| CHAPTER XXI Traditions, Traumas, and Quacks | CONTENTS | 2. Conservative Fiction |
WHILE the years preceding World War I had witnessed an imposing diversity of attempts to reform the social, economic, and intellectual conditions of the country, the general climate of the inter-war years proved to be gloomy, and an anticlimax to the intellectual ferment of the belle époque. The primary cause of the narrowing intellectual horizon was undoubtedly the shock caused by the lost war, the ensuing convulsions – Red Terror, White Terror – and the complex problems, general misery, and intellectual bewilderment created thereby; society could not cope with them. The greatest damage to the national ego was that inflicted by the loss of two-thirds of historical Hungary’s territories, which were ordered to be ceded to the successor states by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
Consequently the new regime, headed by Admiral Horthy,* aimed at regaining these lost territories; the final and supreme aspiration in foreign policy during the next quarter of a century was the restoration of Hungary to the old, pre-1918 frontiers, an aspiration which successfully obscured all other issues, because, irredentist propaganda promised both social and economic salvation for the Hungarian masses after the regime’s foreign policy objective had been achieved. In addition to the openly nationalistic character of the prevailing ideology, the ‘Christianness’ of the regime’s ideals was stressed. The adjective ‘Christian’ was given racial overtones-the shining example of Christian values as opposed to ‘radical, subversive, Jewish machinations’ which were largely blamed for the revolutionary upheavals in 1918-19. The ‘historic classes’ could not forget their humiliation during the brief Communist interlude, and a universal scapegoat was needed for their wounded pride. They reasoned that as Hungarian Communists were predominantly Jews, Jewish participation in public life was to be restricted immediately lest the Bolshevik subversion should repeat itself.
This paranoid fear of Communism was the other main pivot around which ‘Christian-National’ ideology turned. While Hungary was to be a bulwark against bolshevism and its assorted accomplices-socialism, radicalism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and freemasonry – which might attack from outside, within the country the ‘Christian-National’ middle class, the backbone of society, had at all costs to be protected against these dangerous infections. Nevertheless the Horthy regime failed to accomplish its ideals; there was a considerable gap between theory and practice, not only because the regime did tolerate some genuinely liberal trends, particularly in literature and the arts, but mainly because it never became a right-wing dictatorship.
It also failed to produce significant literature which was unequivocally pro-establishment. A general survey of the existing trends shows this convincingly. The Nyugat movement survived and flourished. The prominent authors of its first generation were at least uncommitted, if not outright critics of the establishment; writers of the second and third generations were mostly apolitical, and the neo-népies trend was marked by an enterprising spirit which aimed at drawing public attention to social evils, thus perpetuating the traditional role of the writer in East European society as social conscience and spokesman of the opposition.
If ‘Christian-National’ literature could not boast the kind of success that would withstand the test of time, there nevertheless emerged a generation of pro-establishment intellectuals whose significance reached far beyond the momentary support they lent to the regime; their ideas contributed salient features to the intellectual climate of the country in the first half of this century.
It was with the foundation of the Eötvös College in 1895 that the first steps were taken towards creating the sort of élitist goals in higher education which were needed for the systematic large-scale training of young scholars. Modelled on the École Normale Supérieure of the Sorbonne, Eötvös College, with its stringent entrance requirements, well-qualified academic staff, and stimulating community spirit,* produced cultivated brains in Hungary for half a century; the long list of outstanding pupils included the musician Zoltán Kodály, and many writers, thinkers, historians, and linguists. The college maintained its tradition of painstaking scholarship during the Horthy regime; a young graduate of Eötvös College commanded the same awe-inspired respect which is reserved in the English academic world for graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, or of Harvard and Yale in the United States.
The College was particularly successful in producing eminent historians; and Gyula Szekfű (1883-1955), the leading historian and chief ideologist of the inter-war period, was one of its former students. As a young historian, he challenged nationalistic sentiment with a work which allegedly shed unfavourable light on a national hero (Rákóczi in Exile, 1913) and which involved him in a country-wide controversy, disproportionately greater than the significance of the new sources which made him reconsider the portrait of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi as it was accepted by contemporary public opinion. Notoriety is not the best guarantee for scholarly work; Szekfű, however, was able to overcome his dubious fame.
His basic concept concerning Hungary’s place in the family of European nations was put forward in Der Staat Ungarn (Berlin, 1917). Employing the method of the Geistesgeschichte* School for the first time in Hungary, Szekfű expounded his conviction that Hungary had belonged to the socalled ‘Christian-Germanic cultural community’ ever since its acceptance of Christianity ten centuries ago. The underlying idea of this concept was, of course, the re-emergence in an acute form of the dilemma of ‘East’ versus ‘West’, since the original debate in the Age of Reform had provided no reassuring answers. The implications of Szekfű’s proposition were significant, because by narrowing the concept of ‘West’ to the ‘Teutonic cultural community’ it effectively supported loyalty to the House of Habsburgs; moreover, it paved the way ideologically for a German-Hungarian alliance during World War II.
New dimensions of Szekfű’s ideas were displayed in his most influential work (Three Generations, 1920; with a substantial appendix: 1934), inspired largely by his pessimism, a pessimism generated by the recent national catastrophe, and particularly by his fear of revolutionary upheavals. Having reconsidered some of his earlier views, Szekfű came to the conclusion that recent history was a cautionary tale warning against violent changes such as those advocated by Kossuth and his radical followers. Szekfű’s own ideal was gradual reform, as represented by the conservative Széchenyi. He blamed the politicians of the Age of Dualism for their inept policy towards the nationalities, which, instead of assimilating them, aggravated the existing discord. In the Appendix (1934) he proved himself to be a relentless critic of what he termed neo-Baroque society.
Of Szekfű’s numerous works, the Hungarian History (7 vols., 1929-33), written in collaboration with the medievalist B. Hóman, is undoubtedly the most significant. It fully displays his erudition by the superb handling of his material, his meticulous research and mature style, and last but not least, the refinement of his concepts. His position as a leading intellectual was acknowledged by his appointment to the editorship of the authoritative Hungarian Review (1927-44), a conservative forum of an indisputably high standard, whose series Books of the Hungarian Review published most of the best scholarship in the inter-war period.
By the late 1930s Szekfű found more and more points of disagreement with the regime, which resisted even moderate efforts at reform. In 1938 he resigned his office as editor, and in a series of articles he published a bitter critique of the policies which were leading Hungary to the brink of catastrophe for the second time in a quarter of a century (‘Somewhere We Have Lost Our Way’, Hungarian Nation, 1942-3). Disillusioned by the encroachment of racist theories on public life, Szekfű gave up his concept of the ‘Christian-Germanic cultural community’, and after World War II he drew his conclusions from the fact that the Soviet Union had established a common frontier with Hungary; realizing that future Hungarian foreign policy could never disregard this new situation, moreover, the conservative thinker conceded the need for social revolution (After Revolution, 1947). Events vindicated his views and he accepted the appointment of ambassador to Moscow offered him by the post – 1945 regime.
It was not by accident that the ideas of the Geistesgeschichte School acquired influence on Hungarian intellectual life after World War I. The prevailing general pessimism could find little relief in the study of ‘facts’; positivist scholarship therefore began to decline, and as an intellectual escapism Geistesgeschichte eminently served the meditative, subjective, and retrospective mood of the times, since its keywords were general comprehension, intuition, and ‘re-experiencing’ (nacherleben). Soon Geistesgeschichte became dominant in all branches of the humanities; its forum was, Minerva* (1922-40), a periodical issued by the Minerva Society (1921-40) under the auspices of Pécs University. It was to Szekfű’s credit that he often admonished some of its more fanciful excesses. For example, when Lajos Prohászka (1897-1963) published a popular book (The Wanderer and the Fugitive, 1934) in which far-reaching parallels were drawn between the German and Hungarian ‘soul’ based on ‘constant spiritual traits’, Szekfű refuted most of its theses in Hungarian Review.
Independent-minded authors were unhappy about the way all intellectual phenomena were said to be derived from the universal manifestation of the Zeitgeist, which, in practice, stood for general and universal Western or rather German influence on Hungarian intellectual life. The populist writers argued in favour of the sovereignty of the népi character of Hungarian culture. On the other hand, a small group of intellectuals, led by Károly Kerényi (1893-1973) set the classical tradition against the all-pervading Geistesgeschichte and the slowly penetrating ‘German cultural superiority’ of the 1930s.
Kerényi’s endeavour was significant not only because of its originality, but also because of its implications. His ‘discovery’ was simple enough: although events preserved in myths may have never taken place, the gods of the myths have always existed as an ‘inner event’*, and consequently they cannot be erased from the deeper layers of human consciousness. Kerényi’s aspiration was to free the gods of antiquity from the ‘fetters’ of philology by establishing a ‘living link’ with the classical Greek way of life. At the same time, his preoccupation with the gods of the Greeks aroused his interest in modern authors who created myths (e.g. James Joyce). When Thomas Mann became aware of the Hungarian scholar’s interpretation of his Magic Mountain (e.g. Settembrini as a symbol of Hermes) they entered into a long and fruitful correspondence which contributed to the development of Mann’s ideas about the function of myth in his tetralogy Joseph, based on Old Testament stories.
Kerényi was working on the same lines as Jung, the heretic disciple of Freud, whose convictions about the existence of religious instinct and the subconscious need for faith were the ultimate justification of his turning to mythology. Kerényi and Jung were bound to meet, and the meeting took place when the former left Hungary in 1943. They became lifelong friends and close collaborators (e.g. Introduction to the Science of Mythology, N.Y., 1949). Kerényi’s own main contribution to the study of mythology is his concept of archetypal images in Greek religion, with the timeless faces of gods looking back on mankind to remind it of the primeval source of life and of the permanent aspects of existence. In tracing the origins of symbolism of gods and demigods, Kerényi, rebelling against the hyper-criticism of the positivists, accepted the proposition that all myths and traditions which contain elements of plausibility should be regarded as authentic unless proved otherwise. Kerényi’s Greek ideals were remote from the main cultural aspirations of the Horthy regime, and after World War II his works were ignored until recently.
In the ‘Christian-National’ public thinking of the inter-war period, however, the Churches were naturally prominent. Curiously enough the chief ideologist of the Catholic Church, Ottokár Prohászka (1858-1927), started his career with reformist ideals inspired by a sense of social responsibility and an aversion to the excesses of ‘intellectualism’. His book on the latter (Overgrowths of Intellectualism, 1910) was banned by the Church.* Yet he vehemently opposed all radical changes in society (Culture and Terror, 1918), was against modern literature as represented, for example, by the ‘decadance of Ady’, and held ‘Jewish’ capitalism responsible for all social diseases. Bishop Prohászka’s main social ideal was a strong national middle class with pure Christian morals, and it was in order to promote this that he became the chief spokesman of the conservative backlash of the 1920s, serving its ideals with all his undoubted eloquence as a public orator. The leading figure in the Reformed Church, Bishop László Ravasz (1882-1975), was an equally talented orator; his homiletics, composed with rhetorical elegance, betrayed his literary ambition. A man of moderate views, Bishop Ravasz did much for the spiritual revival of Hungarian Protestantism, and for the fostering of the Protestant traditions of Hungarian literature.
The leading conservative literary forum of the period was East* (1923-40). Its title suggested opposition to everything Nyugat stood for, and showed its preference for national traditions and values as opposed to innovation and fashionable foreign trends. East represented what was best in the ‘Christian-National’ revival; the same cannot be said of the other leading organ, New Times (1896-1949), a consciously non-political weekly with literary ambitions, edited by Ferenc Herczeg, the unofficial ‘Poet Laureate’ of the regime. The popular and successful authors rallying round New Times were mainly entertainers, readily serving the illusions of their readers (who consisted predominantly of the ‘Christian-National’ middle class).
The high standard of criticism in East was largely achieved through the efforts of one of its original co-editors, János Horváth (1878-1961), a scholar who was an outsider on the literary scene, and who after the first three years left East to devote his time entirely to teaching literature at Budapest University (1923-48). Both a student and later a professor at Eötvös College, Horváth was largely responsible for renewing literary scholarship, which had been in danger of losing its way in the maze of philological details at the turn of the century. The short period he spent in public affairs helped fulfil one of his lifelong aspirations, which was to create a valid approach to the study of literature. First he set out to establish his principles of investigation by claiming autonomy for literature. Former scholars, Horváth argued with convincing clarity, had usually regarded literature as a manifestation of the ‘national spirit’, and treated it unhistorically by calling attention only to those of its aspects which had relevance for their own times, while ignoring the fact that literature is more than ‘what is written down’ – it is an intellectual relationship between writer and reader through the written text. Horváth’s conception of literature enabled him to employ a complex approach to his subject taking into account psychological, aesthetic, sociological, and historical considerations when describing literary phenomena (‘Notions of Hungarian Literature’, Minerva, 1922). By introducing novel concepts (e.g. irodalmi tudat) he effectively contributed to the understanding of literature. His theoretical approach was backed by a powerful memory, a lucid mind, and an ability to construct a coherent survey out of a multitude of philological data, the primary importance of which he unceasingly stressed. His style is always clear and concise, and has a character of its own.
Horváth also criticized the stylistic excesses of the Nyugat writers; his critical remarks on neologisms, like his scholarly views, were never unfounded, and represented conservative taste at its best. In the 1920s, when he was participating in literary life, he clarified vexed questions in his essays (‘Racial Issues in Literature’, Minerva, 1922; or ‘The Rights and Limitations of Criticism’, East, 1928) with disarming impartiality and imposing scholarship. After his withdrawal into the academic world, he made a direct impact on scholars only, yet his views were transmitted by the capillary system of literary scholarship to wider circles, and their influence can be felt even today. Of his pupils, probably Gyula Farkas (1894-1958) was the most controversial. In an attempt to explain literary movements more thoroughly, Farkas paid special attention to the background of writers, and in particular to the region they came from and their religion (e.g. in The Hungarian Romantics, 1930). Although there is no doubt about Farkas’s intellectual honesty and integrity, his ideas, developed under the influence of the Geistesgeschichte, were later subjected to severe criticism; he was accused of racialist views after World War II, and he is largely ignored today.
| CHAPTER XXI Traditions, Traumas, and Quacks | CONTENTS | 2. Conservative Fiction |