Zwickl András szerk.: Árkádia tájain, Szőnyi István és köre 1918–1928. (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2001/3)
TANULMÁNYOK - GYÖRGY SZÜCS: Among the Décor of History - Pessimism and Quests for Intellectual Paths in the 1920's
Hungaricum situated in the former Royal Guards Palace; a pupil of Gyula Benczúr, Andor Dudits was commissioned to paint the National Archives. Klebelsberg was quite straightforward concerning his intentions: "That the conservative Dudits painted valuable frescoes for the Archives is only natural. But I have asked two of the moderns, Béla Iványi Grünwald and Gyula Rudnay to paint scenes of the period of the Turkish occupation, the Verbunkos (recruiting dance), Csokonai and the Hortobágy plains for the aula of the Debrecen university. We have thus set folk and historical themes before modern directions, and I sincerely hope that these masters of ours will be as fortunate in connecting modern painting and national idea as was the literature of the age of reform in combining national idea and literature." If we add to the persons appointed by Klebelsberg János Vaszary, who was commissioned to paint a panneau for the Tihany Biological Research Institute, we immediately arrive at the ambivalent aesthetic formula within which the imagination of cultural minister could fly and bring forth newer and newer ideas. Klebelsberg was no theoretician. His exposition was always characterized by precise argumentation, but he had no capacity for theorizing. He took journalism as a compulsory act of cultural politics, as a necessary means of mediating and conveying ideas. This might have been the reason behind his appointing the philosophy professor Gyula Kornis to be his secretary of state in 1927. Professor Kornis had attempted to reveal the relation between culture, world-view, education, and politics, and to create a philosophically-psychologically based general system that essentially followed the intellectual history trend of the era in several publications, in shorter essays and thick volumes from the beginning of the 20's. " He was concerned about, as he put it in the title of one his later essays, "self-examination in our times", the completion of the task of revealing the relation of individual spirit and Zeitgeist to contemporary culture. He regarded the war to be the watershed, and the ensuing decades would not disprove the experience that man is not so much governed by reason as by passions. Clearly, Kornis knew Giambattista Vico's Scienzo Nuova ( 1 725) and thought one of its statements appropriate for his time: "Peoples having risen from barbarism to civilization will fall back to a barbarism worse than the first one." 1 ' Kornis wrote his own exposition of pessimism already under the shadow of a second great war in 1938, but he trusted that the "passion story" shaking all culture would lead man to a spiritual life of a higher order. Though having contrary points-of-view, though each writing out of fascination for a different Hungary, both the conservative Szekfű and the former radical liberal Jászi shared the historian's position of attempting objectivity and evading propagandistic effects, taking a critical tone, and portraying the period without recourse to any means of mollification. The cultural pessimism of Gyula Kornis was influenced by high-school teacher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West - a work that had appeared unexpectedly on the European intellectual horizon and was to determine the public feeling of 1920's. ' Its first volume being published in 1918 and its second volume in 1 922, the book seemed to have been written under the impact of the War, but an early manuscript version had already been completed before 1914. Spengler himself thought the World War to have proved his theory right, which was a characteristic, though only superficial, aspect of the declining stage of culture. According to his inference, the period between 1800 and 2000, in other words, the encompassable period of present-day culture, is morphologically coeval with Hellenism, moreover, the World War as a summit point actually corresponds to "the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age." ' Spengler however warned against the pitfalls of antiquity theories, that public leaders tend to interpret events of the past in the light of the progress of "contemporary" humanity, while another group - consisting of artists and philosophers - long to leave the present behind, condemn the present by assuming an absolute point of reference in the past. 8 Spengler studied the relations of a genuinely global world history, including oriental and northern African cultures, and it is upon investigating their inner regularities that he established his theses on the birth, flourishing and decay of cultures. The cherished metaphor and prototype of "the end of history" philosophies' 1 ' is thus a mental construct the starting point of which is the questioning of a Europe-centred concept of history and a one-sided cultural interpretation, and the aim of which is to follow to the end the fate of Western European and American culture that reached the stage of fulfilment. In the life of a culture - and therefore in the case of Western European, the so-called "Faustian" culture, as well -, decline necessarily occurs, the last stage of which Spengler calls civilization, in which the religious, social, artistic, etc. forms that culture shaped now loose their organic nature and are degraded. The characteristic developments of the civilization stage are the metropolis, the obliterator of all modes of rural life, irreligiosity - stoicism in antiquity, the modern counterpart of which is socialism -, the dominance of money and machine, and mass culture where the arts are degenerated into entertainment and sport. "All we need to do is imagine ourselves", wrote Spengler, "in the Alexandria of 200 B.C.
