35.  “Everyone is a Hungarian”: Geniuses and Artists

Coming home one day during the early 1950s in a state of excitement, the British-Hungarian humorist George (György) Mikes announced a surprising piece of news to his wife: “Imagine, the mother of Leo Amery [member of Churchill’s war cabinet and proud representative of the imperial idea] was a Hungarian! It says so in her obituary.” His wife looked up and said dryly: “What of it?” “What do you mean, what of it?” Mikes was obviously irritated that his sensational news had not produced the desired effect. “Why shouldn’t she have been? Everyone is a Hungarian,” she said and continued reading. The topic was no longer of interest to her, Mikes wrote later. As a man used to seeing the crux of any matter, he perceived his wife’s reply as an axiom, and told the story in an anthology published for American Hungarians, enriched by a few good examples from Britain.

The American historian William O. McCagg Jr quoted a similar story in his 1972 book about Jewish nobles and geniuses in Hungary: a well-known physicist, on returning from a congress in Buenos Aires where he had exchanged information with colleagues from all over the world, was asked how so many people from so many different countries were able to communicate with each other. He answered in astonishment: “Why, naturally we all spoke Hungarian.” The author added that this anecdote contained at least a kernel of truth. During the last decades Hungarians have played an outstanding role in the international community of scientists:

Many people know the names of Leo Szilárd and Edward Teller, who cooperated on the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs, or of Albert Szentgyörgyi, the biologist. Every expert has heard of Theodor von Kármán and John von Neumann, of Georg Pólya, Georg von Hevesi and Jenö [Eugene] Wigner, eminent figures in modern mathematics, chemistry and physics. A great number of Hungarians can be found in the last fifty years in other branches of the international intelligentsia and the sciences as well. Just to mention a few: Karl Mannheim and Oszkár Jászi in the field of sociology, Sándor Ferenczi and Franz Alexander in psychology, Georg Lukács in Marxist philosophy, Karl Polányi in political economy and his brother Michael, who with phenomenal brilliance combined the natural and social sciences.1

At any rate, it is no exaggeration that the Hungarian scientists who migrated to the United States played a decisive role in the development of the atom bomb and partly in that of the hydrogen bomb as well. In a study of intellectuals who went to America between 1930 and 1941 Laura Fermi, widow of the great Italian atom physicist, emphasized that Hungary with its population of 10 million had about the same influence on scientific developments there as the Federal Republic of Germany with its (before re-unification) 60 million inhabitants.²

The atom physicist Leo Szilárd, born in Budapest in 1898, played the key role in the story of the atom bomb, both technically and in the political decision-making.³ Like so many other eminent scientists of Jewish origin he completed his studies in theoretical physics in Germany, which he left after Hitler’s seizure of power. In 1938 he travelled to the United States from London where, with his exceptional powers of persuasion, he belonged to those nuclear physicists who at an early stage recognized the tremendous significance of the “chain reaction” for atomic energy and at the same time were alarmed by news of a successful splitting of the atom in Germany. Szilárd borrowed $2,000 from a friend for a gram of radium, and in March 1939 repeated the Berlin experiment. On the seventh floor of his laboratory at Columbia University in New York, he eagerly watched with his Canadian colleague Walter Zinn to see whether neutrons would result from splitting the uranium. “We pressed the button—we saw signs of light,” wrote Szilárd later. “During that night I came to realize that the world had entered a road full of worries.” That evening Teller was at home, and to relax played Mozart; he was an excellent pianist. Suddenly the telephone rang. “Megtaláltam a neutronokat! [I have found the neutrons]”, cried Szilárd, speaking Hungarian for security reasons.

The Italian Nobel Prizewinner Enrico Fermi and Szilárd’s compatriot Jenö Wigner, Professor of Chemistry at Princeton, were impressed by Szilárd’s experiments and arguments, but Fermi, an immigrant from an enemy country, at first got no support from the American military. Wigner and Szilárd therefore wanted to suggest to Albert Einstein that he use his influence with Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, whom he knew well, to prevent the Germans acquiring any more uranium from the (Belgian) Congo. On a humid day in July 1939 the two of them drove to Long Island for a meeting, and drove around for half an hour in a small village until they finally located his summer house. Wigner related that although it was the first time Einstein had ever heard of the possibility of a chain reaction, he understood the whole nuclear concept within fourteen minutes. He dictated a letter to Belgium in German—Wigner made notes, translated the text into English, gave it to Szilárd, and travelled to California for his holidays.

In the mean time, however, Szilárd had reconsidered the entire matter: foreign countries should not find out anything about a possible chain reaction. So instead he contacted a banker, a former associate of President Roosevelt who was willing to pass on a letter by Einstein to the President. Szilárd then wrote to Einstein, asking him to check his draft letter, and sign it. There was now just one problem: Szilárd could not drive. He therefore persuaded Teller, a Budapest-born graduate of Göttingen University also working at Columbia, to drive him to Long Island.

The two of them set out on 2 August 1939. But Szilárd had once again forgotten the location of Einstein’s summer quarters. They asked around, but nobody knew exactly. Szilárd finally asked a little girl of about eight, whether she knew where Einstein lived. She had no idea. Szilárd then said: “You know, the old man with the long white hair…” “He lives two houses up the street,” the child replied. Einstein was friendly, offered them tea, and also asked Teller to sit down. The two-page letter written by Szilárd referred to Fermi’s and his own work, soliciting quick and concerted action by the government in order to promote nuclear research, acquire uranium and, if possible, develop a bomb. Einstein read through the letter slowly and signed it. By 3 October it was in the hands of the President.

Teller recalled later: “It was the most auspicious time, straight after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt grasped the great danger in an instant. He immediately dictated instructions to the chief of the Bureau of Standards to convene a meeting to discuss the measures suggested in Einstein’s letter.” The road to the development and completion of the atom bomb was long and obstructed by problems. At the time Fermi, Szilárd and Teller were not even American citizens. The three Hungarians Szilárd, Wigner and Teller—known in Chicago as the “Hungarian Mafia”—were appointed members of a six-man advisory body established by Roosevelt for matters relating to uranium. By February 1940 they managed with great difficulty to obtain $6,000 from the Pentagon to purchase materials for the experiments. Not till 2 December 1942 did a reactor in Chicago provide the means to perform a controlled chain reaction.

Fermi led the experiments, and Wigner was responsible for the theoretical research. On that historic day, 2 December, forty-two people were present in the big laboratory: an Italian (Fermi), two Hungarians (Wigner and Szilárd), a Canadian and thirty-eight Americans. Wigner had brought a bottle of Chianti from Princeton. They all clinked glasses, and drank to the prospect that this first controlled chain reaction would benefit mankind and make people less prejudiced. Fermi signed the Chianti label, followed by the others, and because the names of the witnesses to this historic event were nowhere recorded, the label was later to serve as an attendance list. Washington was advised by a coded telegram: “The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World. The natives are friendly.”

The famous Manhattan project, the construction of the atom bomb in Los Alamos. New Mexico, was successful. Within a few days of the summer of 1945 three atom bombs were exploded—the first as a test, the two others over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wigner received the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his pioneering research in nuclear physics, and Teller became known throughout the world as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”. Since its power of destruction far exceeded that of the A-bomb, Teller was soon exposed to harsh criticism, which became even louder when he advised President Reagan in connection with his “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI): “Star Wars” could no longer be regarded as a fantasy.

The role of the “Hungarian mafia” and the many other prominent scientists from Hungary—such as John von Neumann, inventor of the computer; Theodore von Kármán, head of research of the US Air Force; Georg de Hevesy, winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his research into isotopes; and John G. Kemény, mathematician and President of Dartmouth College—earned them the nickname “The Martians”. Dozens of anecdotes circulated about them in Chicago and Los Alamos. The Yankee Magazine published the following:

Kemény, von Neumann, Szilárd, Teller and Wigner were born in the same quarter of Budapest. No wonder the scientists in Los Alamos accepted the idea that well over one hundred years ago a Martian spaceship crashlanded somewhere in the centre of Europe. There are three firm proofs of the extraterrestrial origins of the Hungarians. They like to wander about (like gypsies radiating out from the same region). They speak an exceptionally simple and logical language which has not the slightest connection with the language of their neighbours. And they are so much smarter than the terrestrials. In a slight Martian accent John G. Kemény added an explanation, namely that it is so much easier to learn reading and writing in Hungarian than in English or French that Hungarian pupils have much more time left to study mathematics.4

The myth of the Hungarians’ E.T. (extraterrestrial) origins could already have been born earlier. Thus in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes (New York, 1996) reports that “at Princeton a saying gained currency that Neumann, the youngest member of the new Institute for Advanced Studies, twenty-nine in 1933, was indeed a demigod but that he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly.”

Once, when the Nobel Prizewinner Wigner was asked how Hungary had produced so many geniuses in that generation, he retorted that Hungary had produced only one genius in that time, Johnny von Neumann. The well-known economist and adviser to the British Labour government in the 1960s, Nicholas (Lord) Káldor, wrote in 1985 in his last essay (he died in 1986): “Johnny was without question the only person who came near to being a genius.”⁵

The Hungarians called him “Jancsi”. His father was a banker who, like so many other successful Jewish entrepreneurs, was ennobled before the First World War by Emperor Franz Joseph; he opposed his son’s mathematical studies, despite his obvious talent, arguing that “one can’t earn any money by mathematics”. Father and son eventually reached a compromise: Johnny studied chemistry in Berlin but also attended Einstein’s physics seminar. At the same time he gained a doctorate in chemical engineering in Zurich, and graduated from his mathematics studies at the University of Budapest summa cum laude. Neumann was possibly the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, but there was no Nobel Prize for mathematics—according to Kármán, this was because Nobel lost his girlfriend to a mathematician and never forgave her. Although Neumann played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, he only became Washington’s most influential scientist during the Eisenhower era. The development of the nuclear deterrent theory as well as the invention (together with the Austrian economist Oscar Morgenstern) of the “game-theory” are associated with his name.

When an émigré Russian colleague remarked to him in 1946 “I hear, Johnny, that you don’t think of anything else but the Bomb”, he replied: “That is totally wrong. I am thinking about something far more important than the Bomb. I am thinking about computers.” Actually Neumann had summarized his thoughts in 1945 in a 101-page “First Outline” about the improvement of the current adding machines; it has been called the “most important document ever written about the computer and its functions”. When he decided to build the “Von Neumann computer” at Princeton, the US Army and Navy carried two-thirds of the costs and the Institute one-third. An American colleague on the project declared four decades later: “Neumann was without any doubt a genius. That meant among other things that he could grasp a totally new field unbelievably fast. Before he designed the computer he took two weeks off to study electronics, in order to be able to supervise the construction of the plant.”

But even a genius has no protection against cancer. He battled against his illness from the summer of 1955, and was in a wheelchair when at the beginning of 1956 he received the highest American decoration, the Medal of Freedom, from President Eisenhower personally. While in hospital he wrote his last book, The Computer and the Brain. Politicians, generals and admirals sought his advice up till the very last. He was guarded even at night lest he should divulge military secrets while asleep, but when he actually began to hallucinate, he did so in Hungarian. He died soon after his fifty-third birthday. During that time he converted to Catholicism: “There is probably a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is a God than if there isn’t.”

In addition to the genius János Neumann, the history of Hungarian science contains many other outstandingly gifted people and Nobel Prizewinners—no wonder it has repeatedly been asked how such a small country has been able to produce so much talent. However, with the exception of Albert von Szent-Györgyi, the first Hungarian to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology (in 1937), none was actually a Hungarian citizen. Of the first three Prizewinners on the “Hungarian list” one is regarded (rightly) as German, and the two others are recorded as Austrians. Of the other “real Hungarians” four had American, one Swedish and one British citizenship. The 1986 Nobel Prizewinner for Chemistry, John C. Polányi, is the son of the Hungarian polymath Professor Michael Polányi and his Hungarian wife, was born in Berlin, studied in Manchester (where his father was a professor at the University), and since 1962 has occupied the chair of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. The case of Elie Wiesel is even more complicated. His place of birth (in today’s Romania) belonged for only three years to Hungary after 1941; he was deported to Auschwitz and was the only member of his family to survive; studied in Paris, and has for many years held US citizenship.

Leaving aside such ledger-keeping efforts as trying to compile a complete list of Nobel laureates, it remains true that the Hungarians in America have had a lasting influence. One reason why most of the internationally known Hungarian scientists (by no means only natural scientists) have gained fame abroad is the great turmoil after the First World War: the swing of the pendulum between the “red” and “white” terror, and between the short-lived Soviet Republic, dominated by Jewish commissars, and the anti-Semitic tendencies, especially in education, of the twenty-five-year Horthy régime. Historians and other writers interested in the “secret of Hungarian talent”, such as Laura Fermi and William O. McCagg Jr, have stressed that most of this scientific diaspora were either Jews or converted Jews who felt threatened and left their country as early as 1919–20. Since many of them not only studied abroad but remained there, they had a head-start over Germans who sought refuge in the United States and elsewhere only after Hitler came to power.

But a Jewish background alone does not explain it. Geniuses such as Béla Bartók or Zoltán Kodály were no more Jewish than, for instance, the Nobel Prizewinner George de Békésy or such notable writers and poets as Gyula Krudy, Zsigmond Móricz, Endre Ady and Attila József. Also, one must not overlook the extraordinarily high standard of Hungarian secondary schools, especially those élite high schools attended by most of the “Martians”. Also the quality of intellectual life in the exuberant, fast-growing capital, which had been bubbling over with vitality ever since the nineteenth century, formed a natural background for remarkable achievements. A further influence, the waves of emigration for political and not exclusively ethnic reasons, must also be taken into account.

The year 1994 impressively exemplified the continuity of the Hungarian “secret” when two men of Hungarian birth were among the American citizens who received the Nobel Prize. János Harsányi, who left Hungary in 1950, was a pharmacist, a philosopher and eventually an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, and received the award for his achievements in game theory (in the footsteps of Johnny von Neumann). György Oláh was already a respected chemist before leaving Budapest for Canada in 1956; from there he went on to the United States, where he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. A small country was thus represented at Stockholm by two top scientists, even though they carried American passports. The Nobel laureate Békésy perhaps helps us to understand the “Martians” better:

If a person travelling outside Hungary is recognized as a Hungarian due to his accent (something which—beyond a certain age—is impossible to drop), the question is asked in almost every case: “How is it possible that a country as small as Hungary has given the world so many internationally renowned scientists?” There are Hungarians who have tried to give an answer. For my part: I cannot find an answer, but I would mention one thing. When I lived in Switzerland, everything was peaceful, quiet and secure. In Hungary life was different. We were all involved in an ongoing struggle for almost everything we wanted. Sometimes we won; sometimes we lost; but we always survived. It did not bring things to an end, not in my case anyway. People need such challenges, and these have existed throughout Hungary’s history.6

Edward Teller once remarked that it was virtually incumbent upon a Hungarian abroad to be much better than others. When the mathematician John G. Kemény (1926–92) fled from Hitler to New York with his parents aged fourteen, he did not speak a word of English, and attended the same school as Henry Kissinger. During his successful entrance exam at Princeton the professor noted his foreign accent and asked where he came from. On hearing Kemény’s reply the examiner exclaimed “God, not another Hungarian!” Kemény later became President of Dartmouth College, one of the oldest American schools, and at the peak of his career was appointed by President Carter in April 1979 to chair a twelve-man special commission to investigate breakdowns in the vicinity of the atomic power plant at Three Mile Island. Another Hungarian scientist, Bálint Telegdi, who had won the prestigious Wolf Prize for Mathematics, recalling his youth in a talk in Budapest, remarked that a young Hungarian abroad might do well to hide his nationality since too much will be expected of him if it is made known.

However, there was another profession in the United States besides science which was probably even more crowded by Hungarian talent. A sign on the wall of a director’s office in a great Hollywood film studio warned “It is not enough to be Hungarian”, to which someone is said to have added “but it may help”. Although no eyewitness can be located who actually saw the sign, the story may be instructive even as an urban myth. It was one of the familiar gibes against the Magyars, others being “If you enter a revolving door ahead of a Hungarian, he comes out first” and “What is the difference between a Romanian and a Hungarian? Each is willing to sell his mother, but only the Hungarian delivers.” These of course are said by non-Hungarians, and mostly stem from Hollywood.

The combination of admiration and malice in these quips is easy to explain. Hollywood was indeed partly a Hungarian creation, and at certain stages in its existence Hungarian producers, directors, cameramen, composers and actors put their stamp on the American film industry. Non-Hungarians claim to this day that the Hungarians somehow clung together, forming a “Magyar clique”. The reason for this undeniable sense of a common bond was and is the peculiar mixture of language and accent. Apart from foreign young lovers, zealous spies and linguists there would hardly be a normal person on earth who would voluntarily undertake to learn the language of a people whose closest linguistic ties are with the 30,000 Ostiaks and Voguls from the Finno-Ugrian ethnic family to the west of the Urals. The most important distinctive feature, however, is the accent, that loud or soft “singsong”, which derives from the mother-tongue. Even the famous playwright Ferenc Molnár is said to have given the “very refined, slightly old-fashioned” German that he habitually spoke a Hungarian inflection. The accent was and is the trademark of the Hungarians.

The most famous Hungarian mathematician of the past decades, Pál Erdös (1913–96), who published 1,475 significant scientific essays, and constantly travelled with a small suitcase, “the man who loved numbers” (the title of his biography),7 lectured in such gibberish-sounding English in America and Britain that subtitles had to be used in an American documentary about his life. When the future Nobel laureate George de Békésy had to pass Immigration Control, the official asked him whether he was healthy. Békésy promptly replied “No!” to general bewilderment, until someone realised that he had thought he was being asked whether he was wealthy.

It was therefore especially difficult for Hungarians trying their luck in the film industry without any knowledge of English. Yet two of the legendary figures of Hollywood, Adolph Zukor and William Fox, were Hungarian immigrants—among over 400,000 who went to the United States before 1914. Of these one in four returned home,⁸ but Zukor and Fox stayed on and soon made film history. The two came from the same neighbourhood, near the Tokaj wine-growing region, Zukor from Ricse and Fox from Tolcsva.⁹ Admittedly Fox arrived in American as a baby; Zukor came aged fifteen, and worked first as an upholsterer and later, successfully, as a furrier. But his dominant interest was a very different, new “industry”. He quickly understood the potential of the so-called “nickelodeon” automats, in which moving pictures could be viewed for 5 cents—even in railway carriages. Zukor raised the admission price to 10 cents, and so began making real money, which enabled him to become a film producer. He funded, together with English and French investors, the first full one-hour film about the life of Queen Elizabeth I of England with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, and acquired the rights for the United States for the then large sum of $18,000. He achieved the great breakthrough with his first silent film, which was shown in the New York Lyceum Theatre. Thus encouraged, Zukor engaged the first film stars, such as Mary Pickford and John Barrymore, and established his own firm called “Famous Players in Famous Plays”, which became Paramount Pictures and soon had 1,000 movie houses all over the United States. The preconditions of Paramount’s dizzying rise to world-wide recognition were the founding of his own studios, putting films into theatres and eventually into cinemas, but first and foremost a new form of advertising which created stars out of actors. Zukor never quite cut his contacts with the old country, and visited his parents’ grave in the Jewish cemetery of Ricse several times. He died at the age of 104.

William Fox was already fascinated by the prospects for development of the new medium as a young man. He was six years younger than Zukor, and started his career as a manufacturer’s agent. He founded a company for purchasing and lending films with a starting capital of $1,600. When he became dissatisfied with the quality of the productions on offer, he took matters into his own hands; he also acquired fifteen “movie palaces” in Brooklyn. Within the span of fourteen years his Fox Film Corporation increased its market value by twenty-five times, but in 1930 the banks and his rivals hit out; Upton Sinclair described the shady deal in a book on the subject. Fox had to sell his share—for $20 million.10

Hollywood now demanded the best directors, production designers, cameramen and actors. While the influence of Hungarian directors and artists continues to this day to be exaggerated in official and semi-official PR publications, the reality is impressive enough as it is. The directors George Cukor (not to be confused with Zukor) who shot the international hit My Fair Lady, Joe Pasternak and Charles Vidor were of Hungarian origin—as, naturally, was Michael Curtiz (formerly Mihály Kertész), who became the most successful Hungarian director after Alexander Korda. Mihály Kertész, originally an actor himself, shot “the first Hungarian dramatic artfilm in 1912 with Hungarian actors, Hungarian scenery and a Hungarian topic”.11 By 1918—there were already fifteen professional film directors, then a considerable figure by international standards—he made a further thirty-eight films. Kertész, like Korda, left Hungary at that time to escape persecution by the various officer gangs, and went to Hollywood via Vienna. He called himself Michael Curtiz after 1919, and during his thirty American years shot as many films as he had in Hungary, among them the cult film Casablanca.

Despite, or perhaps because of his successes, Michael Curtiz was constantly ridiculed behind his back by extras and stagehands for his fractured English. The actor David Niven even adopted Curtiz’s slip of the tongue as the title of his best-selling memoirs Bring on the Empty Horses. This came about during the filming of one of his typical American films. Several hundred extras on horseback thundered past the camera in the midst of a battle. After the crowd scenes had been shot Curtiz wanted to show the defeat as well, with the horses galloping bareback in the opposite direction without their dead or wounded riders. At that instant he let slip the oft-cited Hollywood chestnut: “Bring on the empty horses!” It was of course not this linguistic innovation that went down in the annals of the film industry but the coveted Oscar which Curtiz received from the Film Academy in 1943.¹²

But by far the most notable and famous of all the Hungarians in the history of films was László Sándor Kellner—known to the world as Sir Alexander Korda—born in 1893 in the village of Pusztatúr-pásztó in the heart of the region once inhabited by Cumans and Jazygs. This exceptional man was originally a journalist, film critic and publisher of movie magazines. His career began at Kolozsvár in Transylvania, and he soon founded his own firm, which he called Corvin. Korda was not only a great director and scriptwriter but also a first-rate organizer, the first producer who ever worked with writers, dramaturges and literary editors, who served as the connecting link between the studio and the important writers. Korda shot nineteen films before 1918, all based on highbrow literary pieces transformed into scripts by excellent men of letters. The largest Hungarian film studio today is still located in Korda’s onetime workshop.

As a participant and head of the largest film studio Korda, together with almost all directors and dramaturges, played active roles during both the Károlyi regime and the Communist Soviet Republic. After the triumph of the counter-revolution Korda, Curtiz and most of the other film people fled to Vienna, where for a time no fewer than thirty-eight film-makers found a temporary home. The cultural historian István Nemeskürty summed up the situation in his popular history of Hungarian film:

The 1920s brought about the bankruptcy of Hungarian film production and art… The systematic persecution by the Horthy-Fascists resulted in the loss of Hungary’s best directors. The white terror was raging. Soldiers with egret-feathered caps—the symbol of the counter-revolutionary army—were given cinemas as rewards; war-widows, left-oriented citizens and Jews were booted out from their cinemas… Korda’s departure left behind a tangible gap.13

Korda’s gifted brothers Zoltán (also a director) and Vince (production designer) also left the country during the 1920s and joined their internationally famous brother.

Korda commuted between Hollywood, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London, where he eventually accomplished his great breakthrough by establishing his own company, London Film Productions. Between 1931 and 1956 he produced and/or directed hundreds of films: to mention only the highlights in the long list of successful productions, which in fact created the British film industry, The Private Life of Henry VIII, Rembrandt, Anna Karenina, The Four Feathers and one particularly good example of Korda’s style, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The story of this highly intelligent but pretending to be simple-minded “typically British” hero from the time of Napoleon had been written by the Hungarian Baroness Emma Orczy, and was turned into a script by Kordas favourite scriptwriter Lajos Biró. The star of this cult film was the archetypal dashing Englishman Leslie Howard, who died in an air crash during the Second World War. Originally named László Steiner, he was born in Budapest, and emigrated as a child with his parents to London, where he worked as a bank clerk before going into films. Incidentally, in The Scarlet Pimpernel the cameraman, stage designer and, of course, the three Korda brothers were all Hungarians. The music was composed by Miklós Rózsa, who subsequently gained international renown in Hollywood. This Hungarian, who died aged eighty-eight in 1995, and who also worked for Hitchcock, Zukor and other directors, won three Oscars (1946, 1948 and 1959). Another Hungarian film composer, Joseph Kosma, wrote the chanson about “fallen leaves” which, interpreted by popular singers, became known all over the world.

Yet another Hungarian, John Halas, made a career for himself in London as a maker of animated cartoons, among them one of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Alexander Korda, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was not only a giant of movie history but, according to the unanimous recollections and reports of many Hungarians, also outstandingly generous; he is said to have supported numerous people in the old country with money and other gifts.

This almost endless list of Hungarians who gained success in films and the theatre is still led by Zsazsa Gábor, who came across as the best-known Hungarian from a list of forty personalities in a survey conducted in 1995 among 400 young business people in twenty-two countries,14 but unfortunately her fame is due rather to escapades with rich men than to her film roles. Close on her heels followed none other than the porno-queen and temporary Italian parliamentary deputy Cicciolina (Ilona Staller). When the Hungarian movie actress Eva Bartok died in a London hotel in 1998, German, Austrian and British newspapers published long obituaries of the sixty-nine-year-old ex-wife of Curt Jürgens and one-time girlfriend of Frank Sinatra and the Marquis of Milford Haven (Prince Philip’s cousin and best man). Although the Budapest-born Éva Szöke played in forty films she was, according to the London Times, “famous for her famousness”. Although she spoke five languages and acted with Burt Lancaster and Bernhard Wicki, she never lost her Hungarian accent either in English or German.¹⁵

Other notable actors and actresses from Hungary, some long forgotten, include the silent movie star Vilma Bánky, Ilona Massey, Béla Lugosi the first and most frightening movie Dracula, and Pál Lukács, who as Paul Lukas was successful in Hollywood with his suave good looks and “slight Hungarian accent”; he won an Oscar in 1943 for his part in Watch on the Rhine.

The currently best-known American Hungarian, Tony Curtis (originally Bernie Schwartz), though New York-born, had to fight against his broad Hungarian accent. His father, a poor Jewish tailor, came to New York in 1921 with his family: “My first words were Hungarian. At home I hardly ever heard any English, not even Yiddish; we spoke only Hungarian… I wasn’t conscious of living in America until I went to primary school at the age of six or seven. I believed that Mátészalka was somewhere around the corner, and was convinced that Budapest was at the end of our street.” Fifty years later and after close on 100 films, the world-famous actor and his eldest daughter visited his father’s birthplace in the small town of Mátészalka, 30 km. from the Ukrainian border. Tony Curtis (meanwhile married for the umpteenth time, this time to a model thirty-five years his junior), accepted the honorary chairmanship of an association set up to collect money for the restoration of synagogues in Hungary, and named, in honour of his father Emanuel Schwartz, the “Emanuel foundation for Hungarian culture”.16

Not all Hungarians had success-stories in the film industry. The greatest Hungarian comedian of all times, Gyula Kabos, had to leave the film studio in Budapest because of the anti-semitic decrees when already aged fifty and start a new career in America. He died of a broken heart in 1941.

In the German-speaking film world it was above all singers and dancers such as Martha Eggerth (wife of Jan Kiepura), the operetta diva Gitta Alpár (wife of Gustav Fröhlich) and (for longest of all) Marika Rökk who spread Hungary’s reputation and, unwittingly, the cliché “Puszta, Paprika, Piroska*”. Of the “three Géza von” team of directors—Bolváry, Cziffra and Radványi—the last-named made film history in Hungary and Europe with his 1947 Irgendwo in Europa (Somewhere in Europe). Today István Szabó is perhaps the internationally best-known director; he received an Oscar in 1981 for his Mephisto (with Klaus Maria Brandauer in the lead), as did the cartoonist Ferenc Rófusz for The Fly.

The best-known Hungarian writer and above all playwright to this day is Ferenc Molnár (1878–1952), the son of a Budapest doctor, who is thought by many to have been an Austrian. He had, in fact, lived for many years in Vienna, and perhaps his plays are nowhere else as regularly on the playbills as there, yet he wrote his forty-one plays, eleven novels, eight volumes of stories and reports (including the interesting war correspondent’s report from the First World War) exclusively in Hungarian. He was profoundly modern with his charming novel about the world of schoolboys, The Boys from Pál Street, and his superb tragicomedy of toughs and barkers from the Budapest amusement park, Liliom. He captured, like no other, the psychological and spiritual atmosphere of the multicultural capital bursting at its seams, including the milieu of the Pest workers and petit bourgeoisie.

The “legend from the wrong side of the tracks” with the servant girl Julie, Liliom and the underworld characters was a flop at its première in Budapest in 1919, but it was filmed in many variations, and as the musical Carousel (composer Richard Rodgers, librettist Oscar Hammerstein) performed countless times after 1945. Between 1913 and 1948 more than a dozen of his plays (The Swan, The Play’s the Thing, The Guardsman etc.) were performed on Broadway in various adaptations. Molnár’s plays, with brilliant ideas and dialogue, sparkling with that typical Pest banter, were staged in twenty-eight languages, and twenty-five were made into films. He was the only non-English writer whose works appeared in an English-language anthology. At his peak Molnár worked exceptionally fast: he wrote Liliom in twenty-one days, sitting in the still extant Budapest literary and journalistic coffeehouse, the New York.17

Molnár was also a master of the anecdote. The following are some oft-cited prime examples recorded by Friedrich Torberg, who for five years from 1945 shared Molnár’s New York emigration:

Once, when he had to appear at court as a witness at what was for him an unearthly hour (before noon), and when his friends eventually managed with great difficulty to drag the famous night-owl into the street in the morning—he pointed in utter astonishment at the people hurrying to and fro and asked “Are they all witnesses?” Returning from a visit to Budapest, he drew up the following really instructive formula about the economic situation prevailing there: “There are only 2,000 pengös* in all of Budapest, and someone different spends them each night.”¹⁸

Molnár lived from 1940 till his death in 1952 in room no. 835 on the eighth floor of the famous Plaza Hotel in New York (“Always take the cheapest room in the best hotel!”). The essayist and Molnár translator Alfred Polgar referred to this axiom when he wrote in the obituary of his friend: “I think he has a right to such a place up there too, in the section for those who have written good plays: a small room but in the house where the great ones live.”19

Like Korda, one of the most successful dramatists and librettists of the twentieth century, Menyhért (Melchior) Lengyel, born in 1880, came from a typical little town on the edge of the Hungarian puszta of the Hortobágy, Balmazujváros. His play The Typhoon was performed in Vienna, Berlin. Paris and New York, and he wrote the libretto for Béla Bartók’s The Magic Mandarin, as well as the script for the cult films Ninotchka (with Greta Garbo) and The Blue Angel (with Marlene Dietrich).

The most renowned and successful Hungarian dramatist of today is George (György) Tábori, who has become an important figure especially in the German-speaking countries. Born in Budapest, the son of a journalist killed at Auschwitz, he began to write in English in London, and as the correspondent and press officer of the BBC during the Second World War worked in the Balkans and the Near East. He published several novels which attracted little response at the time. His older brother Paul, also living in London, wrote numerous popular scientific books and was for a while president of International PEN. George subsequently spent almost a quarter of a century in the United States, mostly in California and New York. Although working as a scriptwriter and assistant director with such notable figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Anatole Litvak and Joseph Losey, and on friendly terms with Chaplin and Brecht (his first Broadway play Flight into Egypt was directed by Elia Kazan), Tábori made his real breakthrough relatively late in life in Germany and Austria. His black humour, acrid wit and deeply humane though often shocking poetry always revolve around love, hatred and death. In what is perhaps his most successful play hitherto, Mein Kampf (first performance May 1987 in the Wiener Akademietheater), he presents a shockingly grotesque pair: the Jewish hawker Schlomo Herzl and Adolf Hitler as inmates of a Viennese flophouse. In Tábori’s plays hatred and laughter, love and humour in the post-Auschwitz Jewish-Hungarian tradition link his personal history and Jewish history in general with that of Germany (and Austria). When Tábori received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1992, Wolf Biermann spoke of “stories which timid children would rather not listen to yet still cannot get enough of”.20 One of these is Horrorfarce²¹ (Peter von Becker), a play about Auschwitz. Some of these are what a German critic Peter von Becker called “Horrorfarce” 21—examples are The Cannibals, about Auschwitz, and My Mother’s Courage, dedicated to the survival of his mother.

The fact that George Tábori fits into the tradition of those Hungarian Jews living working and writing in several languages like Arthur Koestler, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the superb artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, the photo-journalist Stephan Lorant and the “Martians” of the natural sciences does not surprise those familiar with Hungarian history. However, he is unique in the German theatre in not only having written plays but having also directed and sometimes even acted in them—and he still unites these roles within his person. He is perhaps the last living link between Hungarian history and British-American exile. Central European cultural tradition and postmodernism. Although Tábori—even if somewhat hesitantly at first—still speaks flawless Hungarian in company, and although his childhood and early youth belong to the old country, his international standing is not linked to Hungary, and vice versa: probably because of the trauma of 1944–5 his plays are less well-known in Budapest than in Germany and Austria.

Another writer of world renown was Arthur Koestler, whose life encompassed Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Madrid and London. Born in Budapest in 1905, he studied in Vienna and grew up bilingual. As a journalist he worked for the newspapers of the Ullstein press in Berlin, and joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1931. Although he never forgot his Hungarian and repeatedly paid brief visits to his native city, where he had been a close friend of Attila József, he was basically moulded by the intellectual and political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. He first became known internationally as the correspondent of the London News Chronicle in the Spanish Civil War, when he bravely and nonchalantly travelled to Franco-occupied territory to gather material about the German and Italian intervention. The most dangerous of these journeys ended in his being arrested and sentenced to death: an international press campaign resulted in his release after four months in jail.

During the spring of 1938 Koestler left the KPD and after 1940—despite being often attacked, slandered and at first hardly believed—he became the first writer to analyse to a logical conclusion his disastrous experiment with Communism. After his Spanish Testament (Dialogue with Death) he wrote Darkness at Noon, his classic roman à clef about the Moscow show trials, and a collection of essays entitled The Yogi and the Commissar, which not only went through numerous editions but was dynamite in countries such as France with a strong Communist Party. Koestler acquired a permanent place in the history of “mythoclasts” long before Solzhenytsin, but far fewer people listened to his message.

In London, having adopted British citizenship, he never once wavered from his rejection and exposure of totalitarianism. His two volumes of autobiography present an unparallelled, thrilling introduction to the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s, threatened by both brown and red expansionism. Later he wrote around a dozen books on various scientific and quasi-scientific subjects, including the phenomenon of coincidence. He identified with Hungary during the 1956 crisis, and in his first indignation wanted to storm the Hungarian Legation with other like-minded intellectuals. After his friends managed to hold him back from this venture, he vented his anger by at least throwing stones and breaking a few windows. At least that is the version which his friend George Mikes spread by word of mouth and in writing, and which was taken up in David Cesarini’s biography of Koestler, published in 1994.22 He organized international protest meetings after the defeat of the Revolution. Before the British Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, made a trip to a Moscow for a meeting with Khrushchev, Koestler rang him at midnight, imploring him to ask for the release of Tibor Déry and other arrested writers.

Koestler spoke accent-free German because of his mother and his schooling in Vienna, but by his own admission he dreamed in Hungarian and suffered on account of his strong and indelible Hungarian-German accent when he spoke English. Yet it was in English that he wrote all his books during his life in London. He was an extraordinarily stimulating, often obnoxious intellectual who sometimes drank to excess and was adored by women. In 1983, when terminally ill, he committed suicide together with his much younger wife Cynthia.

And what about the great figures of Hungarian literature who remain unknown to this day? Some ex-Communist writers such as Tibor Déry and Gyula Háy became internationally known after their arrest in 1956, although Háy’s plays had already been performed in the German-speaking world. Déry’s short stories exposing the inhumanity of the Stalin era could also be found in various foreign publications. The bitter truth is that far fewer Hungarian writers were known abroad after 1945 than during the inter-war years. Yet the various associations during the time of “late Kadarism” still had 3,000 artists, 600 writers and seventy film directors on their membership lists. Compared to the Czechs and Poles, the Hungarians were at a hopeless disadvantage internationally in the 1970s and ’80s. The only exception was the humorist Ephraim Kishon. His real name was Hoffmann, but as a young journalist on the staff of Ludas Matyi, the regime’s comic magazine, he called himself Ferenc Kishont. In 1949 he migrated to Israel, where he again acquired a new name, and mastered modern Hebrew to the extent that he could write humorous sketches for newspapers and later in book form in that language, which is extremely difficult for a Hungarian to learn. As he admitted in his Recollections, it was primarily thanks to his gifted translator from English, Friedrich Torberg, that he became a bestselling writer in German-speaking countries.

In the last years of the twentieth century some Hungarian writers attained succès d’estime. This is no doubt due to the greater attention paid by publishers, which can be attributed to the existence of so many excellent translators. The chronicler of the Holocaust, Imre Kertész, achieved great success with the new edition of his shattering Auschwitz Report, not only because its publication coincided with the new wave of reassessing the past, but also because this time the German version had a talented translator. György Konrád, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, György Dalos, István Eörsi, László Krasznahorkai and some other Hungarian writers also have a loyal following, but sadly some of the country’s most significant twentieth-century novelists such as Gyula Krúdy, Zsigmond Móricz and Dezsö Kosztolányi have been translated only sporadically and decades after their work first appeared or not at all. The same is true of its poets, including even the greatest of them, such as Endre Ady, Attila József and Gyula Illyés. It is a tragedy because probably in no other country are there so many good poets in proportion to the population. The uniqueness of the language, political turbulence and the lack of literary lobbies are probably responsible for the dearth of interest in Hungarian literature.

In contrast to literature, the Hungarians were and are truly a great power in music. The two undoubted Hungarian musical geniuses, Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967), had begun to collect folksongs with the aid of a phonograph in remote Slovak- and Romanian-inhabited country areas around the beginning of the twentieth century, and became convinced that the popular songs played by the beloved Gypsy orchestras had little or nothing to do with old Hungarian folk music. They were saviours of the national musical heritage, but at the same time resolute opponents of the unbridled nationalism of the inter-war years. In contrast to Kodály, Bartók was an excellent pianist. From his Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs and the sonatas for violin and piano to the avant-garde opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911, with libretto by the future film theoretician Béla Balázs) and the expressionist one-act pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin (1924), from the string quartets to the Cantata Profana, he was a pioneer of modern music and admired throughout the world.

Bartók was also, like Kodály, a human being in a time of inhumanity. A British musical encyclopaedia laconically writes of him: “Hungarian composer; lived in the United States since 1940, died there as a poor man.” That is true enough, but the reason for his emigration in 1940 when nearly sixty is not stated. As he wrote to friends after the Austrian Anschluss, “There is a danger that Hungary will capitulate before this murderous and predatory regime. It is unimaginable to continue living and working in such a country.” And later: “Unfortunately almost all educated Christians pay homage to the Nazi system. I am truly ashamed to belong to that class.” In a testament written shortly before his departure he laid down that after his death no streets should be named for him or memorial plaques set up in his honour as long as streets and squares bore the names of “those two men” (meaning Hitler and Mussolini).23

Bartók left of his own free will, and his emigration was a gesture which conveyed a moral message in the clearest terms. Kodály stayed in Hungary till his death, but he used his position as “an international institution” to help people under both dictatorships. His Psalmus Hungaricus, the opera Háry János, Dances from Galánta and the Marosszék Dances conjure up lost traditions from Hungary and Transylvania. Bartók honoured him as the master of Hungarian classical music: “If I am asked who is the one whose works absolutely embody the Hungarian spirit, I always have to answer: Kodály.”24 The third renowned composer of this generation but less a national and modern one was Ernö Dohnányi* (1877–1960), who moved to the United States in 1948 and whose orchestral pieces, piano concertos and operas were composed more in the German musical tradition.

The two composers who hold similarly outstanding positions in the musical world of our time are György Ligeti (born 1923) and György Kurtág (born 1926). Ligeti, born in a small Transylvanian township, spent his school years in Cluj/Kolozsvár, and after the end of the Second World War studied at the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he later lectured on musical theory. Bartók became his compositional model. His first works were banned during the Communist era as formalistic-decadent, and he found out only after his flight in 1956 that Kodály as president of the Academy had personally intervened on his behalf when he was to be dismissed from his position. He fled to Vienna, from where he moved to Cologne settling finally in Hamburg and remaining a professor at the College of Music there until 1989. His compositions were at first the subject of vehement controversy, but the enthusiastic reception of his Atmosphères, which had its première at the Donaueschingen music festival in 1961, confirmed his final acceptance; and when Stanley Kubrick used extracts from it and from the choral pieces Lux aeterna and Requiem for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti—a rarity for a young contemporary composer—they became known to a worldwide audience. That the film music was used without his consent and that he was paid only after bringing in lawyers is mentioned only in parentheses. One of his greatest successes was the opera of the absurd, Le Grand Macabre, composed in the 1970s, a hymn to the victory of Love over Death, a rejection of the populist gurus’ pretentious ideologies and slogans.

Critics acclaim Ligeti’s originality in all of his creative phases. The Swiss musicologist Thomas Schacher summarised his significance as follows:

For the past forty years Ligeti has personified the contemporary musical world, first as a shrill exponent of New Music and bogey of the middle classes, then increasingly as a much-wooed composer, and lately even as an advertisement of conservative concert organizers. He is mentioned today in the same breath with Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono or Berio, the other great names of his generation. He enjoys worldwide recognition, and has been awarded the highest honours the Western world has to offer.25

But is it possible to say that his music is Hungarian? The Budapest newspaper HVG asked this on the occasion of Ligeti’s seventy-fifth birthday, to which the composer replied: “I am an Austrian citizen living in Hamburg and Vienna; as a child I held Romanian, as a young man Hungarian citizenship. Wherever I live I am a Hungarian Jew from Transylvania. I have learnt most of what I know about composition from Ferenc Farkas. My ideal was Bartók. The rhythm of my music stems from the rhythm of the Hungarian language; since I think in that language, it also indirectly determines my musical thinking.”²⁶

Ligeti is a close friend of the other great Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who received for his lifework Germany’s highest cultural award, the DM 250,000 Ernst von Siemens Prize for Music, in June 1998. The media-shy composer emphasized once that Ligeti has been not only his friend but also his mentor, and that all his life Bartók had been his model.²⁷ Kurtág is regarded by many as an “unwieldy” composer of the New Music. The jury’s introduction to his subtle Játékok (Games)—improvised short pieces (some very short), which have since been collected into a collection of several volumes—explains that his sounds and rhythms are never lost in a system. He has drawn not only on old and new Hungarian, but also on Russian, German, English and French texts for his polyglot and many-voiced song cycles. Born in Lugos (Lugoj) in the Serbian Banat, he was familiar from childhood with the languages of the Romanian, Serbian, German and other ethnic groups living there, in addition to his Hungarian mother-tongue. This diversity, especially the distinctive position of Russian, demonstrates the unusual range of this great musician, who has also set to music poems by Hölderlin and Paul Celan, prose by Samuel Beckett and Kafka Fragmente.

However, it is Hungary’s great conductors and soloists whose repute has spread and been preserved all over the world. Sir Georg Solti (originally György Stern), who as musical director of Covent Garden Opera House in London, then chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (where he succeeded another Hungarian, Fritz Reiner) and a celebrated star at the Salzburg Festival, made musical history. On his death aged eighty-six he was buried in Hungary in accordance with his express instructions. His obituaries began on the front pages of every major newspaper and filled entire pages. At the end of his Memoirs, which he finished on the very eve of his death in 1997, Solti described a visit to his father’s village at Lake Balaton and the old Jewish cemetery where his ancestors are buried: surrounded by the graves and standing on a hillock with a view of the lake, he felt a sense of belonging for the first time in sixty years.28 Thus the road of this great conductor, hounded out of his country, led through Munich, Frankfurt, London, Chicago, Vienna and Salzburg back to his native country.

Space does not permit tributes to other outstanding conductors: George Szell in Cleveland, Antal Doráti in Dallas and Eugene Ormandy (Jenö Blau) in Philadelphia, who all enlarged the fame of these great orchestras. How could one forget the erstwhile world-renowned violinists Jenö Hubay, Joseph Szigeti or Sándor Végh, who became an institution at the Salzburg Festivals? The tradition of the internationally celebrated pianists Ilonka Kabos, Annie Fischer, Lajos Kentner (known in the West as Louis Kentner), Andor Földes and Géza Anda is being continued by the highly gifted András Schiff and Zoltán Kocsis.

Although the Golden Years of the Budapest operetta, which—because of the multiple cultural loyalty of its Jewish virtuosos—cannot be separated from the Viennese culture of the time, are long past, Franz Lehár and Imre Kálmán still enjoy great popularity. Other talented composers, such as Paul Ábrahám, Viktor Jakoby and Albert Szirmay, could not hold their own on Broadway after their arrival in America. Incidentally, the operetta by Kálmán, Countess Maritza (1924), which is set in Transylvania, was used by the Hungarian revisionism of the inter-war years; in the famous duet the town of Varasdin, whose beauty is extolled in the German version, was changed in the Hungarian one to Kolozsvár, the capital of Transylvania lost to Romania.29 This shift of the focus of attention provided a welcome opportunity for a quasi-political demonstration, and the duet sometimes had to be encored almost twenty times in each performance. Viennese modern culture was influenced in other spheres as well by Hungarians of multiple cultural loyalty, such as Ludwig Hevesi, standard-bearer of the Viennese Sezession,* the film theoretician Béla Balázs, the economist Karl Polányi and the philosopher Georg (György) Lukács.

It belongs to one of the peculiar traits of Hungarian cultural history that the best-known and most controversial Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century, Georg Lukács (1885–1971), son of an ennobled Jewish banker, had a far greater influence in Germany, and in American, British, French and Italian intellectual circles of the Left, than in his native country. This had less to do with his enigmatic past in the Communist movement than with his unpalatable written Hungarian.³⁰ After his studies in Florence, Berlin and Heidelberg, and the publication of his early works Soul and Form (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1920), both highly praised by Max Weber and Thomas Mann, Lukács would under normal circumstances have become, as he put it, “an interesting, eccentric senior lecturer”. Instead he joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918, and acted as commissar for cultural affairs from 21 March 1919 during the Kun regime. When war broke out against Czechoslovakia and Romania he became a political commissar of the 5th Division. Shortly before his death the valiant warrior told the story that “for the sake of man’s incarnation as part of the historical process” he had had eight deserters from the Red Army summarily courtmartialled and shot.

After the defeat of the short-lived Soviet Republic, Lukács lived in Vienna for almost ten years, then between 1931 and 1933 in Berlin, and subsequently in Moscow. He had to recant abjectly and repeatedly in public because of his unconventional philosophical and political views (his History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, influenced generations of deviants), which were criticized by Lenin and later by the Rákosi clique; otherwise, Lukács remarked in 1962, “I would have been rehabilitated by now and buried under a special memorial.” He contributed to the process of soul-searching within the CP in the revolutionary year 1956, and took part in Imre Nagy’s government and the newly-formed Party leadership. He was arrested and taken to Romania with Nagy but not put on trial, and was even re-admitted to the Party in 1967. He constantly fought against modem directions in literature and art, reproaching Kafka and Joyce for their “late-bourgeois decadence”. In his last years he affronted many Hungarians with his absurd statement: “In my opinion even the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism.”

Although of only minor effect in Hungary, Lukács directly and indirectly influenced quite a number of outstanding Hungarian intellectuals, who during the First World War gathered in the so-called “Sunday Circle”, a philosophical and cultural discussion group. Eminent scholars such as the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the famous Polányi brothers, the art historian Arnold Hauser (author of A Social History of Art and Literature), well-known artists, writers and psychoanalysts all started their careers in that circle.

It has fallen mainly to Americans to study the long-ignored influence of Hungarian émigrés on modern art in Vienna, and especially on the Germany of the Weimar period. The pioneering role of the Hungarian avant-garde in Vienna and the activities of the artists gathered around the journal MA (“Today”)* with their manifold links to the Bauhaus have only lately been opened to the interested German-speaking public by way of exhibitions and studies.³¹ According to the American art historian Lee Congdon, Hungarian expatriate intellectuals and artists played a decisive role in moulding Weimar culture.³²

Space does not allow us to dwell here on more than two great figures from this group: László Moholy-Nagy (a second cousin of Solti’s mother) and Marcel Breuer, whose works are exhibited, esteemed, even admired to this very day. After the collapse of the Soviet Republic Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) emigrated first to Vienna and then to Berlin. In 1923 he joined the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius, where he ran the metal workshop. He became copublisher and typographical designer of the Bauhaus books in Dessau, worked as a typographer and graphic artist in Berlin and Amsterdam, and created stage designs for Otto Klemperer’s avant-garde Kroll Opera in Berlin and for Erwin Piscator, the expressionist theatre director. In 1937 he was invited to head the “New Bauhaus” school in Chicago, later the “Institute of Design”. In addition to his activities as an educator from Weimar to Chicago, he conducted radical experiments with painting, photography, plastics, graphics, film-making, advertising and industrial design, stage design and film. Art historians are convinced that the multifarious nature of this unusual artist’s interests and talents explain his lack of deserved renown.

He used materials unusual for his time, such as aluminium and celluloid panels. His greatest interest was the analysis of light and motion. His photographs are so rare today that in a Sotheby auction in 1995 his “View from the Berlin TV-tower” reached $44,500, the reserve price being $25,000. After he knew that he had leukaemia, he told one of his closest collaborators at the institute in Chicago: “I don’t know yet about my paintings, but I’m proud of my life.”33

The great architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902–81) was also active at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he took charge of the furniture workshop. He designed the first tubular steel chairs and worked as a self-employed architect in Berlin. When the Hungarian chamber of architects refused him membership in the 1930s, he went first to England and then to the United States, where he established an architectural practice with Gropius, became a professor at Harvard, and opened architectural offices in New York and Paris. His buildings in New York, one of them with a mural by Jackson Pollock, are cherished today as monuments to the modern architecture of his time.

From Moholy-Nagy we must turn to the work of the internationally admired and exhibited Hungarian photographer³⁴ André Kertész (1894–1985), who emigrated to Paris in 1925 and then to New York in 1936. His sensitive and at the same time unconventional manner of photographing people and the human condition in rural Hungary, but also in Paris and New York, soon catapulted this autodidact into an unchallenged primacy in international photography. Medals, prizes and great retrospective exhibitions all over the world demonstrated that above and beyond his commercial work for various glossy magazines he was recognized as an artist.

The other eminent photographer who worked at this time in Paris bore the name Gyula Halász, but called himself Brassaï professionally after his home town, Brassó, in Transylvania. He started work as a journalist and used his pseudonym for his photos. Brassaï (1899–1984), who went to Paris in 1924, was inspired to take up photography by Kertész, but unlike him was interested in scenes from Paris nightlife, graffiti on walls and the works of the surrealist writers and artists. He made his living from worldwide orders for Harper’s Bazaar, but demonstrated his true expertise in photographic books such as Conversations with Picasso, On the Tracks of Proust and The World of Henry Miller. Exhibitions and books about “Paris at night” made him internationally known, and he received the gold medal for photography at the Venice Biennale. His credo was “The mobility of a face is accidental. What I am looking for… is permanence.”35

Our third photographer is Robert Capa, whose photo reports from the Spanish Civil War made him known overnight. It is little known that he was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, and left there because he was arrested and beaten up for taking part in a leftist demonstration. He started using his professional name only in Spain. He covered four wars as a photo journalist: his pictures of the siege of Madrid and the well-known one of the mortally wounded republican soldier, and his last photos from the Indochina war made this Hungarian a legend in his field. He was killed by a landmine in Indochina aged only forty, but produced 70,000 negatives and gained world fame.³⁶

When Stephan Lorant, another photo-pioneer from Budapest (born in 1901), died at the age of ninety-six, obituaries of the “founder of modern photojournalism” (The Times) appeared in leading newspapers all over the world.³⁷ As an émigré he worked first as a photographer and cameraman, but began his career in journalism in Munich, where he made the Münchner Illustrierte the first photojournalistic paper in Europe, rapidly increasing its circulation to 700,000. Pictures, he observed, were like notes of music which he gathered into a symphony. He invented a new montage technique, which enabled photos to extended parallel to the text across several double-page spreads. After Hitler took power, Lorant was taken into “protective custody” for six months but released after protests by the Hungarian government, and went via Budapest to London, where he published his first bestseller, I Was Hitler’s Prisoner—he had learned some English in prison with the aid of a dictionary. The pocket edition of this book sold half a million copies.

Lorant founded the satirical magazine Lilliput, and close on its heels the first modern illustrated paper, Picture Post. One of Lorant’s numerous books contains a picture of himself walking with Winston Churchill, a contributor to Picture Post, in the garden of Chartwell in 1941. Its ingenious layout secured the magazine a weekly circulation of 1.5 million. Indignant about his “enemy alien” status in England, Lorant moved to the United States, and started a third successful career by developing a new literary genre: the illustrated book on contemporary historical themes. Books on Lincoln and Roosevelt, his famous Story of an American City about Pittsburgh, and photo-stories about America and Germany brought him money, fame and numerous prizes. Whether Kafka really found a job for him playing the violin in a movie house during his early stay in Czechoslovakia, whether he really seduced Greta Garbo after a screen test in Berlin, whether these and other stories recorded in his “Recollections” are really authentic is no longer known by anyone. It is perhaps enough that the London Times listed him among the 1,000 prominent people who have “made their indelible mark on the twentieth century”.

Ever since 1917 the coveted Pulitzer Prize has been awarded annually in the United States for outstanding journalistic and literary achievement, It is accepted as the ultimate recognition of responsible and original journalism, and the names of the recipients—writers and newspapers—are regularly reported in the world media. The founder of this most respected of journalistic awards, a certain József Pulitzer, came from the small southern Hungarian township of Makó, where his father was a bankrupt grain merchant, and migrated to the United States aged seventeen. Pulitzer joined the First New York Cavalry Regiment as a volunteer. He had always wanted to be a soldier, but was not robust and had poor eyesight, and was rejected by the Austrians, the French and finally the English.38 In 1865, after the end of the American Civil War, friends suggested that he start a new life in the Mid-Western town of St Louis, which had a large German-speaking population—Pulitzer was bilingual in Hungarian and German—and after working at odd jobs he landed an apprenticeship with the local German paper Westliche Post.

The young man who had started his journalistic career with a rather inadequate education and command of English became part-owner of the paper within a few years. He was a passionate fighter against crime and corruption, and in spite of his innate shyness and fractured English, he won a seat in the lower house of the Missouri state legislature when barely twenty-two. However, his destiny was journalism, not politics. After acquiring the controlling interest in the German newspaper, Pulitzer sold it for the round figure of $30,000. He then bought the bankrupt St Louis Dispatch, merged it with the Post, and with tremendous energy and remarkable journalistic and organizational talent transformed the daily St Louis Post-Dispatch into one of the great independent newspapers of America. “Accuracy, brevity, accuracy” was his motto, written on the walls of every one of his newsrooms. He also introduced the meaningful headline so that the reader would grasp the essence of an article in the first paragraph. Of course the popular newspaper had its enemies. The turning point came in 1883 when Pulitzer acquired the great daily paper the New York World, eventually establishing an evening edition as well. His first step was to reduce the price to 2 cents, while other papers sold for 3–4 cents; the result was a leap in circulation. The paper demanded a federal income tax on high earnings, as well as measures against monopolies and high tariffs. This owner, publisher and supreme editor-in-chief made journalistic history with his crusades for principles and ideas—never for the prejudices and interests of individual groups. He was also a munificent benefactor, particularly where the future of journalism was concerned. Thus he bequeathed $2 million in his will for the establishment of a School of Journalism at Columbia University and to endow the Pulitzer Prize. The end of the Pulitzer saga was tragic: around the age of forty he lost his sight, and then sailed restlessly around the world in his yacht the Liberty, dying on board in 1911 in the port of Charleston, South Carolina.

Pulitzer’s physical and psychological problems—his shattered nerves and bouts of depression brought on by overwork, and the rapid deterioration of his eyesight—could of course have been treated effectively a few years later by some of his former countrymen. In fact, Hungarian psychiatrists have in the mean time gained worldwide recognition; many went abroad during the Horthy regime, and others followed in the last phase of the Second World War and the ensuing Communist dictatorship. One who did not emigrate was the founder of the “Hungarian school”, Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s closest collaborator.39 The Hungarian doctor and neuropsychiatrist deeply admired the founder of psychiatry, and the affection between them is apparent in more than 1,000 letters they exchanged up till Ferenczi’s death in 1933. Ferenczi’s fame attracted many foreigners to Budapest. An outstanding representative of Hungarian psychoanalysis was Lipót (Leopold) Szondi (1893–1986), whose theory and therapy of fate-analysis (anankology), and his “Szondi test”, which is still used in clinical practice, attained international recognition. Lucky circumstances brought him to Switzerland via the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, and he was active in the Szondi Institute for Anankology in Zurich until his death. Mihály Bálint (1896–1970), a Ferenczi disciple who migrated to England in 1939, became known in emigration for his psychoanalysis of “thrill”, the anxiety-pleasure sensations in extreme situations. His name lives on in the so-called Bálint groups, a form of psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic medical training, which he introduced.

One of the numerous Hungarians working in the United States who should not be omitted from this list is the anthropologist Géza Róheim, who employed psychoanalytical methods and concepts in anthropological fieldwork in Somalia and Central Australia inter alia. Between 1911 and 1928 he devoted his attention to Hungarian ethnology, and later to the subject generally. One of his main interests at the time was Hungarian mythology, especially the shamans (“táltos”) and the use of magic. He pointed out that Hungarian folklore had been exposed to innumerable Croat, Serb, Czech, Romanian and German influences. He was accused by some of “lacking patritotism”, but when he died in America in 1953 he was buried, as he had requested, wrapped in a Hungarian flag. The eulogy was given by the Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai in Hungarian. The best-known Hungarian scholar in the United States today is Thomas C. Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse—author of several scientific works on psychiatry and at the same time a radical critic of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Paul Harmat writes in his work on Hungarian psychology that Szasz has both admirers and enemies in great numbers. That psychoanalysis has a different status in Hungary and in the United States was illustrated when the American novelist Bernard Malamud was asked on a visit to Budapest what he considered the difference between living there and in New York. He replied that if two intellectuals first meet in New York, one would ask the other: how much time have you spent in analysis? In Budapest, the question would be: how much time have you spent in prison or in a camp?

The so-called Hungarian hegemony in Los Alamos and Hollywood was parallelled by the Hungarian “boom” in Britain. Never before did Hungarians exert so much influence on a country’s national economy as the two economists Thomas (Tamás) Balogh and Nicholas (Miklós) Káldor did during the Labour governments of the 1960s in Britain. Both came to England in the 1930s: Káldor did research and taught at Cambridge, while Balogh did the same at Oxford. Both were left of centre. Balogh was one of Harold Wilson’s closest advisers, and for a while even Minister for Energy. (The two were nicknamed “Buda” and “Pest”.) As the first Hungarian member of the House of Lords, Balogh began his maiden speech with the remark: “My Lords, this chamber has listened to many voices over the centuries, but I presume to none as yet which spoke with a genuine Hungarian accent.” He schemed, connived and mistrusted his colleagues, but remained one of the Prime Minister’s closest confidants.40

The situation was different with Káldor, a witty and open-hearted man, who was also made a life peer a couple of years after Balogh. He was the Wilson government’s tax expert, and introduced a top marginal rate of 98 per cent on incomes from capital investments; the controversial and long forgotten Selective Employment Tax (SET) for the restructuring of the workforce from service industries to the production sector is also connected with his name. He wanted to convince the former colonial governments that economic planning and the principle of equality led to prosperity. His intentions were good but his advice caused great difficulties. He was one of two Hungarian advisers at different times to Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of independent Ghana, the other being the professor of economics József Bognár, and the two unwittingly contributed greatly to the trends which led to Nkrumah’s fall.

The most famous and controversial Hungarian of our times is not a scientist, an artist, a politician or an inventor, but the world’s most successful speculator and at the same time one of its most notable philanthropists. This is George (György) Soros,41 whose private wealth is estimated at $5 billion. Funds established by him for private investors are said to be worth $17–18 billion. An example may suffice to prove his phenomenal success as the “king of speculators”: had an investor put $1,000 at the disposal of the Soros Quantum Fund in 1969, and re-invested the dividends, he would now have over $2 million! Despite occasional blunders with yen and DM exchange rates, his fund has shown unbelievably high growth since its inception: 35 per cent annually.

Born in 1930, the son of a Jewish lawyer, he survived the German occupation and the Nazi terror in 1944 with false papers under the name of Sándor Kiss, Soros was known only to international investors until 1992. He attained unfavourable publicity, especially in Britain, as “the man who broke the Bank of England” when on one monumental day in 1992 he made “a billion dollars” (more precisely 958 million) by correctly assessing that the British government would eventually devalue the pound. The fact that when Soros came to Britain in 1947 he was desperately poor and financed his studies at the London School of Economics by working on the railways and later as a costume jewellery salesman lent his raid on the pound a special piquancy in the eyes of British commentators and taxpayers. He migrated to New York in 1956 and became a share dealer on Wall Street. With a $4 million loan from rich investors he established the Quantum Fund in 1969 in a Caribbean tax haven outside the supervisory orbit of the US finance authorities, and amassed a huge fortune by daring tax-free and unregulated speculations. As manager of the fund Soros personally earned 15 per cent of the profits.

Since his triumph over the pound, the image of George Soros has changed dramatically. He is constantly quoted not only in the international media but also by heads of state and government of countries whose currencies succumbed to a devaluation spin, such as Thailand’s in 1996. A year later President Mahathir bin Mohamed of Malaysia called him a “robber and bandit”.

Yet the world’s best-known investor, who has meanwhile taken US citizenship, is far more than the “king of speculators”. After the great turning-point in 1989 Soros retired from day-to-day business matters, leaving the administration of the Fund to a close collaborator, and since then has become the world’s greatest philanthropist. He established his “Open Society” foundation in 1979 in the spirit of his former teacher at the London School of Economics, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper, and launched it with a pioneering initiative in his home country, Hungary. There a Soros Foundation was established in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences (the Kádár regime was still in power), and under the supervision of his personal representative—the last surviving defendant in the Nagy trial, the journalist and later liberal parliamentarian Miklós Vásárhelyi—annual grants of $3 million, subsequently $10 million, were made for language courses, support of journals and literature, and scholarships for students and researchers travelling abroad (proper tenders always had to be produced). The later Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was among those who were enabled to spend a year at Oxford with the help of a Soros scholarship.

Soros Foundations were created even before the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Poland, and after the change in almost all the Central and East European countries, including the Ukraine and the Baltic states. Hundreds of millions of dollars (according to official statistics $300 million in 1994, $350 m. in 1995, $362 m. in 1996 and $428 m. in 1997) are pouring into thirty-one countries in Europe, Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America, as well as several social institutions in the United States fighting drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. Soros has donated more money to promote an “open society” than the American government and major official bodies.

His influence has by no means exclusively won him friends. He was denounced in Romania as an “agent of revanchist Hungary” and in Hungary as the “agent of international Jewish capital”, a “Judeo-Communist plutocrat” who was morally undermining the Hungarian character with his benefactions. To the governments of Serbia, Croatia, Belarus and sometimes the Czech Republic Soros was like a red rag to a bull since they could not treat the self-confident, anti-authoritarian billionaire just as they wanted. Macedonia owes its economic survival, or at least the stabilization of its position, to support from the Soros Foundation. His opponents claim that his investments in Eastern Europe are made to give his image a shine and for personal aggrandizement. It is true that Soros is not averse to honours and world-wide publicity; the New Yorker has described him as a “billionaire with a Messiah complex”.

In his lectures and books he has expressed his inner conflicts, much to the derision of his many critics, for example: “As a participant in the market. I am trying to be on the winning side, as a citizen and human being I am trying to serve the common good.” At any rate, Soros is at the centre of contention not least because he frequently offers advice publicly to politicians about their policies towards Russia and the Balkans, or about liberalizing drug and immigration policies. In short, he acts like a “statesman without a state”, but with a vast fortune and the personal power of distributing millions of dollars according to his whims, and only for positive purposes.

Time magazine chose as its 1997 “Man of the Year” another American of Hungarian origin, Andy Grove, thus giving him instant fame, especially in his home country.42 We have here again an American-dream rags-to-riches career, Grove has changed the world with the computer chips produced by his firm Intel, which delivers 90 per cent of micro processors for PCs, and has an annual turnover of $25 billion, with profits amounting to $6.8 billion in 1997. András Gróf came to New York aged twenty without any knowledge of English, and as early as 1960 the New York Times trumpeted the success of a young Hungarian who on his arrival could not tell the difference between the words “horizontal” and “vertical”, yet graduated in chemical engineering from City College of New York as best in his class. With enormous ambition, diligence and ability he achieved a dizzying career even in American terms. What is more, he had to overcome partial deafness; only after twenty years and five operations did he regain his hearing. Grove retired from the presidency of Intel in 1998, but remained on the board; in 1997, according to the report in Time, he collected over $100 million in income and bonus payments. In contrast to the peripatetic Soros, he has not re-visited Budapest.

No depiction of Hungarians in the world of finance would be complete without a mention of André Kosztolany, the best-known stock market commentator in the German-speaking world, and Alexandre de Lamfalussy (Sándor Lámfalussy), the most respected banker of Hungarian origin in Europe. The incorruptible maverick Kosztolany, born in 1906 in Budapest (he died in Paris in 1999) but holder of a US passport, was a bestselling writer in Germany and the epitome of a Hungarian cosmopolitan. Although he spent more time in Munich and Paris than in Budapest, and considered himself, as he said, at home in ten cities, the finance writer “was still a committed Hungarian patriot”.

For a quarter of a century Kosztolany wrote a regular column for Capital, and his books about money and the stock market have sold more than a million copies in eight languages. At a meeting of expatriate Hungarians on his ninetieth birthday, the present writer personally witnessed his mastery of Hungarian, although the “wise speculator” had lived outside his homeland for over seventy years. Incidentally, one of the speakers at this function, Otto von Habsburg, spoke in beautiful, polished Hungarian although he has never lived in the country. But the private tutor of the last King and Emperor’s eldest son had been a Hungarian Benedictine, who taught him complete mastery of the language.

The banker Lamfalussy was also beholden to the Benedictines for their assistance to him in Belgium after his flight from Hungary in 1949. Having graduated from the Benedictine high school at Sopron, he studied briefly at the University of Budapest before escaping to the West with two friends in the Scout movement. While studying at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, he earned his living as a tourist guide and even as a street-sweeper. After subsequent studies at Oxford, the Hungarian refugee, by now a Belgian citizen, began his successful career at the Banque de Bruxelles, followed in 1976 by a leading position in the BIS (Bank for International Settlements) in Basel, where from 1985 (now ennobled by the Belgian king as Baron Lamfalussy) he served as general manager. In 1994 he assumed the presidency of the European Monetary Institute in Berlin, forerunner of the European Central Bank. He owns a house on Lake Balaton, and was a member of an informal international economic advisory body consulted from time to time by the former Prime Minister Orbán.

Space does not permit us to do more than merely mention other well-known Hungarians, such as Victor Vasarely (Vásárhelyi), “inventor of Op Art” (1908–97); the historian of Central Europe, François (Ferenc) Fejtö from France; the authority on myth and religion Karl (Károly) Kerényi (1897–1973) from Switzerland; or Mihály Csikszentmihályi, the psychologist and writer from Chicago; or Peter (Lord) Bauer (1915–2002), Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics; André Deutsch (1917–2000), creator of one of the most distinguished publishing houses in post-Second World War London; the famous media manager Josef von Ferenczy in Germany; and the inventor of the “Rubic Cube”, Ernö Rubik, in Hungary itself.

To enumerate the outstanding Hungarian successes in sport (sixteen gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games in London and almost as many at Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne in 1956) would occupy several pages. Or the “golden era” of Hungarian soccer with the wonder team of Puskas, Kocsis, Bozsik and Hidegkuti beating England in 1953 for the first time ever on home ground at Wembley by 6-3 and somewhat later by 7-1 in Budapest. The tradition of the champions in fencing, water-polo, swimming and many other sports played an important role in preserving and strengthening national identity in times of political repression and foreign domination. And who could overlook the triumphs of the Hungarian chessplayers, headed by the world champion Judith Polgar?

After the German edition of this book was published, quite a number of Hungarian émigrés wrote to the author admonishing him for ignoring other outstanding Hungarians in the fields of natural and human sciences, music (the pianist György Cziffra), ballet, architecture, medicine, finance, and industry (Sir Peter Abeles in Australia, C. Munk in Canada, and others).

Among the important politicians of Hungarian descent one should mention first of all the Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos of California, one of the many Jews saved by Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. The Governor of New York Sate, George Pataki, is partly of Hungarian origin, and he visited the birthplace of his paternal grandfather in a small village in eastern Hungary. The father of the French Minister of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, came as a Hungarian refugee after the crushing of the 1956 Revolution to France. Neither Pataki nor Sarkozy (Sarközi) can speak Hungarian. For several years, the Hungarians were proud of the fact that the wife of the then French Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, née Eva Hegedüs, was not only Hungarian-born but also regularly attended Hungarian cultural events and accompanied her husband on a state visit to her native country.

One could indeed fill the telephone diretory of a small town with the names of all these talents from Hungary. Yet even this probably would not satisfy all Hungarians at home and abroad. The insatiable appetite for recognition abroad is a reflection of the deep-rooted uncertainty and fear concerning the nation’s slow death ever since Johann Gottfried von Herder’s oft-quoted and never forgotten prophesy.

 

 

* Piroska is a typical Hungarian girl’s name.

* The pengö was the Hungarian currency before the Second World War.

* Grandfather of the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi and the German politician Klaus von Dohnányi.

* Various groups of Austrian artists who in 1897 “seceded” from official art institutions to establish more modern schools.

* Published by the former metalworker and autodidact Lajos Kassák (1887–1967).