Several years later, while nosing around one of Budapest’s antiquarian bookshops, Andor would stumble upon postcard-format prints of three of the missing pictures.[52] He never found out who had made them or why.

  One swallowed one’s losses and soldiered on.

  Andor returned to Budapest to discover more smashed windows and looted buildings. The streets swarmed with soldiers and deserters — ragged, unshaven, and bitter. Some had covered the Habsburg insignia on their uniforms with rosettes in Hungarian red, white, and green. Some brandished rifles or machine guns. Others rode around in trucks commandeered from the public works department, scuffling with the police over control of banks, bridges, and post offices.[53]

  All the while, Romanian and French troops were advancing toward the capital, cutting off supplies of food and coal. Like everyone else, the Kertészes shivered in a gloomy apartment, their cupboards mostly bare. Ernesztina had little to sell at her shop: no coffee, no tea, only burned barley powder. The refugees, widows, and war-wounded who haunted Teleki Tér could ill afford even that. What’s more, the Spanish influenza was raging: newspapers were reporting a hundred thousand cases in Budapest alone.[54] Andor’s homecoming and those of his cousins and uncles in uniform would have brought the family comfort but scant celebration.

  Andor loathed the war. Yet his demobilization thrust him back into a work life that gave him no pleasure. He was lucky to have a job at the Giro Bank and Transfers. It involved compiling daily statistics for the accounting department. So much for his life of adventure and travel. Arduous though the army had been, he’d seen the world, found his social bearings, discovered photographic possibilities. Now that life slammed shut. Back to drudgery five days a week.

  André Kertész, We Lost the War, c. 1918

  3 WE LOST THE WAR, 1918–1925

  A man and a woman, viewed from the back, plod down a dirt road behind a team of oxen. Although the war has ended, the man wears his uniform because he owns few other clothes. The woman, a beast of burden herself, shoulders a sack and a basket. The two look weary and poor. Yet they have what matters: a home down the road; maybe some land; the oxen, purchased, one imagines, with savings from the man’s army pay; and each other. Eventually, Andor’s photograph would acquire a title: We Lost the War.

  That scene of a couple’s subdued return to a rural and ancestral way of life bears little resemblance to what Andor was witnessing in Budapest. With the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsing, the city was consumed by political turmoil. Led by Count Mihály Károlyi, a new National Council scrambled for popular support of a platform that called for a decent peace treaty, democratic reforms, fairness for all ethnic groups, and an independent Hungary. On October 29th, the royal police joined the council. Then factories, shops, and trams shut down, disgorging their employees onto the rain-soaked streets. One by one, other groups threw their weight behind Károlyi’s Aster Revolution. Soldiers ripped the imperial buttons from their caps and replaced them with asters. Skirmishes erupted with diehards for the old regime. On October 31st, King Charles IV—who would abdicate two weeks later — named Károlyi prime minister. A democratic order was emerging. Crowds churned through the streets. Shuttered theaters and cinemas reopened. People packed into cafés and restaurants. The First Hungarian Republic was born.

  Three months later, the death of a poet once again sent Hungarians reeling. A black ocean of mourners flooded the streets. Schools closed for the funeral. The nation’s literary lions gave eulogies next to the catafalque at the national museum.

  Endre Ady was no ordinary poet. For years, the publication of each volume of his verse had electrified Andor’s generation like the release of a megastar’s records in decades to come. Hungary’s great poet of the twentieth century embodied the nation’s tragedies and aspirations.

  Andor had grown up on Ady’s poetry. He would turn to it for the rest of his life. Speaking in 1979, with almost seven decades of photography behind him, he would tell an assistant that if the assistant wanted to understand Andor’s work, he should read Ady.[1] Was he referring to the cultural values he shared with the poet? To their romantic temperaments? To Ady’s launch of literary modernism in Hungary and his own trailblazing of modern photography? Andor didn’t explain.

  Born in 1877, Endre Ady was a young journalist at a small-town newspaper when he fell in love. The wealthy and sophisticated Adél Brüll embodied the twenty-six-year-old provincial’s wildest dreams. The two became lovers. Although Ady met Brüll in Hungary, she and her businessman husband lived in Paris, where Ady promptly followed. His encounter with French culture led the journalist to intensify the attacks he’d been making on Hungary’s conservative, self-dealing establishment. Outraged at the backwardness of his own nation, he castigated Hungary for its corruption, its hypocrisy, its decay.

  In 1906, Ady published a landmark volume of poetry, New Verses. He opens by asking, “Shall I break through beyond Dévény / With new songs for new times?”[2] To break through beyond Dévény, the westernmost village in Hungary, was to smash literary conventions and breathe modernism into the nation’s stale traditions. Repudiating what he saw as Habsburgian Hungary’s shallow culture, Ady took inspiration from the popular culture of its Magyar past. Brüll appears in New Verses as Léda. In Greek mythology, Zeus transforms himself into a swan and rapes Leda as she sleeps with her husband. She bears the god two children. Ady’s children with his Leda were the poems that burst from the “sweet, holy torment” of their liaison.[3]

  Not until nine agitated years after their first meeting would Ady spill his last bit of ink over his mistress in the poem “Letter of Dismissal.” By then, alcoholism, depression, and syphilis were sapping his strength. Resettled in Hungary, he wrote searching and apocalyptic verse about love, God, and moral degeneration. Tragic and pointless in Ady’s view, the Great War coincided with the last stages of his illness, driving omens, wraiths, and dead youth into his poems. An angel drummed an alarm. A beehive burst into flame. The world had fallen foul of Christ.[4]

  After the war ended and Ady died, his writings continued to illuminate Andor’s generation as it struggled to find its bearings. “No one will ever be able to measure his impact on the entire youth of our time,” asserts the novelist Zsigmond Móricz. Where Ady’s words fell, Móricz raved, “the seeds of new powers were cast in the souls of men.”[5]

  While the “seeds of new powers” cast in Andor’s soul had yet to germinate, the poet’s obsession with his mistress Léda resonates with the young man’s self-enslavement to an idealized Jolán. Andor, too, was in love with love.

  What’s more, he would have internalized Ady’s tenacity in building a life around creative work and doing it on his own terms. They included a transgressive use of language. Ady warps syntax, invents words, repeats phrases and lines, and piles up adjectives. Conventional language, he believed, could never convey his passions, his dreams, his despair. Young Andor lacked Ady’s command of his medium. Yet he too deviated from formulaic practice. He photographed unorthodox subjects like lace curtains and horses copulating. He played with unorthodox angles. He thought about framing and lighting his subjects in unorthodox ways.

  Unlike Ady, Andor turned his back on politics; like Ady, he detested Hungary’s social stratification. Ady’s attacks on class privilege surely made sense to a Jew from a Swabian family, marginalized at birth. When Andor wasn’t photographing his family or friends, he might be focusing on a market boy or street sweeper, not as a social case or picturesque element but as a full human being. Like Ady, he judged those sidelined by the establishment to be the soul of the Hungarian nation. Eventually, he would earn the epithet “the great democrat of modern photography.”[6]

  * * *

  —

  The tension between the Ady that Andor carried inside and the dutiful employee who reported to work five mornings a week could feel unbearable. Andor’s mother and uncle stood firm and united against his idea of quitting the bank job to become a photographer. Photography was fine as a hobby, Uncle Poldi maintained, but it was not a career. Andor knew that. “Being a photographer in Budapest was like being zero,” he later explained.[7] Photography as he practiced it was even less. Could he account for what he was doing—walking around and trawling for pictures? Not really. One imagines Uncle Poldi’s kindly voice and hand on the shoulder of his cloud-gazing nephew. It’s time to retire your impractical notions and build a solid life for yourself, he counseled. Such discussions would have been haunted by memories of Andor’s father, a washout when it came to supporting his family. Andor was fond of his uncle and wanted to meet his expectations. Yet he also wanted to do what he wanted to do: continue the conversation with life that was photography.

  To make matters worse, the aftermath of war was straining the family’s finances. Andor was diligent about tracking his expenses and saving all he could of his salary and his modest military pension. Casting about for more ways to earn money, he considered moonlighting as a commercial photographer. The idea did not thrill him. Commercial work felt tedious. Hulking professional gear killed all freedom of movement. But the family needed the cash.

  Such work required a view camera. While poking around an antique shop one day, Andor chanced on a quaint English camera that took about 3 by 5 inch glass plates. He was smitten. He purchased it with money he knew his mother needed. He then wrangled his first assignment, for which he asked and obtained an audacious fee, recouping his investment in the camera. Next, he photographed the interior of a fancy apartment that belonged to one of his cousins. For that, too, he earned a nice sum.[8] After that, offers dried up, or he simply lost interest.

  Like most amateurs, Andor photographed his own family. He would pull out his camera on important occasions like birthdays and his cousin Ilonka’s wedding. Atypically, he also took pictures when nothing special was happening: during everyday dinners, walks with his cousins, Ernesztina’s klatches with her sisters and sisters-in-law. His fattening stacks of tiny prints and his thinning diary entries confirm that pictures suited him better than words for pinning down what amused him or warmed his heart.

  One photograph shows Andor’s brothers strolling in sync down a city street. Looking as if they could conquer the world, or at least the stock market, Imre and Jenő flout hard times by cutting fashionable figures. They wear dark overcoats and fedoras, tilted just right and no doubt doffed for the ladies. Andor uses what was becoming a favorite pictorial strategy: two or three subjects face the camera side by side, inviting comparisons, contrasts, and different ideas about who they—and he — might be or become.

  In a variation on that approach, The Circus, Budapest shows a man and a woman standing together and seen from behind. Andor had been photographing a small traveling circus in the Városliget, Budapest’s city park, straining to capture the roustabouts setting up the big top. Then he spotted a couple unwilling or unable to buy tickets.[9] In Andor’s photograph, they occupy a strip of hard ground below a band of tent canvas and in front of a wood-plank wall. They press up to that wall, peering through a knothole at the doings inside. Even though the man, probably a veteran, appears to have only one leg, his stance is stable and jaunty. He and she are a pair. Sealing their complicity, the band of his boater rhymes with the stripe of her headscarf. They read as unsophisticated yet self-sufficient and somehow marvelous. With his lens, another knothole of sorts, Andor has captured their raptness.

  The Circus, Budapest is simple, rhythmic, and rigorously carpentered. Except for the ribbon of tent canvas, viewers see nothing of the circus, not even the knothole, which is blocked by the couple’s heads. They must take on faith that the knothole and the circus exist. Andor’s image catapults the imagination into a big top in which the performance will never begin and never end. Who knows what feats are unfolding? As for the two voyeurs, they stare through the knothole as intensely as Andor stared through his lens. He may have intuited the man as himself projected into the future: physically impaired yet emotionally whole, conjoined with his woman, and engrossed in the act of looking.

  In the rolling wine country southwest of Buda, Andor took more scenes conjuring the pleasures of photographic vision. One shows a trio of boys piled up — one, two, three, like the cars of a train that’s made a too-sudden halt — behind his tripod-mounted Voigtländer. They are wide-eyed at the inverted and reversed image visible on the ground-glass focusing window. (Because light travels in a straight line, all cameras invert and reverse the scene in front of them. Andor’s did not correct for this fact.) A fourth child, a girl, her hair flying in the wind, stares at the viewer and at Andor, who is recording the scene with a handheld camera.

  Another such picture, this one gently self-mocking, again centers on Andor’s camera and tripod, along with a goat who looks to be studying the scene in the viewfinder. A third shows the Voigtländer alone vignetted by foliage and shade. It reads as a metonym for the photographer: I am a camera, the picture asserts.[10]

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks after Andor captured Imre and Jenő as boulevardiers, he and his bank colleagues strode down those same central Budapest streets singing “The Internationale” in a massive demonstration. The Hungarian capital was decked out like a Communist bride, its balconies and bridges festooned with red canvas and its classical bronzes adorned with red globes.[11] Marching that May Day was mandatory for all citizens, many less intent on celebrating proletarian solidarity than on consuming the free liquor and food.

  President Károlyi’s campaign for a fair peace had failed. Even before the new government and republic fully existed, Hungary’s ethnic minorities revolted. Intent on humbling the enemy and forcing harsher peace terms, the victorious Allies backed separatist Croat, Serb, Slovak, and Czech insurgents. Then Romania annexed Transylvania. The loss of a region that was vital to their national self-identity left Magyars angry and soul sick. Their country—historic Hungary—was being dismembered even as it was rebirthing itself. The final blow was the French command’s order to evacuate the ancestral Magyar lands east of the Tisza River. What remained of southwestern Hungary was wedged between advancing foreign armies. With their nation chewed up, Hungarians were open to the message of the Jewish Communist Béla Kun. When Károlyi’s National Council collapsed, the Communists maneuvered their way to power. Kun proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a dictatorship of the proletariat.

  That spring, Andor hovered around the edges of the city’s turmoil. One of his photographs shows two soldiers-turned-communards stripping the stars from a rueful officer’s uniform. No more ranks! Everyone was going to be equal. Another picture looks down on armored trucks parked in the courtyard of his office building. Andor’s anxiety level was high. The new government was targeting capitalist institutions like the Giro Bank and Transfers. All banks had to close for inventory and reorganization. Andor’s boss was reduced to a figurehead. Andor’s job, too, was precarious.[12]

  With foreign armies bearing down on the city, reservists like Andor received orders to report to a Red Army unit. He recoiled but had to show up. Thankfully, the People’s Commissariat for War declared him unfit for duty.

  Roving the streets one day, Andor turned his camera on one less fortunate than he. Viewed from behind, a conscripted hussar (light horseman) bids farewell to a frumpy woman, probably his wife. She narrows her eyes as if to memorize his face, ignoring for a moment the squalling child in her arms. The man also seems transfixed. The feeling between them is palpable.

  Not only were families being torn apart, but the regime was also carrying out arbitrary arrests and hostage-taking and murdering those it deemed bourgeois obstructionists. In the Red Terror unleashed that spring, people Andor knew were senselessly shot. As weeks passed, the government tightened restrictions. When all coffeehouses were ordered closed, Ernesztina’s last trickle of income dried up. But she had savings, and family was close at hand. Andor was probably suspended or unemployed. In any case, he and Jenő spent much of that summer of 1919 with the Klopfers in Szigetbecse.

  Curly-haired and jug-eared, twenty-two-year-old Jenő exemplified the red-blooded Hungarian male. He was an athlete, a cutup, a flirt, and a striver. The speech pathologists he had consulted as far away as Vienna had failed to remedy his stuttering. His disability may have sharpened Jenő’s determination: He had a near-obsession with professional achievement. As an engineering student at Polytechnic University, he had proved himself a wiz at anything mechanical. Even so, his efforts to find meaningful work had brought only frustration.

  With train service disrupted and private use of the telephone banned that summer, Szigetbecse felt far distant from Budapest.[13] Yet parts of rural Hungary also were roiling. Estates were being nationalized, food was requisitioned, and Kun’s Lenin Boys rampaged from village to village in search of naysayers. All the same, Andor’s photographs give no hint of the political ferment or even the dawn-to-dusk labor of the farmers around him. Instead, they bear witness to young men who have slipped off their obligations to revel in one sunny day after another. To experience mobility and joie de vivre. To skylark and playact in Eden. Andor’s awareness of his recovered wholeness must have been acute. It contrasted with his cousin Misi’s loss of mobility. By 1923, both of Misi’s legs would be paralyzed.[14]

  In one of Andor’s photographs that summer, Jenő is a pagan nude hoisting a tree seedling. In another, he struts as a pipe-playing Pan. A third, titled Dancing Faun (also known as My Brother as a Scherzo, meaning a jest, a game, a light and lively composition), again centers on Jenő, now flanked by small trees like rustic stage curtains. He capers against a windswept sky, his backlit body all stylized gesture.