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)

Eszter Balázs: Avant-Garde and Radical Anti-War Dissent in Hungary-A Tett (1915-1916)

carpet and a crescendo of scapegoat-hunting rhetoric.55 56 It was to these changes that Kassák himself was later to attribute the journal’s ban.55

THE BANNING OF A TETT

The ‘war culture(s)’ often involved denunciation of internal enemies as well as hatred of foreign enemies. It was in a stormy autumn for Hungarian literary life that A Tett had first appeared. The campaign to discredit Endre Ady, led by Jenő Rákosi, targeted Nyugat authors who were gradually intensifying their criticism of the war. Nonetheless, the writers whom Kassák later dubbed “brave mourners"57 did not give up (or gave up only partially) encouraging soldiers at the front to keep up the struggle, thus continuing to follow a minimum programme in supporting the war.58

Unlike Nyugat, A Tett struck a radically new note in war discourses and representations, and it attracted the notice of the popular press as well as the watchful eye of the censor.59 Only the imposition of the ban, however, brought it widespread substantial public attention. No press organ had ever been banned in Hungary since the outbreak of the First World War.60 61 The media almost universally adopted the language of the war discourse, news of the fighting was carefully filtered, there was post-publication censorship, and self-censorship was universal. Consequently, in the early years of the war, Kassák’s journal was the only voice in the press to take such a determined anti-war stance.

There were two kinds of press response to the ban. The objections in the Catholic journals, stated in the name of religious morals, were almost word- for-word the same as those brought against Italy - which had entered the war against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in May 1915 - and the Futurist intellectuals. Új Idők [New Times], a literary magazine close to the govern55 Péter Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban, Középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az első világháború Magyarországán [Trenches in the hinterland, The middle class, the Jewish question and anti-semitism in First-World-War Hungary], Napvilág, Budapest, 2008, 7-8., 15.

56 Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete, vol. II., op. cit., 294.

57 Ibid., 183.

58 Eszter Balázs, Szó és cselekvés kettőssége, értelmiségellenesség, értelmiségi felelősség Magyarországon az első világháború elején [The duality of word and act, anti-intellectualism, and the question of intellectual responsibility in Hungary at the start of the First World War], Múltunk, 61/2., 2016, 50-53.

59 Pesti Napló and ,4 Világ, for example, regularly reviewed the issues of/A Tett and recommended them to its readers.

60 Könyvtári Szemle, 4/1., 1916, 85.

61 Gábor Dobó, Imagining the war: "frenzied Futurists” and “treacherous Italians" portrayed in Hungarian newspapers of the 1910s, in Gábor Dobó-Merse Pál Szeredi, (eds.), Signal to the World, op. cit., 56-58.

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