This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust. Several articles and reviews in this issue are devoted to or touch directly on the Holocaust.
Departure and Return - Excerpts from a memoir
by György Konrád
György Konrád is probably viewed in the Enghish-reading world as a quintessential Budapest writer. These extracts from a memoir in progress (to be published by the Other Press, New York later this year) reveal otherwise.
Born in a small town that found itself elevated into the county seat after the historical county was divided by the provisions of the Treaty of Trianon, he grew up within an extended and comfortably-off family whose "members imagined they were good Hungarians and good Jews at the same time." When he was eleven the Germans occupied Hungary , the restrictions on Jews led to the confiscation of the family business and the taking away of his father and mother by the Hungarian gendermarie. He managed to bribe his way to the relative 'safety" of Budapest through travel permits for himself and his sister. There he and his relatives went into hiding to survive the Arrow Cross rampage, the horrors of the siege of the city, the arrival of the Red Army and the "liberation". Naturally the children set off for the security of home, where they find they are the only survivors of the town's Jewish school, their house looted by passing soldiery . "In place of a childhood, there is an absence, a story that has not, and perhaps cannot be fully discussed."
In Our Poems
by Dezsö Tandori
One of the most important of the post-modernists in the language and the inspirational figure for younger writers for his constant willingness to experiment and expand his own range. In George Szirtes's translation.
House Searchies (Short Story)
by György Dragomán
Born in Transylvania , György Dragomán moved to Hungary where he eventually studied English literature at ELTE University , and has published one novel so far.
Rationality or Irrationality?
The Annihilation of Hungarian Jews
by Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági
"In March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and a collaborationist government came to power. On 17 May, during the ceremonial installation of a new prefect at Nagyvárad, the Minister of the interior, Andor Jaross, spoke openly about the new government's plans concerning Jewish wealth:
Let me emphasise, that all the assets and valuables that Jewish greed was able to amass during the liberal period, no longer belongs to them. It is now the property of the Hungarian nation . It must be used to enrich the whole of the nation. It must be incorporated into the circulation of the national economy, so that every decent hard-working Hungarian can share in it."
The authors of Self-Financing Genocide ( Budapest - New York , Central European University Press, 2004) here examine the attempt by the Hungarian state during the nine months following the German occupation to seize and redistribute the assets and possessions of Hungarian Jews.
They describe the rise of an urbanized and assimilated Jewish middle class during the Austro-Hungaraian Monarchy and its composition by the 1920s and the attempts by far-right ideologists to assess the Jewish-owned share of the economy (variously between twenty and twenty-five per cent). One rationale for the seizure of Jewish property was to finance the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau; execution was hampered by "institutional rivalry", the presence of German organizations competing for the loot and, last but not least, the approach of the Red Army.
Seizure of property was more or less effected, the consequences were chaotic with pharmacies and medical practices left abandoned all over the country, the distributive sector largely collapsed and a surge of complaints from various authorities, with petitions citing the difficulty of working without key Jewish employees.
Can One Speak of Jewish Photographers?
by Károly Kincses
The author is Director of the Museum of Hungarian Photography and of the House of Photography, the two most important institutions devoted to photography in the country.
"I started work on this article with considerable reluctance, having grown up and spent half a century of my life without paying much attention to the word 'Jewish'. Thanks to history and my personal good fortune, or pure chance I have never been obliged to profess my own Christian roots in such a way as to distinguish or differentiate myself from others. Thus the question has not entered into my thinking about photography - or much else; the uncovering and elucidation of other aspects has always seemed more significant and presented a more enticing challenge. Still, I do not wish to deceive myself. Sixty years ago something happened. Sixty years ago several million innocent human beings were exterminated by large-scale industrial methods. For sixty years we Hungarians, both collectively and individually, have been ducking the duty of confronting this and coming to terms with it. Though I myself was not alive at the time, and I neither had nor have the slightest personal involvement, the time has now come when I too can no longer dodge some kind of assessment of its implications for my own work. "
Thus begins Károly Kincses's description of the work and fates of fourteen photographers, some of whom achieved world fame, some national but all affected by the storm that broke over Europe in the twentieth century.
The article is accompanied by 15 stunning black and white plates.
Engineers of Light
by Tibor P. Sándor
Ibolya Cs. Plank - Virág Hajdú - Pál Ritoók: Fény és forma. Modern építészet és fotó 1927 - 1950. (Light and Form. Modern Architecture and Photography 1927 - 1950). Budapest , Örökségvédelmi Hivatal, 2003, 304 pp.
"In the 1920s and 1930s, there was an overlap between the modern movements in architecture and photography. The photographical style that followed the "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit) turned its back on the earlier schools and photography imitating painting, just as new architecture turned against historicism."
The Budapest historian reviews here a book (originally the catalogue for a major exhibition on this theme) devoted to the synergy between the two movements, specifically as carried by the journal tér és forma (shape and form), which flourished between 1928 and 1948. Illustrated.
Urban Icons (Nigel Warburton)
by John Avery
Nigel Warburton: Ernö Goldfinger- The Life of an Architect. New York - London , Routledge, 2003, 216 pp.
"Goldfinger's own house is now a tourist attraction. Goldfinger the man, through his legendary force of character, powerful built work and his extraordinary life, has acquired cult status among architects," points out John Avery, who works with a major London architectural practice, before he turns to this first major study of the Hungarian-born architect, who worked the last fifty years of his life in England.
Dohnányi at Tallahassee
By William Lee Pryor
Trained as a musician and now Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Houston , William Lee Pryor was a young graduate student at The Florida State University when Dohnányi arrived there in 1949 to become Professor of Composition and Piano. He quickly became a close family friend and here sets down a warm and detailed memoir of Dohnányi the man, maestro and teacher during those last happy eleven years in Tallahassee .
Dezsö Tandori Set to Music
by Alan E. Williams
"There are only 3 or 4 pieces setting Tandori . There are a number of pieces which while not actually setting texts by Tandori, take their form, or their inspiration from his poems. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other poets who would seem to be more significant in contemporary Hungarian composition- Pilinszky, for example. Yet sometimes, an odd flurry of activity can be more revealing of the currents of musical thought at a particular time than the steady presence of a poet, appealing across a wide range of musicians."
Such a flurry of activity took place in the 1970s and early 1980s involving both settings and references. Alan Williams attempts to account for the appeal Tandori's poetry (especially his koans and haikus) had for Zoltán Jeney, members of the New Music Studio. and György Kurtág.
Thirteen Days in the Death of Liszt
by Frank Cooper
Alan Walker: The Death of Franz Liszt based on the Unpublished Diary of His Pupil Lina Schmalhausen, Cornell University Press, 2003, 208 pp.
Alan Walker, the author of the monumental three-volume biography of Franz Liszt, unearthed during his research the unpublished diary of Liszt's former student, who devotedly accompanied and cared for her master throughout his final thirteen days in Bayreuth and the circumstances under which the diary was written and subsequently embargoed.
This review by a former President of the American Liszt Society includes a summary of the final days as recorded in the diary, amid family and personal intrigues that could have come from the pen of Balzac.
Maids Across the Ocean
by Tamás Ungár
An intriguing article on how some young Hungarians get themselves to the green pastures of the United States in the hope of finding work within a typical grey area of the economy and how they find an immigrant's pastures are not so green after all.
Out of Old Hungary
by Ivan Sanders
Margit Kaffka: Colours and Years. Translated by George F. Cushing. Introduction by Charlotte Franklin. Budapest , Corvina, 1999, 242 pp.
Like her Prague namesake, Margit Kaffka (1880-1918) died young. She produced a significant body of fiction and poetry. Long recognized, especially by other writers, as an essential modernist, her work is almost unknown outside Hungary . Here Ivan Sanders, himself an important translator of Hungarian literature into English, assesses the complexity of her prose and the novel which is considered to be her masterpiece.
A Minor Classic
by John Lukacs
András D. Bán: Hungarian-British Diplomacy 1938-1941: The attempt to maintain relations. London , Frank Cass (Routledge), 2004, pp.
The Budapest-born and internationally acclaimed historian, who has also written extensively on Churchill's wartime leadership, devotes this article to a significant book by a young Hungarian historian, who died unfortunately young before this English translation appeared. The three years Bán's book covers, Professor Lukacs describes as the most important in the history of British-Hungarain relations. Sketching the background on both sides, he has special praise for the author's achievement:
In additon to the diplomatic and governmental records, his studies and reconstruction of relations of trade, of travel, of the press, of literary productions and of their influences, of emigrés etc. - all of these more or less reciprocal - are included in his work. This is unusual and, in more than one sense, novel and pathbreaking. It illustrates the great maxim of Jacob Burckhardt, who said that history really has no "method" of its own, save for the overall condition: Bisogna saper leggere - one must know how to read. And we might add: how to write. These are absolute conditions of a craft that Bán has observed and fulfilled.
White-tie Diplomacy
by István Deák
Tibor Frank, ed.: Discussing Hitler: Advisers of U.S. diplomacy in Central Europe , 1934-1941 . New York-Budapest: Central University Press, 2003, 374 pp. Photographs, Appendix.
A historian who has dealt with Central European and Holocaust history, István Deák, Professor at Columbia University , writes of the political and foreign policy context in which John Flournoy Montgomery, the American minister in Budapest from 1933 until March 1941, functioned. He refers extensively to Tibor Frank's excellent Introduction to and collection of the conversations Montgomery conducted and recorded during his assignment and which were the basis of his reports to the State Department. The minister, obviously sympathetic to the aristocratic circles around government and especially to Regent Horthy, "approved of the country's ruling elite, and he hoped that one day the injustices committed against Hungary following the First World War would be righted. As fervently anti-Bolshevist as the Hungarian circles he was bewitched by, this mid-Western Babbit followed them in failing to see the economic injustices suffered by the majority of the population, followed them in their concern for a large share of the economy in the hands of Jews and largely disregarded the threat the rise of Hitler was posing on the whole region: he "never wanted to know what was driving the right -wing and left-wing critics of the establishment. Yet, within a few years first the Far Right and then the Far Left would come to power in Hungary , both acting in the name of ordinary people."
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