During the Second World War, a Hungarian madman wrote to Tsar Boris of Bulgaria to ask for his eleven-year-old daughter's hand in marriage. The man explained that he had found a way to put an end to the Second World War such that both sides and all nations could emerge as victors. It was a perfectly mad idea, yet one that had preoccupied Hungarian politics since the nineteenth century. Did someone else really have to lose in order for Hungary to win, or vice versa?
Holly Case is a Professor of History at Brown University.
