The Great Powers and the Dissolution of Austria-Hungary
Ignác Romsics

Author of a recent (1999) and acclaimed book on the the history of Hungary in the twentieth century, Professor Romsics begins by outlining the Great Power background between 1849 and 1914. Great Britain, France and, later, the United States, were initially undecided as to their war aims vis-a-vis Austria-Hungary, whether to maintain it in some form ("Bohemia, Austria, Hungary") or to engage in a more radical dismemberment -- in order to satisfy the demands of Italy, Romania and Serbia. The collapse of Russia, the only one of the Allies to have formulated war aims against Austria-Hungary, and the failure of Emporer Charles to negotiate a separate peace for his empire led directly to Trianon.

A Protecting Power without Teeth
László Szarka

After concluding an armistice in 1918, Hungary had to negotiate a peace. Here Dr Szarka examines the official brief and documents of the Hungarian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and outlines the consequences in the twenty years following the Treaty of Trianon. The delegation clearly expected a major rectification of Hungary's borders, and pressed for plebiscites and respect for national minorities. The Hungarians' will to act as a protecting power for their kin across the borders is evident, but the delegation was unable to successfully argue for even some clear linguistic borders as a basis for the settlement. Finally, the responses to the settlement on the part of the newly created Hungarian minorities, the successor states and inter-war Hungarian governments are succintly summarized.

Lőrinc Szabó - A Poet of his Century
Lóránt Kabdebó

Lőrinc Szabó is a major poet and a controversial figure in the canon of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Here, Professor Kabdebó sees his work as evidence for a world in conflict, to which Szabó's response was akin to other modernists such as Yeats, Pound and Eliot, seeking to resolve the "struggle between traditional and objective rhetoric". What the author calls the "Caliban Syndrome" is another link to the modernists. He offers a new decoding for Szabó's best known poem, "Semmiért egészen" (Everything for Nothing), conventionally read as a paen to male domination and joins it to a later sonnet sequence. The 1947 book Tücsökzene (Cricket Music) is discussed as evidence for Szabó's achievements as a poet.

Poems
By Lőrinc Szabó

Three of the poems from Tücsökzene  discussed in the article by Lóránt Kabdebó are here published in translations by the English poet, Alan Dixon.

György Petri (1943-2000)
By András Veres

The poet György Petri died while our pervious issue, containing four of his late poems, was at press. The literary historian here remembers the man and his work. He is also commemorated in poems by Szabolcs Várady and György Gömöri (translated by David Hill).

Happy Christmas
By Sándor Tar

A short story by the master of the diminuendo.

CLOSE-UP

How the Young live Now
By Géza Wolf

Hungarians favour marriage and children, states Géza Wolf at the outset of his account of the first post-Communist generation's lifestyles and expectations, based on several recent surveys taken among the 15 to 30 generation. The young now have entirely new opportunities and seem to be targeting themselves accordingly. The traditional "high culture" education is out, computer literacy is in. There is cause for both optimism and anxiety in the job market, which shows a steady fall in unemployment rates for school-leavers but a rise in long-term unemployment. A surprising high proportion already have a share in some business enterprise. This generation constitutes a new market which requires a shift in the marketing of products and services targeted at them.

HISTORY

Four articles in this section deal with Hungary and the Second World War. (A review by Jenő Thassy covers a fascinating book in English, an oral history of the period.)

The Tragedy of Two Hungarian Prime Ministers
By John Lukacs

John Lukacs writes on two of Hungary's premiers during the Second World War, Béla Imrédy, who was tried and executed as a war criminal in 1945. He pays tribute to Miklós Kállay under whose premiership (1942-1944) Hungary was a relatively independent and free country within the Axis block.

Endgame 1944
By Kristóf Kállay

Kristóf Kállay was son and private secretary to his father during the latter's premiership (1942 to 1944). He describes here how his father reacted to the German invasion of March 1944, and the consequences for his family (his mother was killed by a rifle grenade at the Turkish legation, where she had taken asylum, during the siege of Budapest and his father survived Dachau).

Miklós Kállay's Attempts to Preserve Hungary's Independence
By Antal Czettler

On December 16th, 1941, after Hungary's declaration of war on the United States, the Regent Miklós Horthy informed the departing American chargé d'affaires that "for his part he considered the declaration invalid and unconstitutional". Three months later the appointed Miklós Kállay as Prime Minister. The Swiss-based historian Antal Czettler sees this as a move to preserve Hungary's sovereignty and freedom of movement within the Axis camp. Kállay resisted German pressure to actively engage in the Final Solution and, as early as November 1942, his government made its first peace feelers towards the Western Allies in Stockholm. The author describes in detail the failure of these and other subsequent moves, predicated on a Hungarian surrender to Anglo-American forces arriving in Hungary after landing on the Dalmatian coast.

The Failed Handshake over the Danube
By Miklós Lojkó

In the inter-Allied planning for an Anglo-American attack on the European continent, one proposal enthusiastically received by Churchill, was for a landing in the Balkans, followed by a drive through the Ljubljana Gap on Vienna and Hungary. The author, a specialist on British history, here examines just how realistic an expectation this was for Hungary's wartime government.

REVIEWS

We highlight here reviews on a novel, on Budapest's most famous landmark, an oral history of the Second World War, a book on Béla Bartók and an article on György Kurtág.

Everything and Nothing
By Miklós Györffy
Péter Esterházy: Harmonia Caelestis. Budapest, Magvető, 2000, 711 pp.

The event of this year's publishing season has been a new novel (an autobiography? a family archive?), nine years in the writing, by Péter Esterházy. Our fiction reviewer sees it as a major novel: "Esterházy's monumental saga is constructed on the rather ambitious contrast between everything and nothing. It seeks to portray everything and nothing in the Esterházy destiny. ... the unimaginable wealth and power, the continuous historical presence, being identified with the country ... and that situation in which all this suddenly equally naturally becomes nothing."

What Clarks Have Joined Together...
By János Végh
Imre Gáll and Szilvia Andrea Holló, eds.: The Széchenyi Chain Bridge and Adam Clark. Budapest, City Hall Publishing House, 1999, 208 pp.

The first permanent bridge to bind Buda and Pest, and a symbol of the capital, the Chain Bridge also binds Budapest to London and Hungary to Great Britain. The two links are explained by the distinguished art historian, in this review of a book on the bridge, its begetter Count István Széchenyi, its designer William Tierney Clark and the engineer in charge of the construction, Adam Clark. We include illustrations from the book.

The Bad War
By Jenő Thassy
Cecil D. Eby: Hungary at War. Civilians and Soldiers in World War II. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, 313 pp.

A former hero of the resistance, a longtime broadcaster for the Voice of America and author of a recent highly acclaimed autobiography covering the last year of the war, Jenő Thassy reviews a splendid oral history of the Second World War as experienced by Hungarians, written by Cecil D. Eby, a retired Professor of English from the University of Michigan.

MUSIC

Bartók's Words -- Bartók's Thoughts
By János Kárpáti
András Wilheim, ed.: Beszélgetések Bartókkal. Nyilatkozatok, interjúk 1911-1945. (Conversations with Bartók: Statements, Interwiews 1911-1946). Budapest, Kijárat Kiadó, 2000, 235 pp.

Professor Kárpáti welcomes this collection as a valuable addition to the secondary literature on Bartók and places it into the context of recent work on the composer. (The author of an important recent book, László Somfai, is interviewed in this issue.)

Three Recent Works by György Kurtág
By Margaret McLay

"He was a central figure in Budapest musical life, holding sessions for young musicians and others, during which not only musical scores were analysed, but also Works of literature ... " the author reminds us. She here examines how Kurtág has set texts by Lichtenberg, Hölderlin and Beckett. (Elsewhere in this issue, Paul Griffiths reviews new recordings of Kurtág's works.)