Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36. (1983)
BARANY, George: Széchényi, America, and Assimilation: An Ambiguous Legacy
198 George Bárány and in the subsequent works of his final years, there are many derogatory remarks about Jews as well as Germans. Yet one of Széehenyi’s most trusted co-workers in Döbling was the Jewish journalist, Max Falk; while in his last major published work, the Blick (London 1859), he credited the all-powerful Minister of the Interior, Alexander Bach, with having achieved that ‘Die meisten Nationalitäten des österreichischen Gesamtstaates hassen á-peu-prés in dieser Welt nichts so sehr und so decidirt als die Deutschen, als das deutsche Element! Grace de votre sollicitude vexatoire' 46). In other sections of the Blick, Széchenyi accuses the Germans of planning to “swallow up” the Magyars and to germanize everything although they did not possess the qualities necessary to melt others as proven by their contacts with other nationalities. With biting satire, he suggests that since German national awakening and undisputable superiority constituted the major trend in the world, it was the foremost duty of every German to produce a sufficient number of new citizens for the globe; as this could not be done in sufficiently large numbers, mature people now alive should be germanized, too, lovingly or by order. Given their intellectual supremacy, Germans who so far had been unable to unite as one nation, would assimilate the Yankees in America, would bring freedom in England to the slaves of John Bull, and would help the French of Gaul to elevate themselves to the level of a practical German professor. But because in the Austrian Empire, the Germans failed to either annihilate or germanize the brown race of Gypsies, Magyars might still hope to survive by supplementing their relatively small “quantity” with the best possible “quality” of their nation 47 *). Anticipation of Germandom’s darkest forces that were to erupt just two generations later with fury, and the ability to present in a satirical formula his dream of a qualitatively superior Magyar nation, described in one powerful passage of the Blick, demonstrate the dimensions of Széchenyi’s thought. The presentation of the noblest national goal together with that which turned out to be the greatest threat directed against it in Hungary’s modern history shows Széchenyi’s constant preoccupation with the relationship of assimilation and Magyardom’s survival as a nation. The depth of his involvement with this problem can be gauged also in some of his desperate letters in which he blamed himself for all the ills that befell Hungary during and after the revolution. Had he not antagonized Kossuth and mislead the nation, he wrote, the Magyar race would have supplied leadership to Austria and even to Europe. It was his obsession with the idea of nationality that inflamed the younger generation of Magyars, who 46) Árpád Károlyi — Vilmos Tolnai, eds, Gr. Széchenyi István döblingi irodalmi hagyatéka [Count Stephen Széchenyi’s Posthumous Papers of Döbling], 3 vols (Budapest 1921—1925) = vols 7—9 of SzIÖM; here 3 310. «) Ibid. 138—139, 350—352.
