Pester Lloyd

In the aftermath the leaders of the rebellion were hanged, imprisoned or exiled and Hungary faced years of brutal military occupation by the Austrian army.

Organizations or publications of the least political nature were clearly out of the question but Austrian policy allowed, even encouraged, economic development—in the late 1830s investment in the building of railroads had created great profits and the banks in Vienna had an appetite for more of the same.

The political and financial heart of Hungary was the sprawling market city of Pest, the portion of present-day Budapest on the left bank of the Danube.

It differed greatly from the earlier merchants’ associations: first, membership was open without religious distinction; second, it included as honorary members dignitaries, officials, educated people and artists.

On the technical level the Gesellschaft took three steps: They established a grain exchange hall, a bourse (stock market), and a daily newspaper, the Pester-Lloyd Tagesblatt.

Incidentally Weisz’s knowledge of history and politics was so profound that when the talk of a new Hungarian government began in 1861 the national leaders, Deak and Gyula Andrássy turned to him for guidance.

Even after Hungarian became the official language again, German still remained the dominant lingua franca in foreign trade, and Pester Lloyd has continuously been the strongest German-language publication in Hungary.

Over the years it was prominent enough to attract such internationally famous contributors as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Alfred Polgar, Ferenc Molnár, Dezső Kosztolányi, Egon Erwin Kisch, Bertha von Suttner, Franz Werfel and Felix Salten.

Being published outside the Third Reich's borders until World War II, Pester Lloyd was not subject to Nazi Gleichschaltung and thus, in an article on 16 September 1935, openly criticized the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

The paper spoke of the laws allowing an extent of discrimination unheard of in history and compared the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany to those of the Helots, a slave class in the ancient Greek state of Sparta.

Since 2004, the Wiener Lloyd is part of the publication every four to six weeks, as an insert, reflecting the relations between the two capitals, Vienna and Budapest, of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.