Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)

I. PÁRBESZÉD FEKETE-FEHÉRBEN - Bakos Katalin, Anna Manicka: Valami történik közöttünk. Szubjektív előszó a Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben. Lengyel és magyar grafika

school in the 1970s and remember that the author of my history textbook was somewhat embarrassed at Poland's restored independence being more important than the outbreak of revolution. This was not quite in keeping with the official line. KB: Almost bled to death, the population of Hungary took firm action in 1918 against the government that expected newer and newer sacrifice of the people without the hope of victory. The strikes and demonstrations against the war were coupled with such fundamental democratic demands as the right of suffrage, freedom of the press and assembling, and distribution of land. As a result of the bourgeois democratic revolution, Mihály Károlyi became the prime minister and his Independence Party and the Social Democratic Party could form a cabinet. However, external and internal difficulties aggravated the situation. Pro-Entente neighbours crossed the borders that were ratified by the new government in the Belgrade agreement. The Vyx memorandum specified further withdrawal of Hungarian troops. Armed resistance, however, was only undertaken by the Republic of Soviets declared by the Hungarian Socialist Party on March 21, 1919, and the Red Army was set up. It is hard to sum up the dramatic events of the next few months. The Entente had stifled the possibilities of the Hungarian democratic government so much that it opened the way to the proletarian dictatorship. That was of course intolerable for the victorious powers and with the cooperation of the neighbouring countries they swept off the Republic of Councils with arms and diplomacy, making room for Miklós Horthy and the National Army with extreme rightist armed commandos joining them to revenge themselves on the leaders and the rank and file of the Red Republic. Many intellectuals took a role in promoting the goals of the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the Republic of Soviets. They were not only leftists but democrats or socially sensitive artists, teachers, scholars. They hailed the positive goals, the abolition of feudal vestiges, the flagrant social inequalities and illiteracy, the separation of church and education, the promotion of public education, the state support for modern art. Fleeing imprisonment or utter hopelessness during the period of the white terror, lots of intellectual emigrated. Poles and Czechs, in whose countries various modernist trends, constructivist and functionalist architecture, applied arts unfolded unhindered - at times even with official support - are at a loss seeing that the works of the Hungarian avant-garde were created in emigration in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, with some limited possibilities arising in conservative Hungary from the second half of the 1920s. Official cultural policy and conservative criticism branded all modernism as "Bolshevik". The Hungarian origin of artists who remained abroad - László Moholy Nagy, Alfréd Forbáth, Marcell Breuer, Andor Weininger - was blurred. And Europe's first museum of modern art was founded in Łódź! The first interpretation of the short-lived Hungarian Republic of Soviets was passed on to the new generation by the counter-revolution that crushed it and the conservative and extreme rightist ideology in the interwar years, overwritten by the communist ideologues after 1945 with their prejudices, presenting this extremely complex period as a simple story of heroism. All the mental and psychic suppressions broke to the surface with the political change of around 1990, and the young people of today are completely at a loss. In America, posters of the Republic of Soviets are popular items in Hungarian avant-garde exhibitions. AM: I also remember my latest stay in Saarbrücken, Germany and my visit to the local History Museum. They see some things unlike we do. For instance, they believe that during the Nazi occupation the Poles did not object to being sent to Germany for forced labour though they [the Germans] admit that the living conditions offered by the German "hosts" were not congenial. In Belarus, in turn, descendants of the local Poles offered their cousin arriving from Poland in the 1990s pork fat "because of the famine you're going through back at home". Many Russians living in the Soviet Union blamed their food shortages on the Polish drones they had to provide for. Or perhaps the Hungarian drones as well, who knows?