Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36. (1983)
BARANY, George: Széchényi, America, and Assimilation: An Ambiguous Legacy
Széchenyi, America, and Assimilation 199 excelled in tolerance toward all nationalities and religious creeds. Magyar music, literature, language and culture spread among the educated and foreign-born. If only he had left them alone, Hungary with a multi-ethnic population like that of America would be in the process of full development. Her less than ten million Magyars would have gradually magyarized all the propertied classes — only the common folk would perhaps have stuck stubbornly to their own nationality. But fate willed only the emancipation of the Jews 48). The unrealistic and racist overtones of these letters sent in 1850 and 1851 “from the madhouse”, should not obscure the universal challenge inherent in Széchenyi’s variations on the theme of assimilation and cultural interchange written a few years later. He always thought that it was a miracle that the Magyar nation could sustain itself after its long struggle amidst Slav, German and Turkish “elements”. But in Döbling, he also wondered whether Czechs or other “intermingled nationalities thrown into the Austrian pot” would melt into Germandom 49); at the same time, he derided those “deranged minds” who fancied that “nations can be mixed and melted as the Spaniard prepares his ollapodrida” 50 *). “Only highly educated individuals can afford to loose their national character up to a certain point without doing violence to their own value. Thus there will be hardly any national difference between the fully educated Magyar, Englishman, Frenchman, German or Russian, while some geniuses, so-to-speak, cease to be the property of one particular nation and become the treasures of the whole human species. And this is how it should be, because they are the ones who form the links that tie the nations into an interlocking chain. But woe to the nation that betrays and kills its national spirit ... and it can do it only to itself ...” si). It is in the context of this recognition of the individual person’s often ignored right to assimilate or not, and the universal and continual significance of the validation of this right in human history that we must interpret the act of defiance and the deep insight of the old Széchenyi, who signed one of his letters to the editor of the London Times as ‘A Hungarian Who Would Like To Be An Englishman If He Were Not A Hungarian’ 52). It is also in this sense of the erudite individual’s heightened duty that in a letter adressed to the Academy and widely circulated in manuscript form at the end of 1858, the founder of that scholarly institu<») Majláth Széchenyi levelei 3 (1891) 630—634; Károlyi — Tolnai Széchenyi döblingi hagyatéka 1 (1921) 441—442: Széchenyi to Tasner, September 7,1850 and March 14, 1851, respectively. 48) Zichy Széchenyi beszédei 361: speech of October 3, 1844; Károlyi — Tolnai Széchenyi döblingi hagyatéka 3 (1925) 669: önismeret [Self-Knowledge] (1856). 50) Spanish stew of meat and vegetables. Ibid. 2 (1922) 23. si) Ibid. 52) Letter to the Editor of the London Times June 28, 1859: Staffordshire County Records Office Stafford Sutherland Family Papers D 593/v/10/341 a.
