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

not so much come to know as remember for the rest of my life that, having joined the Axis powers, Hungary supported Hitler's Germany during World War II. With the disintegration of the great empires in the wake of World War I, Austria-Hungary ceased to exist. The monument to the Suffering Hungary, at the foot of which Gina Vitay puts flowers in a film scene, has the shape of a mutilated female torso to symbolize Hungary deprived of some of its old lands. Up on the monument, there is an anti-fascist leaflet! Moreover, Abigél brought it home to me that Hungary had for the most part been a Protestant country (the girls' boarding school at Arkod is a Calvinist one). KB: As part of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, Hungary entered World War I on Germany's side. Losing the war and the incredibly large war losses caused a great trauma, and on top of that, the country lost two-thirds of its former territory. The peace treaty stipulating extremely harsh conditions for Hungary was signed in the Trianon palace in Versailles, hence the word "Trianon" bears symbolical importance for Hungary. Hungary lost its mines, the railway lines that connected the radial lines circularly, as well as major industrial centres. Cradles of Hungarian culture like Kassa, Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad and Újvidék were torn away from the heartland. What caused further frustration and hard to elaborate grievances was that frontiers were not drawn along ethnic borderlines, hence masses of people had to flee, many people were evacuated and resettled. All this had very profound consequences. Very few questioned the sensibleness of Hungary's entry into World War II, the lawfulness of attacking the Soviet Union, because they hoped that allied Germany would guarantee the return of the detached areas. The pro-German section of the military leadership prevented Miklós Horthy's plan to pull out of the hostilities and thereby precipitated the German occupation of the country in 1944. Magda Szabó commemorated the few but truly brave and determined partisans in her novel. An important dissimilarity is religion: Polish culture is decisively determined by Catholicism, while in Hungary the Protestant religions also have an important role. The Reformation spread quickly and widely in Hungary, but the counter-reformation supported by the Habsburg House was also effective, hence the reversal in proportions to the benefit of Catholicism. Debrecen, the native town of Magda Szabó, remained a major centre of Calvinism. AM: I have always been left rather amused by German or French museums' occasional requests for looking through Polish art for traces of trauma following World War I. This on the ground that entire Europe must have gone through the shock of thousands of soldiers fallen, of trenches, war gas, invalids in the streets, people celebrating in the ruins, the great powers destroyed, the Russian revolution and so forth. In brief: the twilight of the gods and the overall Untergang des Abendlandes.

2 The situation in Poland was quite unlike that. We regained independence in 1918 after one hundred and twenty-three years in captivity and though some had fallen, dulce et decorum est pro patria moń. Poland saw something like a cult of the fallen. No wonder it did. People perceived soldiers in Polish uniform as a sign of the new times when the struggle for Poland, until then clandestine, could come out to the open, and Poland could finally rise from the dead like Christ has risen from the tomb... The first decade of the Second Polish Republic was one of euphoria against all odds, of the painstaking unification of relics of partitions: different legal systems, different legislation and different structures of the local administration, of building everything from scratch. Problems had not emerged until the late 1920s, this time shared with the whole of Europe. And then the war came... KB: After the war, the whole socialist camp was inundated with Soviet war films and our own partisan and spy films. Their later-day descendants, the TV serials of the 1970s tried to keep alive the myth of communist heroes. From the Polish crop Four Tank Men and a Dog was on in the cinema and the serial Risk with captain Kloss (Stanisław Mikulski) was on TV. In Hungary, too, there were partisan actions, but they were few and isolated, nevertheless, we also made serials on such themes. Specialists have been wondering how films glorifying the Soviet army and the partisans could be so popular in a country that lost the war to them. At any rate, a thoroughly false picture evolved on the minds of Hungarians about the Polish-Soviet relationship. Very rare was there strict self-searching