Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1982 (10. évfolyam, 31-34. szám)
1982 / 34. szám
I HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER No. 34 ISSN: 0194-164X WINTER, 1982-83 Published quarterly by the Hungarian Research Center of the American Hungarian Foundation: Winter, Spring (two numbers included), and Autumn. Founder and editor: Bela Charles Maday. Journal editor: Susan M. Nagy. Communications concerning content should be addressed to the Editor, 4528-49th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20016. Communications concerning subscriptions, advertising, and circulation should be addressed to American Hungarian Foundation, 177 Somerset Street, P.O. Box 1084, New Brunswick, N. J. 08903. Annual subscription in the U.S.A. $5.00. Abroad $7.00. Current single copy $3.00; back issues $3.50 each. BOOKS (Continued) Janies, Kalman. CZECHOSLOVAK POLICY AND THE HUNGARIAN MINORITY, 1945-1948. Intro, by Gyula Illyés; transl. by Stephen Borsody. Social Science Monographs, distributed by Columbia U. Press, 562 West 113 Street, New York, NY 10025,1982.241 pages. $25.00 cloth. (East European Monographs no. 122. Brooklyn Coll. Studies on Society in Change no. 18.) This volume is an adopted version of A hontalanság évei (The Homeless Years), published at Munich in 1977 under the auspices of the Hungarian Protestant Free U. in Europe with headquarters in Bern. Its topic is a long neglected issue, a thoroughly documented discussion of post-World War II treatment of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia, which numbered some 570,000 souls according to the 1980 census (896,000 persons according to prewar Hungarian statistics). The study concentrates on the years 1945-1948 and on documenting the existence and consequences of a strong anti-minority mentality in Czechoslovakia. Borsody argues in the preface that “during World War II. . .Edward Benes, President-in-exile of Czechoslovakia, launched a punitive campaign that advocated the expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia. Soon he advanced a general theory, flimsy but successful, that national minorities are the cause of war and a threat to peace. Thus, to make Czechoslovakia into a homogeneous Slav nation-state, the Hungarian minority too has been declared guilty of treason and dangerous to both the security of Czechoslovakia and to European peace.” The significance of the volume, according to Borsody “is that it speaks of a universal phenomenon: man’s inhumanity toman under the dehumanizing influence of nationalist frenzy,” and that the Hungarian side of the story has never been told before. This book is undoubtedly of major import to East European specialists and social scientists in particular. The author is a physician and a sociologist who lives in Czechoslovakia; Illyés is the leading poet of contemporary Hungary; and Borsody is a historian and retired college professor, who lives at Wellfleet, Mass. His The Triumph of Tyranny (London, 1960), and his The Tragedy of Central Europe (New York, 1962) were well received. Note: The National Széchényi Library has just published (1981) in microfiche form a bibliography of Hungarian books published in Czechoslovakia between 1961 and 1970. Compiled and edited by Mrs. Rezső Hotter and Ma'ria Orvos, the bibliography is reviewed on p. 6 of this issue. Komjáthy, Anthony Tihamér. A THOUSAND YEARS OF THE HUNGARIAN ART OF WAR. Preface by General M.W. Clark; 2 epilogue by Major General B.J. Legge. Rákóczi Foundation, P.O. Box 2727, Cleveland, OH 44111; and P.O. Box 67, Stn. “L”, Toronto, ON M6E 4Y4, 1982. 210 pages, maps, notes, biblio, illus. $20.00 cloth. Hungary has always been proud of its sons who have been willing to make the maximum sacrifice for the common good of their country. “We are a military nation” has been the motto for centuries, and history has time and again called on Hungarians to prove the validity of the maxim. Because military history was frequently neglected in general historical works, and cultural aspects overlooked in military history studies, this volume tries to fill a void of interrelatedness between these two fields. It discusses outstanding military events throughout Hungarian history, beginning with the conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the tenth century. The conquest and subsequent raids of Western Europe were made possible by flexible cavalry tactics which characterized Hungarian military operations for centuries and gained them fame and international reputation. The embodiment of this military behavior was the hussar whose tactics and even his name (from huszár) was adopted by most every army. Of more recent history, the author covers the m ilitary aspects of the Dual Monarchy, of the two world wars, and the role of Hungarians in foreign armies including their contribution to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War of the United States. The volume concludes with an appeal to historians and would-be-historians to pursue the line of inquiry demonstrated in this study, thus, to throw more light on critical events which in the past received rather one-sided or incomplete coverage. The author is prof, of history at Rosary Coll., Illinois. His The Crisis of France’s East Central European Diplomacy 1933-1938, has been well received in 1976. His essay on “Hungarian Jobbágyság in the Fifteenth Century” was reviewed in HSN no. 11, p. 12. Lukács, Lajos. THE VATICAN AND HUNGARY 1848-1878. Reports and Correspondence on Hungary of the Apostolic Nuncios in Vienna. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 1981. 795 pages, maps, illus., register of documents. $48.00 cloth. The recent opening of the Vatican secret archives covering the Papacy of Pius IX, offered new opportunities for scholarly research. This volume, which in addition to a 200-page historical analysis comprises the full Italian text of 368 of some 10,000 nuncial reports now available, aims to investigate relationships between the Papacy and Hungary for a more precise understanding of Hungary’s social and political development in that period. The work is basically historical in character with emphasis on politics and diplomacy. It begins with a discussion of the changing character of the Papal States and the invalidation of Josephinism between 1846 and 1849, giving a fair treatment to documents related to the abortive Hungarian war of independence. This is followed by a discussion of the era of Habsburg absolutism as it coincided with the efforts towards a concordat and subsequent disintegration of the ecclesiastic policy. The Compromise of 1867 and the consolidation of the dual monarchy between 1867 and 1878 are the subjects of the concluding chapter. The magnitude of the available source material makes this volume but a starter in the field and not the fulfillment of the research based on the documents available. (E g., the Papal States Secretariat received 343 reports from Vienna during the fatal year of 1848, or about one a day.) Other sources used include the Archives of the NO. 34, WINTER 1982-83, HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEW5LETTER ’
