Between the two World Wars
The First World War and its consequences are well known. The Austro-
Hungarian monarchy was broken up. Budapest became the oversized capital of a
small country, which could not regain its earlier international role in a
hostile Carpathian Basin that had been cut into pieces. Its population
continued to grow at a moderate pace, but it now resembled the urban growth of
the developing countries, nurtured more by crisis in the countryside than by
the internal energy of the city. By the 1930s Budapest was beginning to
overcome the consequences of World War I, when the next world war overwhelmed
it, causing enormous damage to its buildings, as well as to its population.