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)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

There was disagreement among the Dokumentum editors as to what constituted declaration of political views. This tension is apparent in the journal, and may have contributed to its downfall. Kassák had urged social and political changes in MA when he was in exile in Vienna, and claimed that art and self-formation had important parts to play, but he did not see the need for taking a position in current political issues. In this respect, he put some distance between himself and other avant-garde journals put out by émigrés, which were directly connected to the Communist Party and followed the Prolet- kult line. Examples are Akasztott Ember [Hanged Man] (1922) and Ék [Wedge] (1923-1924), launched by artists who had broken with Kassák precisely because of their party activism. The writers Illyés and Déry had also been involved in the workers’ movement during their years of exile, and unlike Kassák, wanted to form Dokumentum into an outspoken journal that took a stand in current political issues. Kassák did not want to make this concession to his co-editors. Even MA had emphasized the autonomy of art relative to the left-wing parties, and had approached politics indirectly and with an utterly different logic, but there were also censorship considerations in avoiding stating political views directly.

Differences in outlook among the editors and the restriction of freedom of speech and freedom of the press combined to explain why Dokumentum, despite being a political journal, avoided taking a direct stance. It could be described as a depoliticized journal, meaning that in Hungary, avant-garde journals (which were inherently political - from the Dada publications of Berlin to La Révolution surréaliste [The Surrealist Revolution], published between 1924 and 1929 and clearly exercising the greatest influence on Illyés and Déry) were required by external forces to at least partially veil their political character if their staff were to avoid trouble for propagating their political views.34 It was a frustrating situation for the editors, and generated tension among them, as they mentioned in their press statements and private correspondence of the time. Andor Németh, for example, described the editorial staff as a ‘“foreign embassy’ - the embassy of a new society - here in Budapest in 1927. That perhaps explains why we do not interfere in the internal affairs of the host state’’.35 Tibor Déry wrote in a letter to philosopher Vilmos Szilasi: “I objected

34 “Depoliticized" is different from “apolitical” or “antipolitical”. On the latter, see György Kon- rád, Antipolitika, Közép-európai meditációk [Antipolitics, Central European meditations], AB Kiadó, Budapest, 1986. Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, Reticence as Dissidence Under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956-1989,1. B. Tauris, New York, 2014.

35 Andor Németh, Új folyóiratok, régi hangok, op. cit, 34-35.

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