THE UNKNOWN MÁRAI

Sándor Márai (1900-1989) spent the last forty-two years of his long life in exile, mainly in Italy and the United States, refusing to allow his work to be published at home while it was under a Communist regime and occupied by Soviet troops. ("He felt that in a Hungary in the hands of the Bolshevists, not only was one not free to speak, one was not even free to remain silent.") What is not so well-known is that he had spent a great deal of his twenties abroad, in France and Germany, writing journalism and feuilletons in German and Hungarian (he was bilingual).  Since his death, his novels and memoirs in translation have been received with critical acclaim in Europe and the United States.

This issue and our Summer issue present and discuss aspects of his non-fiction and non-dramatical works, publishing these pieces for the first time in English.

A Sentimental Education:
Portrait of Sándor Márai as Traveller and Journalist
by Zoltán András Bán

"Is a Hungarian, who had always considered and identified himself as European, sufficiently European? For the young Márai, travel was a kind of examination." Zoltán András Bán describes Márai's almost compulsive travelling in the Twenties and Thirties ("when he found himself in Leipzig, he immediately set forth for Frankfurt, only to take the first fast train from there to Berlin. Then back.") and regards it as a search for self and identity. Journalism was for Márai the "antechamber to artistic creation" and the experience of writing several thousand articles gave him an eye for the vignette and the telling detail-it most certainly affected his craft as a novelist. (When he published three novels in quick succession at the end of the Twenties, his contemporaries were astonished by the fluency and assurance of his writing.) He was not a writer of impassibilité, or of non-commitment as we would say today: he wrote with cold contempt on the futility of colonial adventurism (see his piece on Damascus in this issue) and on the rise of fascism (see "The Messiah in the Sportpalast").
When he left Hungary in 1948, for good as it turned out, he took his battered copy of Faust with him.

In the Footsteps of the Gods (Extracts)
by Sándor Márai

Already a rising star as a journalist, and still only twenty-six, Márai travelled to the Near and Middle East in 1926, publishing his articles in book form under this title the following year. The stops on his journey included Palestine and Syria, the latter under League of Nations' mandate to the French.

"What is Europe doing here, what does it want of them, why does it choose to bless them with its tanks and flying machines? And what would happen if these crowds ever stirred themselves and in one concerted blow struck back at us Europeans in our homelands, with our ridiculous houses, our tanks and treaties, and drove us from a world where through our greed-fuelled, avaricious, wickedly cruel behaviour, we have totally forfeited their respect? 'Islam prescribes the sword.'"

Translated by Len Rix.

Márai the Journalist (1921-1936)
A Selection

Born into a family of German origin in Kassa (Koąice, Slovakia), Márai was bilingual in German and Hungarian. He left Hungary hurriedly in 1919, presumably in the hope that his youthful indiscretions in a Bolshevist newspaper would be forgotten as time went by, and was soon writing articles for the newspaper Újság in Budapest and various German and Austrian papers, eventually becoming a correspondent for the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung.
The selection here includes early feuilletons (The Fountain Pen,1922), Monism (1928), examples of how he treated the radical right in France and Germany (Just a Mistake, 1925), along with his superb account of a Hitler rally, The Messiah in the Sportpalast (1933) and a withering vignette of the Swiss national character (The Barber of Basle, 1935).

Translated by Len Rix

CLOSE-UP

Healthcare Under the Knife
by Júlia Gáti

Underfunded, overstrained, abused and wasteful, the Hungarian healthcare system has long been overdue for drastic reform.
Júlia Gáti, a journalist who specializes in healthcare and medical topics, outlines the strains on and abuses of a system which has had to provide social as well as medical care; she details the scope and implications of the major bills that have just gone through Parliament to rationalize and modernize its structure. The new legislation involves substantial hospital closures and reductions in the number of acute beds (from 60,000 to 44,000), charges for prescriptions, consultations and for hospital beds.
Medical care, hitherto paid for by social security deductions, is now subject to token charges (about 1 euro per consultation) in the hope that trivial complaints will no longer flood GP surgeries and out-patients clinics. By providing an additional (taxable) income for doctors, this, it is hoped, will "squeeze out the practice of tipping"-the universal practice of "gratitude money"-for service provided, whether it be child delivery, an operation or even being jumped ahead of the queue for access to scanning. A recent case of another abuse, involving "fixers" smoothing the path to a disability pension is described in some detail, as an example of how healthcare has been exploited as a welfare provider.

INTERVIEW

Why Men Die Young in Hungary
Mária Kopp in Conversation with Eszter Rádai

More Hungarian men of working age now die annually than in the 1930s despite the improvement in living conditions for the population as a whole: "only about 60 per cent of men are reaching the age of sixty-five. Among the less skilled the figure is even worse, barely 50 per cent." This is now referred to as the Central and East European health paradox and Mária Kopp was one of the researchers who extrapolated the trend from the data back in the 1980s.
Professor Kopp, now Director of the Institute for Behavioural Science at Semmelweis University in Budapest, discusses some of the factors contributing to the striking male mortality rate in Hungary and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc, highlighting chronic stress as a main cause of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and the strong correlation between educational levels and early mortality. ("Today anyone who has not completed their secondary school education is twice as likely to die before the age of sixty-five.") She points to gender roles in Hungarian society as contributing to the indicators and underlines that Roma death rates are related to educational attainment rather than to genetic factors, with the concomitant requirement for early catch-up programmes in the school system to prevent youngsters from falling through the educational net.

1956

The anniversary that will not go away is the subject of one book dealing with the events in Budapest, Washington and Moscow, and of another book on the mysterious death in New York of a Danish member of the special UN committee set up in 1957 to report on what had happened in Hungary in the previous Autumn. Tamás Koltai, our theatre critic, highlights 56 06, a play attempting to stage the events in their complexity and ambiguity.

Was Failure the Only Option?
by Géza Jeszenszky

Charles Gati: Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. Washington D.C. Woodrow Wilson Center Press-Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 264 pp.

"Gati's key, and truly revolutionary, thesis is that, if Imre Nagy had been a more competent leader during the days of the Revolution, if the revolutionaries had been capable of moderating their demands, and if America, instead of mere rhetoric, had responded more vigorously and firmly to events, then there would have been a realistic chance of the Soviet Union holding back from intervention. In that case, Hungary could have acquired a more moderate Communist regime, somewhere between what Gomulka initially attempted and what Tito achieved."
Thus the historian (and former Minister of Foreign Affairs) Géza Jeszenszky sums up Charles Gati's critically acclaimed account of 1956. His review covers Nagy's political career before and during the Revolution, examines who the revolutionaries actually were, outlines the infighting within the Kremlin and, discusses what for him is the most valuable part of the book: its analysis of Washington's policy and unpreparedness in October 1956.

Obsessed with 1956
by János M. Rainer

András Nagy: A Bang-Jensen ügy. '56 nyugati ellENSZélben (The Bang-Jensen Affair: 1956 in a UN Westerly Headwind) Budapest, Magvető, 2006, 399 pp.

Povl Bang-Jensen was a Danish diplomat at the UN who had served on the sub-committee charged in 1957 with compiling a report on what had happened in Hungary during the previous Autumn. Specifically he held the document which provided the real names of those Hungarian refugee witnesses who did not want their identities to be disclosed. Attempts were being made by certain secret services (the Hungarian included) to disseminate disinformation and discredit witnesses. Warned that the UN bureaucracy was riddled with spies, he consistently refused to hand over the document; he was suspended and later dismissed. In late 1959 his body was found in a New York park with a gunshot wound to the head, a brown fluid was found in his stomach, a mysterious telephone caller named a psychotropic drug, an inquest was rushed through with a verdict of suicide, the body was cremated. "In the bloc-aligned, consensus-building climate of the mid-Fifties, there was really no scope for a Hungarian Revolution that sought democracy, independence, neutrality on the Austrian model and socialism all at once." 
This is not the stuff of a John le Carré plot but an investigation into the circumstances of Povl Bang-Jensen's death by the novelist and playwright András Nagy, "a thriller employing a historian's tools," comments János M. Rainer, one of the leading authorities on 1956.

ART

The Esterházy Treasures Recollected
by János Végh

Treasures of the Esterházys: Five Centuries of Art Works
from the Collections of the Princely Line.
Exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest. December 2006-December 2007.

One of the grandest, and certainly the wealthiest, of Hungarian aristocratic families, the Esterházys rose to eminence and established their family fortune under Count Nicholas I (1583-1645), through his services to the Habsburg rulers of Hungary and through two highly advantageous marriages. Count Nicholas and Paul I (1635-1713), on whom the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire was bestowed, amassed the family treasury in the fortress of Fraknó (Forchenstein, Austria). The family's subsequent patronage of the arts is reflected through their magnificent palaces (in one of which Haydn spent many years as kapellmeister) and the fact that the greater part of the Old Master Collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts was purchased from them.
Some of the Fraknó treasury was sent to Budapest for safety after the First World War and, towards the end of the Second, was stored in a cellar in the Royal Palace, which collapsed after receiving a direct hit during the siege of Budapest. Several years later, many of the gold and silver items seen here were discovered and, eventually, skilfully restored. These are joined with items that had remained in Fraknó in 1918 to form this exhibition.
The art historian János Végh traces the rise of the family and describes the detail and the provenance of some of the outstanding items gathered for this breathtaking array of applied art works, European and non-European in origin.

Illustrated with 8 pages of colour plates.

When Art Nouveau Turned to Glass
by Judit Pataki

Tiffany, Gallé and Their Followers: The Masters of Art Nouveau Glass.
Exhibition of Selected Items from the Art Nouveau Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts. Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, March-November 2007.

Around the turn of the last century an extraordinarily rich Art Nouveau collection was started by the Museum of Applied Arts, mainly due to the resourcefulness and efforts of the museum's first director, Jenő Radisics, who attended international exhibitions and invariably made purchases. The Museum's own annual Christmas shows provided an opportunity for Hungarian artists to display their work-and the museum to purchase the best of what was on show. Expanded throughout the last century, the collection now represents the major names, Hungarian and foreign, of this period. In particular, its holdings of early Tiffany glassware is unique.
Judit Pataki's review article covers the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Émile Gallé and René Lalique shown in this sumptuous exhibition, along with those of their Hungarian contemporaries, such as Valentin Leó Pantocsek and István Sovánka, responding to the new "cosmopolitan" styles and to what came to be called "national decorative art".

Illustrated with 8 pages of colour plates

The House Spatial: Lajos Kozma's Modern Villas
by Eszter Gábor

The New House: Lajos Kozma's Modern Villas. Exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, November 2006-May 2007.

"The best proof of his quality lies in the fact that his dwellings and furniture have lost none of their topicality over the ensuing decades. His villas are still much sought-after, and his chairs have never been bettered to this day," says Eszter Gábor of the highly esteemed lone wolf of modern Hungarian architecture and design.
At the outset he was better known as a graphic and interior designer and was appointed to the Chair of Interior Design in Budapest during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which led to him being treated as a persona non grata as far as commissions for public buildings were concerned for the next quarter of a century. By the end of the Twenties, he was beginning to be sought after by the haute bourgeoisie as a designer of residences whose hallmark was his use of mass and space, often with custom-designed furniture.
The author, who has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, summarizes Kozma's career through this review of an exhibition covering his most significant output, in particular ten of the villas he built in the thirties, his great period as an architect, before he was forced out of practice by the anti-Jewish laws.

Illustrated.

MUSIC

"From My Memoirs": An Autobiographical Sketch by Ernst von Dohnányi
by Deborah Kiszely-Papp

Deborah Kiszely-Papp, the director of the Ernő Dohnányi Archives, introduces the text of the composer's "verbal farewell", broadcast in January 1944 to the Hungarian Radio audiences he had served so well as its musical director from 1931 on. Unique to this broadcast was his performance of some works he had written in his childhood, so happily spent during the 1880s and 1890s in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia).

"In addition to providing a firsthand portrait of late 19th century Hungary, his account gave voice to the pain shared by so many who had become strangers in their own homeland in a war-weary, hopeless Hungary."

The text is annotated and musical examples are provided.

LITERATURE & FILM

Journey to the Depths of the Penalty Area (Extracts)
by Péter Esterházy

The novelist (and former fourth division footballer) was commissioned by a German magazine to write up his impressions of the Germans and his reflections on football for the 2006 soccer World Cup; out of this commission came a book, first published in German and now in Hungarian.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson.

Out in the World
By Erzsébet Bori

Hungarian Film Week 2007
Csaba Bollók: Iska's Journey; Árpád Bogdán: Happy New Life; Györgyi Szalai & István Dárday: The Emigré

Our film critic sees a common thread in this year's Film Week, "a distinct turning away from the particular towards regional or even wider concerns". Here she focuses on a documentary on that ultimate outsider Sándor Márai (The Emigré) and two outstanding feature films on scrap-pickers in Romania (Iska's Journey) and an alienated young Roma (Happy New Life).

 

 

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