Everyone was given a label. This was also true during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the outcomes were rarely lethal. Neither were they done to destroy livelihoods. All of that changed after the First World War and the postwar peace process. Trianon was an agent of change that exacerbated matters. Division along ethnic lines pulled people even further apart then they were in Austria-Hungary. Divide and conquer, then subdivide and conquer again and again. The interesting thing is that whatever the regime, the same thing kept happening. The German Jewish Philosopher Hannah Arendt was right when she identified that Nazism and Stalinism were more alike than they were different. Satu Mare suffered at the hands of similar offenders. The ideologies changed, but the script stayed the same.
Normal upbringing – City center of Satu Mare (Szatmarnemeti) in 1907 (Credit: Fortepan)
Radical & Benign – The Real Revolution
Those who were savvy or malevolent switched from one side to the other when regimes changed. This phenomenon was reminiscent of the famous quote in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard, “Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.” And that is exactly what happened again and again until the cycle was broken. The only truly radical change in Satu Mare was one that in retrospect seems to be the most benign. This was the post-communist period that started at the end of 1989 when Satu Mare began its move towards relative normalcy. It was the first time since 1914 that a sense of moderation returned. The worst was over, but Satu Mare’s deeper history demonstrates that the city has suffered through terrible periods of warfare and calamity prior to the 20th century.
Coming soon: The violence and chaos that occurred in Satu Mare from 1918 to 1945 was exceptional, but not unprecedented. There have been other calamitous times in the city’s history. In some of those cases Satu Mare was the target, rather than collateral damage. Invasions led to devastation and occupation. Such cases are not well known for a simple reason, they occurred hundreds of years ago and are obscured by more recent cataclysms. Satu Mare’s deeper past led me to wonder why it was prone to upheaval on numerous occasions. First and foremost, the city is not unique in the annals of Eastern European history. The region has suffered wave after wave of invasions by outside forces attempting to assert control. The invaders had a habit of sweeping all that stood before them. The Hungarians were successful in doing this at the end of the 9th century. Three and a half centuries later, they were on the receiving end of another rampaging horde.
Click here for: Seeds of Separation – From Szatmar To Satu Mare (The Lost Lands #13)