1848 - A Forty-Eighter's Vita Contemplativa: Ferenc Pulszky (1814-1897)
by János György Szilágyi

In the course of several generations, the members of the Pulszky family had been promoted into the highest reaches of society on account of their contributions to culture and politics. The best-known figure was Károly Pulszky (1853-1899), a brilliant collector, who organized the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. (He married the great actress Emilia Márkus; their daughter was Romola Pulszky, wife of the dancer Waslav Nijinsky.) Less spectacular but more and more in the foreground of interest is the figure of the father, Károly Pulszky, whose extraordinary life-course seens to embody the best ideals of the 19th century. Three parallel biographies could be written on his rich life, that of the highly accomplished scholar-collector; the organizer of academic life and its institutions and the founder of museums, and, last but not least, the politician and public person. He took side with the reform movement of the forties, played an important part in the preparation of the revolution in Vienna, and was at Kossuth's side in the revolution in Pest. In exile in Britain, he conducted relentless proaganda on behalf of Kossuth, whom he accompanied to his tour in the United States. He returned to Hungary on the eve of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1866 to become a parliamentarian in Ferenc Deák's Liberal Party and head of the Natonal Museum. His monumental two-volume Magyarország archeológiája (The Archeology of Hungary, ) was an apt conclusion to, in János György Szilágyi's words, "a joint account of political life and vita contemplativa".

Small States in the German Solar System by András Gergely

Amidst the revolutionary upheavals of early 19th century Central Europe the doctrines of liberalism and nationalism, later to become oppposing poles inciting hostility and wars, complemented each other and inspired imaginative plans for international cooperation. By October 1848, when the Paulskirche Assembly in Frankfurt started on a discussion of a draft constitution, the notion of a mutual recognition of liberal nation-states and their independence within a congress of peoples joined by treaties had been embraced as a foreign policy goal. A whirl of ideas and arguments was characteristic of the Paulskirche, readily responded by the 1848 Hungarian government headed by Count Batthányi, whose foreigh policy was based on the regional mission of Hungarians. As however the tide had turned and the "springtime of Nations" was followed by military intervention and restored Habsburg hegemony, Germany, too, turned toward Prince Schwarzenberg's absolutist plan for a seventy-million-strong Mitteleuropa.

Translator, Editor, Publisher, Spy: The Informative Career of Károly Kertbeny (1824-1882)
by Ágnes Deák

Károly Kertbeny made a name for himself as a distinguished translator and publisher. Archival records of the Austrian Political Police reveal the bizarre hinterland of his feverish literary activity and inspired plans for making the landlocked Hungarian literature accessible for roreign readers. They include German language literary journals, which can be regarded as early precursors of The Hungarian Quarterly. In fact, Kertbeny's his real motivation was lack of money and lack of recognition by contemporary literary circles and, as extensive correspondence with Joseph von Protmann, Police Commissioner in Pest and Buda shows, he was a paid agent, who even volunteered to become a double agent.

The Transylvanian Question by Gusztáv Molnár

At the Madrid summit of the North Atlantic Alliance and, not much later, at the Brussels headquarters of the European Commissiom, a selective enlargement was decided upon. That confirms the new divides in post-transition Central Europe with the lucky few, including Hungary, being ever more shut off from such neighbours as Romania, with its one-and-a-half million strong Hungarian minority in Transylvania. It is not however the fate of Hungarians there which provokes the author's argument but the fact that, similarly to other border regions in this troubled part of Europe, Transylvania has had specific traditions. As various data show, the recent election results being the most spectacular, Transylvanian Romanians display a mentality which is closer to that of other ethnic groups living there than to the mentality of Romanians living in the Regat. Economic conditions, body bolitics and culture are more Western in character in Transylvania, indicating that a devolution strategy, i.e., the federalization of Romania, similarly to the British constitutional reform granting political autonomy to Scotland and Wales, would preempt ethnic tensions. Indeed, it would enable this periphery to mediate in the eastern expansion of international integrative structures.

Hungary’s Pillaged Art Heritage Part One: Theft and Destruction 1944–45
by László Mravikby

The Second World War (with its aftermath) wreaked the most appalling devastation upon Hungary's art heritage. Pál C. Voit, a noted art historian, was commissioned by the Minister of Religious Affairs in August 1945 to track down art collections in Western Transdanubia, a border region of rich burgher towns and splendid aristrocratic homes. Following the expulsion of the Germans, it was hoped that various consignments of museum and library materian en route to the West would be located there and that an end could be brought to pillaging by Soviet troops and local inhabitants. As research into wartime or post-liberation atrocities, not to mention the huge art boody seized by the Russian Army and not returned to this day, had been a taboo subject before 1989, only archivists had access to Voit's breathtaking report. The present, English-language, publication thus precedes a Hungarian one, giving some idea to the foreign reader about a loss, which, László Mrávik's expert introductory article estimates, probably exceeded 90 per cent of the art treasure of Transdanubia.