Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

György Tverdota: 2x2 - The Journal Edited by Lajos Kassák and Andor Németh (1922)

adventures. Like the young writer Tibor Déry, he was one of those who stubbornly clung to radical modernity right to the end, possibly even more so than Kassák. When the avant-garde ceased as a movement, he reluctantly made do with the modernity that Nyugat [West] offered the Hungarian public in the 1930s. This explains why Kassák was confident that he had found in Németh a supporter of the most modern endeavours and could trust him as co-editor in the joint venture. This trust was essential to the birth of 2*2. [Fig. 2]

Nonetheless, Németh maintained his independence from Kassák and from MA. He had three fundamental reservations concerning his fellow writers at MA. One was the “scorched-earth" tactic adopted by the Kassák circle. This involved taking up sympathy with some modern movement and then, after a while, abandoning it. From then on, the tendency they had supported became taboo for the members of the group, and on behalf of the newly-chosen movement they ruthlessly heaped criticism on the paradigm they had left behind. Their loudest dispute was with the leading modernist literary journal Nyugat, based on artistic rivalry rather than mutual hatred. Németh, however, had grown up on the works of the first generation of Nyugat and remained

[2.] Unknown photographer, Participants of MA's 1st German Propaganda Evening, Vienna, 22 March 1925, photograph, PIM-Kassák Museum, Budapest

From left to right: Flans Suschny, Leo Flalpern, Miriam Schnabel-Hoeflich, Günther Hadank, Lajos Kassák, Andor Németh, Paul Emerich, Mura Zyperowitsch, and Max Kuhn

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