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)

Hubert van den Berg: Lajos Kassák, the Viennese Edition of MA and the “International” of Avant-Garde Journals in the 1920s

reaching out to the shores of the North Sea as well as to the Adriatic, as it comprised not only the territories of the German and Austrian-Hungarian empires, but still included in a common understanding of “Central Europe” the Low Countries as well. Illustrative is a map published in Joseph Partsch’s Central Europe in 1903,35 but also a lecture by the famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga thirty years later, addressing the question, whether the Netherlands belonged to Western Europe, to Central Europe or - as he saw it then - should be regarded as bridge in between, “as mediator between Western and Central Europe”.36 [Fig. 15] The East-West divide of the Cold War might have turned the Low Countries once and for all into Western-European countries and, thus, the historical avant-garde from these countries into Western-Europe avant- garde. The fact that Partsch’s map of Central Europe covers almost completely Kassák’s network in his Viennese years, with Paris as the exclave it was for Central-European artists in those days, suggests that Kassák was definitely “Central European” in contemporary terms, in the mind-set of the early-twen- tieth century. As his explicit allegiances in his charts in MA in the years 1922- 1924 suggest, the region of “Central Europe" as some other Europe behind some imaginary “Iron Curtain”, envisaged in the interwar period by the Pol[15.] Map of Central Europe, Joseph F. M. Partsch, Central Europe, Heinemann, London, 1903, [frontispiece.]

35 Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, Heinemann, London, 1903, [frontispiece.]

36 Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilisation in the 17th Century and other essays, Fontana-Collins, London-Glasgow, 1968,138-157.

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