The Luring Image
by István Szabó

"I want to talk to you about the relationship between art and politics. Especially in its Central European variant, this curious love-hate relationship evolved through permanent historical turmoil ." so begins the Oscar-winning director when speaking at this year's Salzburg Festival, the first film director to be invited to give the Festival's opening address.

He approaches the falsifying of documents within the two great dictatorships of the last century yet points out that the images can sometimes subvert the intention of the observer holding the camera. He highlights one unique feature of the cinema: the close-up through which thought and emotion can be uniquely conveyed on the human face. Through this power audiences are given "a companion, someone who feels as we do, someone who has the courage to say what we do not dare say," he argues as he sketches out the "companions" that audiences have trusted over the twentieth century from Greta Garbo to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This leads him to consider the essential difference between the American and European cinemas, wryly wrapping up with a classic Billy Wilder anecdote.

 

Poems
by György Rába, translated by Daniel Hoffman

 With a dozen volumes of poetry and several collections of essays published, this is the octogenarian poet's first appearance in English. These translations are by Daniel Hoffman, a former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The "Grands Joyaux" of the Valois Princes
A magnum opus by Eva Kovács
by Erika Kiss

Éva Kovács: L'âge d'or de l'orfevrerie parisienne au temps des Princes de Valois. Dijon , Éditions Fatons - Budapest , Balassi Kiadó, 2004. 412 pp. Illustrated.

In the 1960s, a young scholar called Éva Kovács undertook the cataloguing of the goldsmiths' work in the Esztergom Cathedral Treasury. The most important piece, The Calvary of King Matthias Corvinus, a supreme example of Parisian goldsmithery involving the émail en ronde bosse technique, was to occupy centre stage in her professional life thereafter, as the work under review testifies.

Erika Kiss, Curator of the Silver and Jewellery Collections of the Hungarian National Museum , begins with the documentation of the Calvary and with Éva Kovács's identifying it with an item in the inventory as the property of Phillip the Bold of Burgundy taken after his death in 1404. This discovery, Erika Kiss points out, finished off the illusion that a history of the ronde bosse technique could be written simply by analyzing stylistic marks of extant works. The late Éva Kovács used the written sources to discuss the owners, goldsmiths and purveyors of The Corvinus Calvary, allowing her to reconstruct the mechanism of patronage and luxury of the Valois courts, various elements of which cropped up later in Central European courts in the following two centuries.

The book was seen through the presses after the author died, using the finished manuscript she had left behind - a fitting monument to her scholarship. This article is sumptuously illustrated with plates from the book.

 

The Birth of Emma Kovács (Short story)
by Zsolt Láng

A native of Transylvania , Zsolt Láng has published four volumes of fiction and a collection of essays. He works as an editor for the Hungarian literary journal Látó at Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş).

 

Tamás Fekete, Sculptor
by Mihály Borsos

Now in his early seventies, Tamás Fekete is one of the true originals in the Hungarian art scene, a sculptor who works with all the plastic materials. Known for his enchanting small pieces and public monumental works, he has lately turned to the great Renaissance architect Fillippo Brunelleschi as a source. (His response to Brunelleschi's designs has been ingenious machine-like constructions.) Mihály Borsos, who runs a Budapest art gallery, describes how his work has been bound to a (by no means untypical) life: a Jewish father deported in 1944 never to return, genteel poverty during the harsh years of the siege of Budapest, the Stalinist era, (he was barred from the Academy of Fine Arts because of his middle-class background), training as a factory tool-maker and designer (which has stood him in good stead in his Bruneschelli-inspired works) and eventual recognition of his merits. This article is illustrated.

 

The Holocaust in Hungary
by István Deák

" . on March 18, 1944, the day before the German army occupied Hungary, that is, at a time when millions of Polish and other Jews had long been shot or gassed, there were still approximately 760,000 such persons in Hungary whom the law regarded as of the Jewish race. These people lived in their own homes, went to work daily, wore no discriminatory marks, and were free to move about the country. Three months later, however, at least half of them were dead, in part because of the actions of the German occupation forces, but to an even greater part because of the actions of the same Hungarian authorities that, until March of that year, had protected the country's Jewish population."

Sixty years after the mass murder of Hungarian Jews, the Hungarian-American historian examines the features that distinguish the Holocaust in Hungary . Among these features, he highlights the symbiosis under which Hungary's Jewish population flourished up to the time of the First World War, largely as assimilated and patriotic Hungarians, successful in commerce, the professions and the arts; the traumatic break-up of the old kingdom in 1918 and the irredentism of the inter-war years coupled with an increasing alignment with the Third Reich and a scapegoating of Hungarian Jews for the loss of two-thirds of the country's territories; alliance with Germany in the hope of recovering some or all of the last territories, entry into the war; and the final helpless manoeuvring of the old elite as the Red Army rolled inexorably onwards towards the borders of Hungary.

 

The Battle of Budapest , Sixty Years After
by John Lukacs

"For many reasons - political and not only psychic - many Hungarians have not been able or willing to rethink (in plain English, to digest) the tragic history of their country and its people in 1944-45."

The Hungarian-American historian, who personally lived through the seven-week siege and its aftermath, sketches out the process whereby Hungary in the inter-war years was drawn into the German orbit (mainly in the hope of regaining the territories lost in the post-Great War settlement). He outlines the divisions within the population of Budapest as the Red Army drew inexorably nearer and goes into detail on the situation of the city's large Jewish community (the only substantial one to survive the war in significant numbers).

"But the fate of Budapest was not determined by its population . it was largely determined by the supremos, Stalin and Hitler," he concludes in summing up the two dictator's motives for the savage battle that was fought here in the winter of 1944-45.

This is a reworked version of the introduction the Hungarian-American historian wrote for the American edition of Krisztián Ungváry's much praised The Battle of Budapest, to be published by Yale University Press in 2005.

 

Gabriel Bethlen - the "New Gideon" or an Unreliable Ally?
by George Gömöri

In The Penguin Dictionary of English and European History 1485-1789, Gábor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania, receives an entry to himself, the only Hungarian so distinguished. He is even specifically referred to, as George Gömöri points out, in Ben Jonson's play The Staple of the News (1626), an indication of Protestant England's interest in a Prince willing to take up arms for the Protestant cause. Here the reason for such interest is traced, illustrated by extracts from some newsbooks and a cosmography in which Bethlen figures.

 

"If there is till a God..."
by Endre Lábass

Endre Lábass, an author and photographer extraordinaire of his native Budapest, captures the atmosphere of the Gozsdu Court, now under threat from developers, an amazing sequence of courtyards and atriums interconnected to each other for over 200 metres and built by a wealthy philanthropist to finance the education of children of the Romanian ethnic minority. Some of its history he portrays through his memoir of Uncle Bandi, who had run a barber's shop there from 1926 on, which the author visited regularly to play chess, use the telephone and pass the time of day. "I've been here since the Horthy era. I survived the Arrow Cross period, survived the post-war coalition years, then the Rákosi and Kádár eras." Uncle Bandi reminisces on the denizens and visitors to the Court through these turbulent years, on mushroom gathering expeditions with the Orthodox priest, on chandeliers and marriage certificates. 

 

The Gozsdu Courtyard and the Jewish Triangle
by György Szegő

"Today little is left of what used to be a checkered board of extraordinary ethnic diversity of cities within the city," writes György Szegő, the editor of the bi-monthly architectural journal Új Építőművészet, in the second of the two articles here devoted to a quarter in the heart of the city, part of the city yet self-contained, both residential and partly occupied by small tradesmen and craftsmen, just as London's Covent Garden and Les Halles in Paris once were. His article focuses on the topography, buildings, architects and residents who created this vibrant quarter.

The quarter was recently declared a World Heritage site and these articles are illustrated.

 

An Old Man in Pince-Nez
by György Báron

Márta Mészáros: A temetetlen halott (The Unburied Dead)

"The Unburied Dead is the first post-1989 work on the 1956 Revolution and its martyred Prime Minister that merits critical attention," comments the critic György Báron on Márta Mészáros's latest film. He examines the paradox whereby some films made during the censorship years succeeded in "evoking the days of revolution without mendacity or equivocation" whereas more recent work devoted directly to the Revolution is distinctly unsatisfactory. Here the central figure is Imre Nagy, the Revolution's prime minister, who haunted Kádár's conscience after he had him executed in 1958 like Banquo haunted Macbeth. (The Shakesperean parallel is almost a cliché in Hungary, heightened by Kádár dying in raving senile incoherence on the very day in 1989 that the Supreme Court overturned Nagy's conviction and rehabilitated him.) For all that the film fails to explore much of its protagonist's motivation and background, the review judges it as a sound attempt to cover the basic history of the Revolution.

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