PHOTOGRAPHY
A Belated Interview with André Kertész
by Károly Kincses

Of all the great Hungarian photographers who came to international fame abroad, André Kertész was the one who maintained a presence in the photographic world at home, publishing and exhibiting regularly in Hungary right up to the outbreak of the war.
The author, a founder of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, has created a fascinating collage out of interviews Kertész gave in Hungarian between 1979 and 1984, some published and some only in archival MS. The photographer speaks of his family and childhood, his first camera, the photographs he took on frontline service in the infantry during the First World War ("I would snatch informal snapshots, unlike the professional photographers in the War Correspondents Section, who always went around with gigantic cameras and tripods once a battle was over, in order to take on-the-spot photographs showing the destruction"); he describes some of his work in Paris and his contacts with other prominent Hungarians there, such as Brassai and Moholy Nagy; always protective of his work, he relates how he recovered a large body of plates and other material left behind in France in 1936 when he went to America.

The article is accompanied by a generous selection of photographs of relevance to the interview.

On Home Ground
by Péter Baki

Károly Kincses and Magdolna Kolta: Hazai anyag. Fotónapló. André Kertész és a magyarok - Taken at Home. Photo Diary. André Kertész and the Hungarians. Hungarian House of Photograph -Mai Manó House, Budapest, 2005.

Now Director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, Péter Baki celebrates this latest and, sadly, last collaboration between the two authors, both instrumental in the founding of the Museum and of the Hungarian House of Photography.
He points out that it was difficult for Hungarians to access "the material shot in his homeland, the taste of home that Kertész very much carried with him throughout his life", the last sixty years spent outside Hungary.

 

 

Some Light (Excerpts, Illustrations)
by Péter Nádas

Péter Nádas is best known to the English-speaking world for his novel A Book of Memoirs. (His latest work is reviewed in this issueby Miklós Györffy.) It is not widely known that he started out as a professional photographer and has continued to take photographs ever since. The selections from a book of essays and photographs describe how he became a photographer, the Berlin he lived in before the Wall came down and the remote area in the south-west of Hungary where he now lives.

KURTÁG 80

We devote an entire section to György Kurtág to mark his eightieth birthday. The birthday celebrations included performances of Kurtág works at Budapest's Palace of Arts and the Liszt Academy, reviewed here by Paul Griffiths. We publish a rare and lengthy interview with the master (and his wife) by Bßlint Andrßs Varga and a letter of greetings from another octogenarian master, Pierre Boulez.

Birthday Greetings
from Pierre Boulez

The French composer, looked up to by Hungarian composers from the 1950s on as the torch bearer of the musical avant-garde, recalls that The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza was "the work to which I owe my discovery of this utterly singular composer".

Melody Pressed Like a Flower
by  Bálint András Varga

In 1986 the author published a collection of interviews with 82 composers around the world in which he put the same three questions to all of them. He asked whether listening to a piece of music had fundamentally changed their musical thinking, whether any of the ambient sounds around them had significance for their work and where they thought personal style ended and self-repetition began. Twenty years on,  Bálint András Varga decided it would be interesting to approach the composers again and ask them if their original answers were still valid. Here György Kurtág and his pianist wife Márta Kurtág take part  in a lively exchange based around these questions and around another project of the interviewer's: having composers draw a graphic representation of their own music.
The three drawings György Kurtág provided are reproduced here.

 
Games as Earnest: Kurtág 80 - A Five Day Celebration
by Paul Griffiths

"But he is an unusual kind of master, one who maintains a childlike sense of invention as play, and of games as earnest ", comments the critic in his coverage of the five concerts that concluded with Songs of Despair and Sorrow on the evening of his birthday. Paul Griffiths highlights Six Moments musicaux, Op.44, ("one had the certainty of witnessing the arrival of a classic") presented for the first time by the Keller Quartet, some of the Games and Messages for wind instruments and ...concertante... : "The latter opens the possibility of a whole new phase in his output, perhaps at last including an opera."

 

HISTORY
Anglophiles: The "Anglo-Saxon" Orientation of Hungarian Foreign Policy, 1930s through 1944
by Tibor Frank

Hungarian policy in the inter-war years was directed at the recovery of the territories lost in the peace settlement that followed the First World War, which inevitably drew the country closer and closer to Germany as a fellow-revisionist power, until it eventually entered the war as an ally of the Third Reich in 1941. Yet some members of the political elite tried to maintain an "Anglo-Saxon" orientation even at this time. Professor Frank describes the development, from the end of the 18th century, of a fascination with England among a section of the aristocracy, through to later grandees such as István Széchenyi, who were in the forefront of attempts to modernize the country. This tradition of Anglophilia meant that even as late as the end of 1943 Great Britain was looked to as a potential saviour.

The Former "Southlands" in Serbia, 1918-1947
by Enikő A. Sajti 

In common parlance, the Délvidék (Southlands) is what Hungarians call those areas to the south of old Hungary that were lost after the First World War. A substantial number of Hungarians "found themselves for the first time in the status as an ethnic minority in a foreign land."
Professor Sajti has published extensively on this region and its inhabitants. Here she details the economic, social and psychological consequences of this new status, along with responses to the domestic politics of the new South Slav State. With the return to Hungary of about half of the Southlands in conjunction with the German and Italian invasion and partition of Yugoslavia, it was the "authoritarian features of Horthy-era Hungary" that were in the ascendancy for the next three and a half years. After the war the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp meant that once again this Hungarian minority were living in a state hostile to Hungary.

 

Hungarians in the Serbian Athens: Novi Sad - Újvidék - Neusatz
by Ágnes Ózer

Founded just over three hundred years ago, the city became the largest in old Hungary to have a Serb majority among its inhabitants. At the junction of road and river trade, it flourished and the economic power of its Serbs allowed them to have an important role in transmitting new Central European trends to the south, still under Turkish control. (Much later, in the 1970s, Hungarian-language journals from Novi Sad were to do something similar for their kith in Hungary, more isolated from the modern.)

Oscar Jászi: Prophet and Danubian Federalist
by Nándor Dreiszeger

György Litván: A Twentieth Century-Prophet: Oscar Jászi 1875-1957. Budapest, Central European Press, 2005

"Oscar Jászi is best known for his lifelong devotion to the idea of the confederation of the peoples of the Danube Valley. During all the years he lived in exile, he remained loyal to his native land, though certainly not to the regimes that ruled it." Professor Dreisziger traces this devotion back to a concern for minority rights that began well before the First World War, leading Jászi to advocate collective rights for all the nationality groups in the old Kingdom of Hungary and to see the failures of the successor states, at least as multi-ethnic as Hungary had been, to espouse these rights as a harbinger of war.

 

ANGLOPHILIA
One obvious aspect of the traditional Anglophilia of the Hungarian aristocracy, as described by Tibor Frank in his article,  was its willingness to adopt various sports of their English counterparts.

 

English Influences on Modern Sport in Hungary. Part 1
by Miklós Zeidler

In this, the first of two articles, the historian examines an area where Hungary clearly turned to England for models and guidance: the introduction and shaping of sport as a social institution.
He takes "certain intellectual and political strands and changes around the year 1800" as his starting point, linking them to the spread of the middle classes throughout Europe. In Hungary, as elsewhere, it was the aristocracy that led the way in promoting and spreading the idea of sport as recreation, physical exercise and competition. Not surprisingly they began with physical skills appropriate to their class: fencing (introduced from France) and horse racing, where English influence was to predominate and to which much of this article is devoted.
The great reformer Count Istvßn Széchenyi, himself a former Hussar officer and gentleman rider, noted in his diary when setting off home in 1815: "In England there are nevertheless just three things that, in my opinion, a person should study... the constitution, machines and horsebreeding." 
He saw the introduction of a stud book and racing on the Eglish model as central to the "horse business", as being of great potential benefit (for him, always a prime consideration) to the country. Miklós Zeidler provides a detailed picture of the establishing of horse racing and of the social and political contexts within which it became a form of popular entertainment.
The article is accompanied by extracts from Széchenyi's book on horse racing.
 

Environment

Public reaction to a mammoth construction project and its impact on the Danube in the late 1980s was a factor in the collapse of the Communist regime. Environmental problems and responses are dealt with here by an article and by a review of some important documentary films.

 

Cleaning Up: Environmental Awareness before and after 1989
by Gábor Szabó

 

"In Hungary, as in all the former Socialist countries, environmental concerns were subordinated to industrial production; protection came last on the list of issues to be considered before launching a project. Dozens of horrifying examples could be cited..."
The author, a journalist specializing in environmental matters, cites a few of the horrifying examples produced by the big Hungarian state enterprises (and the Red Army)in his survey of the clean-up problems facing Hungary in the immediate and mid-term future. Some of the problems are not just generated by Hungary: those involving the rivers Danube and Tisza have an international dimension and are discussed seperately. Two positive features in the current situation are HungaryAs membership of the EU and a greatly increased public sensitivity.

 

 
The Bursting of Dams
by Erzsébet Bori

Ádám Csillag: Dunasaurus I-II; Danube Torso I-II; Requiem for the Blue Danube; From the Danube Blows the Wind; The Bridge
Péter Hegedüs: Inheritance: A Fisherman's Story
Tibor Kocsis: New El Dorado

"What was lacking was not environmental awareness, but a civil society allowed to articulate its own interests and defend them against the administrative and economic system - the State, as it was then then called. What happened in the years before and after the changeover resembled the bursting of a dam. Ironically it began with the construction of one - in the area where the Danube formed the border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia..." This is how our film critic leads us into work by three documentary makers devoted to the two major rivers to cross Hungary, the Danube and the Tisza. Now that dam of the Socialist state has burst, no films questioning or expressing reservations about state policy have been banned. In the case of New El Dorado, it may even affect official attitudes.