Written in elegant expository prose, László Bernát Veszprémy’s book chronicles the main political episodes of one of Hungary’s watershed moments: the year 1921.
An in-depth interview with Lél Somogyi, son of c-founder of the Hungarian Association, outstanding scholar and Horthy era government official Ferenc Somogyi, about his father’s legacy, his professional career, his family, and his contributions to the Hungarian American community, not the least as the Secretary-General of the Árpád Academy.
István Haller was a prominent Hungarian Christian politician in the first half of the 20th century. His book summing up his views on Christian politics is apparently paradoxical—it is both Christian-inspired and antisemitic. This combination illustrates the troubling tension that burdened the Christian national politics of the Horthy era in Hungary.
Jewish-Hungarian MP from the Horthy era Béla Fábián was held as a POW in Russia in World War i, and was taken to a concentration camp in World War II. He became an avid critic of the Hungarian Communist Party while living in exile in the 20th century, for which the Kádár regime subjected him to a smear campaign, claiming that he actually served as a ‘kapo’, a prisoner-turned-guard in his camp. Here’s the story of the extraordinary life of a special man.
The gap between reality and the striving for a pure Christian social life angered many conservative public figures in the Horthy era. In his diary, Prohászka wrote that for Hungarian men, ‘using a prostitute is like drinking a cup of coffee’.
‘Paying homage to a towering figure is always a herculean task…That this simple building with its Romanesque arches would house the Mausoleum of a great King, and some of the most beautiful murals in the entire country, is more than a virtuous artistic choice. It is a metaphor for Hungary itself—a nation of immense beauty, history, and faith, if one knows where to look.’
‘As Márton Molnár puts it, “Prohászka’s work covers three major—closely related—themes: educational science and the history of education…the theoretical issues of the philosophy of culture; and the problems of the modern cultural crisis.” In this paper, we focus on this last area: the modern cultural crisis.’
The obituary of László Geréb, who died in 1962, described him as a Marxist literary historian and a researcher of the class struggle. Perhaps by then no one remembered that Geréb, once known as László G. Gerő, used to be a promising Hungarian Jewish Zionist publicist and journalist.
‘Few things better illustrate the antisemitic recycling of certain Jewish concepts than the quote attributed to Dezső Szabó, “Every Hungarian is responsible for every Hungarian.” Of course, a reader with some knowledge of Jewish tradition will immediately recognize the Talmudic origin of this quote: “kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh,” which means, “All of Israel are responsible for one another.”’
‘Life is not easy for many Hungarians, but Hungary has one big thing going for it: a strong sense of itself as a nation and a people. If it is true that hope comes from cultural memory married to the desire to return to what is good, true, and beautiful about the past, then Hungarians have every right, and indeed the responsibility, to be hopeful, even as the chill darkness of forgetfulness and cultural dispossession settles over Western Europe.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.
