This review article examines the 2018 publication by Helena History Press of A Nation Adrift [‘Az elsodort ország’]: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyő. Translated by Miksa Fenyő’s son, Mario D. Fenyő, this work gains new layers of meaning when alternately read as a Holocaust narrative, a family history, an example of life writing and the continuation of intellectual activity in the face of great adversity. Only recently available to an English-speaking audience, Az elsodort ország provides a remarkably comprehensive, well-composed description of the Hungarian Holocaust, World War II and the Siege of Budapest, as related by Miksa Fenyő (1877-1972), the former editor and critic of the modern literary journal, Nyugat [‘West’] and deputy director of GyOSz [Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetsége; ‘Association of Hungarian Industrialists’].
Gregor von Rezzori’s novel Der Schwan presents a highly symbolic narrative structured on important dichotomies such as life and death, beginning and end, childhood and adulthood. The young narrator experiences different situations, such as the suicide of his uncle, the unwished-for separation from his beloved sister, his first encounter with a girl, and the murder of a swan, to all of which he reacts in a passive way. However, he remains entangled in his family bonds and all these experiences come to symbolize the predestined nature of his life, which is and will be characterized by a series of failures and by his decline.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Business history for three generations has focused almost exclusively on capitalist firms, their managers, and their relations with markets, states, and rivals. However, enterprises on all scales also operated within communist nations “building socialism” in the wake of World War II. This article represents a first-phase exploration of business practices in three Central European states as Stalinism gave way to cycles of reform and retrenchment in the 1960s. Focusing chiefly on industrial initiatives, the study asks: How did socialist enterprises work and change across the first postwar generation, given their distinctive principles and political/economic contexts, and implicitly, what contrasts with capitalist activities are worth considering.
It took some seventy years after World War II for the educated part of the Hungarian public to obtain comprehensive information on the double tragedy of Hungary’s participation in the German military campaign against the Soviet Union. Not only was the army’s defeat at the Don River in the winter of 1942/43 an unmitigated catastrophe, but as Krisztián Ungváry demonstrates, the Hungarian honvéd forces, performing occupation duty in Ukraine and a part of Belorussia, committed atrocities against the civilian population which nearly equaled those of the German occupiers. Moreover, the ill-equipped Hungarians’ main dilemma was a nefarious entanglement in local ethnic and nationalist conflicts, in which the Soviet Partisans played only a limited role.
Kiséry, András, Zsolt Komáromy and Zsuzsanna Varga, eds. 2016. Worlds of Hungarian Writing - National Literature as Intercultural Exchange. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 272 pp.
Loránt, Endre. 2016. A budapesti bapagáj ('The Budapest Parrot') (trans. Zsuzsa Mihályi). Budapest: Kijárat. 264 pp. (originally published as: Lorant, André. 2006. Le Perroquet de Budapest, Une enfance revisitée ['The Parrot – A Budapest Childhood Revisited']). Paris: Viviane Hamy. 281 pp.); Lorant, André. 2017. Fugato. Paris: Cohen & Cohen. 263 pp.
Houze, Rebecca. 2015. Textiles, Fashion and Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War - Principles of Dress. Farham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 384 pp. 79 col. Plates. 109 b. and w. illus.
Although there are many Hungarian Studies scholars teaching literature to Hungarian language learners around the world, there are practically no resources available about what is happening in these classes, and what linguistic, literary and cultural challenges they pose for students and teachers. In her study, Györgyi Horváth discusses her ten-year teaching experience as a teacher of Hungarian literature to Hungarian language learners within the Hungarian Studies Program, a one-year off-site university program offered to international students, accredited by the University of Pécs, and hosted by the Balassi Institute, Budapest. She discusses the institutional and program framework she worked in, gives a detailed account of the linguistic, literary and especially the cultural competencies that were in play in these courses, and also formulates some general methodological insights about teaching Hungarian literature to language learners. Horváth concludes that teaching literature cross-culturally widens the cultural horizons of students as well as of their teachers, offering them a space for increased cultural awareness and self-reflection.
Apor, Péter. 2014. Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary – The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism. London: Anthem. 228 pp. Illus (Hungarian edition: Apor, Péter. 2014. Az elképzelt köztársaság. A Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság utóélete 1945–1989. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont. 228 o.)
Reviewed by András Schweitzer, 1956 Institute, Budapest
The process of migration includes the movement between relatively distant geographical locations as well as often facing considerable cultural differences between the sending and receiving countries. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, millions of emigrants from East Central Europe and Southern Europe sought their personal dreams in America, but had painfully little information at their disposal about the country, and were consequently in for a considerable “culture shock.” This paper examines the possible sources of information for soon-to-become transatlantic migrants from Europe in general, and from Hungary in particular. It analyzes the various types of “booster literature,” along with the people who had an interest in its publication, and offers a case study of handbooks and guidebooks written specifically for Hungarian emigrants to America during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II Hungary to uncover their connection to underlying “symbolic geographies” and “mental maps.” Focusing on the way in which Hungarian identity and history have been informed by, and indeed inserted into, virtual spatial rubrics that rely on the historically developed cultural concepts of “Europe” and “Asia,” and “West” and “East,” the paper looks in particular at the “populist-urbanist debate” that raged between two groups of writers, both opposed to the ruling neo-feudal order. The populists were composed mostly of provincial-born intellectuals who saw the recognition and uplift of the peasant as the key to Hungary’s salvation. The urbanists were cosmopolitan intellectuals, mostly of assimilated Jewish origin, who saw the wholesale adoption of progressive Western rights and norms as the only way forward.
Thomas Bernhard reflects in his posthumously published story collection Meine Preise the most important of his many literary awards, which were often associated with public scandals. This essay examines the mechanisms of authorship and self-stylization in the stories concerning the prizes received, shows the conglomeration of reality and fiction which characterizes his late work and offers a compact, interpretative survey of Bernhard’s prose volume in the light of his career in the literary field.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia