Introduction: The Subject and Its Research

Intellectual fermentation in Hungary, particularly in fin-de-siècle Budapest, favored the growth of a uniquely gifted generation. Changes in the structure and organization of Hungarian society, along with the distinguishing features of Hungarian assimilation, helped to nurture a typically Hungarian, and more particularly Budapest, talent. These patterns of assimilation in pre-World War I Austria-Hungary, particularly in Hungary, and those in the United States share a number of remarkable similarities.
The social and legal interplay of Jewish-Gentile relations such as religious conversion, mixed marriages, forced and voluntary Magyarization and ennoblement became relevant at the time of World War I, as well as during the social and political crises of 1918-1920. The social dynamics of post-World War I coalesced to condition significant intellectual and professional emigration from Hungary. It was in this post-War social upheaval, and particularly in the Hungarian “Soviet revolution” of 1919, that professional and intellectual emigration was rooted, and which can be seen first and foremost as a partial solution to the problems of Hungary’s upwardly mobile Jewish middle and upper-middle classes.
Most of the people who left Hungary in 1919 and the early 1920s were directly involved in running one of the revolutions of 1918-19, particularly the Bolshevik-type Republic of Councils (Tanácsköztársaság) of 1919, and/or were, as a consequence, threatened by the ensuing anti-Semitism unleashed in the wake of that disastrous political and social experiment. It is sadly ironic that most Hungarian Jews who felt endangered after 1919 were in fact more Hungarian than Jewish, representing mostly an assimilated, Magyarized, typically non-religious middle or upper-middle class which had profoundly contributed to the socio-economic development, indeed, the modernization of Hungary. Their exodus was a tremendous loss for the country just as it became a welcome gain for the other countries they chose to settle in.
For the small groups of intellectually-gifted Hungarians, often of Jewish origin, who started their migration toward other European countries and the United States after the political changes of 1918-20, the typical choice was to one of the German-speaking countries. Austria and Germany were most commonly chosen, but many went to Czechoslovakia which boasted of prestigious German universities. After what often proved to be the first step in a chain- or step-migration, most Hungarian émigrés found they had to leave those countries upon the rise of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and continue on their way, in most cases, to the United States. This was not the only pattern, though this “double migration” emerged as the most typical one.
The list of internationally recognized people who emigrated from Hungary at that time is truly astonishing: distinguished scientists such as Theodore von Kármán, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner; philosophers such as Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim; filmmakers (later Sir) Alexander Korda, Michael Curtis, and Joe Pasternak; film theoretician Béla Balázs; visual artists like Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy , and designer Eva Zeisel; photographers such as Brassa?, Robert Capa, André Kertész, and Martin Munkácsi; art historians and critics such as Frederic Antal, Arnold Hauser, Erno Kállai, and Charles de Tolnay; conductors such as Antal Dorati, Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Reiner, (Sir) Georg Solti, George Szell; other musicians like Paul Abraham, Gitta Alpár, Andor Földes, Eugen Szenkár, and, later, Béla Bartók; music historian Otto Gombosi. This constitutes just a partial list of the brightest people to leave Hungary forever.
Professional migration was a European phenomenon after World War I, not restricted to Hungary alone. The War was followed by immense social convulsions that drove astonishing numbers of people into all directions. Russian and Ukrainian refugees escaped Bolshevism, Poles were relocated into reemerging Poland, Hungarians escaped from newly established
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia and tried to find some place in a new Hungary[1]. Outward movements from Hungary in the 1920s were part of this emerging general pattern, and cannot be defined as emigrations proper. Many people went on substantial and extended study tours of varied length – just as others did before World War I. Contrary to general belief, migrations were not limited to Jews suffering from the political and educational consequences of the White Terror in Hungary, as a reaction to the revolutions of 1918-19. Yet Jewish migrations were a definitive pattern of the 1920s when the Numerus Clausus law of XXV:1920 excluded many of them from college.
A significant, though smaller group of non-Jews also left Hungary at the same time. The non-Jewish professional emigration from Hungary in the 1920s included eminent persons such as authors Lajos Kassák, Gyula Illyés and Sándor Márai; visual artists such as Aurél Bernáth, Sándor Bortnyik, Noémi Ferenczy, Károly Kernstok; singers Anne Roselle (=Anna Gyenge), Rosette (Piroska) Andai, Koloman von Pataky; actresses Vilma Bánky, Lya de Putti; organist/composer Dezsö Antalffy-Zsiros; and, most notable of all, scientist and future Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi. Motivated by politics, poverty, or curiosity, gentiles with dramatically mixed convictions hit the road and tried their luck in Paris, Berlin, or Hollywood.
In an effort to increase their chances of getting into the United States, many Hungarians left the successor states of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy self-identified as “Romanians”, “Czechoslovaks”, or “Yugoslavs” as U.S. Quota Laws enabled very few Hungarians to enter the United States. Nevertheless, most migrants were directed to centers in Europe, and most of all, to Germany. German centers of culture, education, and research represented the pre-eminent opportunity for young Hungarians searching for patterns and norms of modernization.
Research on the history of intellectual migrations from Europe, a broad and complex international field, was based initially on eye-witness accounts which served as primary sources rather than scholarly literature [2]. Even Laura Fermi’s classic study on Illustrious Immigrants [3], focusing on the intellectual migration from Europe between 1930 and 1941, falls into that category. Research proper brought its first results in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Soon after Fermi’s pioneering venture, Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn significantly extended the period of investigation when publishing a series of related articles in their The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960 [4]. From the beginning it was German-Jewish emigration that was best researched, a pattern that was partly reinforced by H. Stuart Hughes’ The Sea Change. The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965, an excellent survey of the movement of European thinkers and thinking before and after World War II [5]. By the end of the 1970s, the first guide to the archival sources relating to German-American emigration during the Third Reich was also compiled [6]. The 1980s produced the much-needed biographical encyclopedia which paved the way for further fact-based, quantitative research [7]. Soon the results of this research became available in a variety of German, English, and French publications focusing on German, German-Jewish and some of the other Central European emigration in the Nazi era [8]. The primary foci of the research of the 1980s were the émigré scientists and artists fleeing Hitler, with growing interest in U. S. immigration policies during the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Europe [9].

In contemporary statistics and journalism, most refugees from Germany were hurriedly lumped together as “Germans” or “German-Jews” without considering the actual birthplace, the land of origin, the mother tongue or national background of the people who were forced to leave Germany. This unfortunate tradition has tended to survive in the otherwise rich and impressive historical literature on the subject. The great and unsolved problem for further research on refugees from Hitler's Germany remained how to distinguish the non-German, including the Hungarian, elements: people, problems, and cases in this complex area. This is important not only for Hungarian research but may result in a more realistic assessment of what we should, and what we should not, consider “German science” or “German scholarship” in the interwar period.

Laura Fermi was probably the first to notice the significant difference between German refugee scientists and Hungarians forced to leave Germany. Her Illustrious Immigrants included a few pages on what she termed the «Hungarian mystery», referring to the unprecedented number of especially talented Hungarians in the interwar period [10]. The systematic, predominantly biographical treatment of the subject was begun by Lee Congdon in his eminent Exile and Social Thought which surveyed some of the most brilliant careers of Hungarians in Austria and Germany between 1919 and 1933 [11]. A contribution on the achievement of the great Hungarian-born scientists of this century, mostly biographical in nature, came from fellow-physicist George Marx [12]. In a recent book, István Hargittai assessed the achievement of five of the most notable Hungarian-born scientists who contributed to the U.S. war effort [13]. A full treatment of the Hungarian share in the great intellectual migrations of the interwar decades is planned by the present author [14].

Hungary and the German Cultural Tradition

For those trying to escape Hungary after World War I and the revolutions, the German-speaking countries appeared the most obvious destination. The German influence in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was particularly strong in the educational system, in the musical tradition, and in the arts and sciences. Members of the Austro-Hungarian middle classes spoke German well, and countries like Austria, Germany, and newly-established Czechoslovakia were close to Hungary, not only in geographic, but also in cultural terms. Weimar Germany and parts of German-speaking Czechoslovakia were also liberal and democratic in spirit and politics. In addition, like the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Germany and to some extent, Czechoslovakia, represented a multi-centered world: each of the «gracious capitals of Germany's lesser princes» [15] could boast of an opera, a symphony, a university, a theater, a museum, a library, an archive, with an appreciative and inspiring public which invited and welcomed international talent. Young musicians graduating from the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin could be reasonably sure that their diploma concerts would be attended by the music directors and conductors of most of the German operas across the country, poised to offer them a job in one of the many cultural centers of the Reich [16]. Berlin and other cities of Weimar Germany shared many of the cultural values and traditions which young Hungarian scholars, scientists, musicians, visual artists, film-makers and authors were accustomed to, providing an attractive setting and an intellectual environment comparable to the one that perished with pre-War Austria-Hungary, or was left behind, particularly in Budapest [17]. The vibrant, yet tolerant spirit of pre-Nazi Germany, and particularly the atmosphere of an increasingly “Americanized” Berlin, gave them a foretaste of the United States and some of her big cities.
Both as a language and as a culture, German was a natural for Hungarians in the immediate post-World War I era. The lingua franca of the Habsburg Empire and of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, German was used at home, taught at school, spoken on the street and needed in the army [18]. This was more than a century-old tradition: the links between Hungary and the Austrian and German cultures went back to the 17th and the 18th centuries. The average “Hungarian” middle class person was typically German (“Schwab”) or Jewish by origin, and it was German culture and civilization that connected Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with Europe and the rest of the World. Middle class sitting rooms in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia and Croatia typically boasted of the complete work of Goethe and Schiller, the poetry of Heine and Lenau, the plays of Grillparzer and Schnitzler [19].
Not only were German literature and German translations read throughout these areas: German permeated the language of the entire culture. When Baron József Eötvös, a reputable man of letters and Minister of Education, visited his daughter in a castle in Eastern Hungary, he noted: «What contrasts! I cross Szeged and Makó, then visit my daughter to find Kaulbach on the wall, Goethe on the bookshelf and Beethoven on the piano» [20]. Scores of Das wohltemperierte Klavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, Gigues and Sarabandes by Georg Friedrich Händel, the sonatas of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, the Variations sérieuses by Felix Mendelssohn, the popular songs of Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann, piano quintets of Johannes Brahms, and the brilliant transcriptions of Franz Liszt; these were the works which adorned the salon, or, in higher places, the music room.
Throughout the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and beyond, Hungarians looked to import from Germany modern theories and modern practices. Two examples from the beginning and the end of the period are characteristic. Immediately after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, young education philosopher Mór Kármán, the father of Theodore von Kármán, was commissioned in 1869 by Baron József Eötvös, then Minister of Religion and Public Education, to study the theory and practice of teacher training in Leipzig, then Saxony in Germany, and introduce the German system into Hungary. After almost two years under Professor Liller in Leipzig, Kármán returned to Hungary and founded, in 1872, both the Institute for Teacher Training at the University of [Buda]pest as well as the closely related Practicing High School or Modelgymnasium for prospective teachers, thus profoundly influencing Hungarian education in a German spirit and tradition [21]. Likewise, in December 1918, Cecilia Polányi, the mother of Michael and Karl Polanyi and future grandmother of Nobel Laureate John C. Polanyi, intended to study the curricula and methods of German institutions in the field of “practical social work” and planned to go to Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Mannheim, Hannover, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Augsburg, Munich, Heidelberg, Königsberg and a host of other places where the various Soziale Frauenschulen, Frauenakademie, Frauenseminare were the very best in Europe [22].
Efforts to study and imitate what was German were natural. German was then the international language of science and literature: in the first eighteen years of the Nobel prize, between 1901 and 1918, there were seven German Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, six in Physics, four in Medicine (one Austro-Hungarian), and four in Literature [23]. Scholars and scientists read the Beiträge, the Mitteilungen, or the Jahrbücher of their special field of research or practice, published at some respectable German university town such as Giessen, Jena, or Greifswald. The grand tour of a young intellectual, artist, or professional, would unmistakably lead the budding scholar to Göttingen, Heidelberg, and, increasingly, Berlin. Artists typically went to Munich to study with Piloty [24].
The illustrious faculty of the newly-founded Music Academy of Budapest, in most cases invited to Hungary by Franz Liszt himself, typically taught young Hungarians such as Béla Bartók or Zoltán Kodály through German [25]. When German composer Johannes Brahms performed his works in Pest (later Budapest), he recognized that the best music critics wrote in the German papers, that the head of the leading chamber group was German-Hungarian Jeno Hubay (formerly Huber), the cellist of the quartet was the Prague-born David Popper, that the second violinist was the Viennese Victor Ritter von Herzfeld, and that the viola player was an Austrian of peasant origin, József Waldbauer. It was not only in the opera and philharmonic orchestra that the German language reigned supreme: German was the language in which Professor Hans Koessler taught composition and Xavér Ferenc Szabó taught orchestration at the country's top music institution. When Brahms visited the music shop Rózsavölgyi & Co’s in downtown Budapest, he was received by the German-speaking Herr Siebreich who gave him the recently published Hungarian folk pieces that formed the basis of Brahms’ four-handed Ungarische Tänze (Hungarian Dances). There was no reason for the strongly Gesamtdeutsch (All-German) -oriented Brahms to doubt the ‘deep German embeddedness’ of Hungarian culture. This is why his Hungarian pieces were composed as though they represented a particular, Eastern branch of German music: they jump about, as it were, in a pair of German trousers, the mádjárosch Hopsassa, to which Musicology Professor Antal Molnár referred in remembering the Budapest of his early years [26].
Ironically, it was the Moravian-Jewish Gustav Mahler who, as Director of the Royal Hungarian Opera between 1888 and 1891, first demanded that singers use the Hungarian language instead of the generally-accepted German [27], though Mahler himself, as well as several other celebrated conductors in Budapest such as Hans Richter and Arthur Nikisch, only spoke German.
The Hungarian middle classes often read local papers published in German that were available throughout the Monarchy until its dissolution and even beyond. Founded in 1854, the authoritative Pester Lloyd of Budapest, for example, continued as one of the most appreciated and well-read papers of the Budapest middle class until almost the end of World War II (1944). German in language but committed to Hungarian culture [28], this part of the press helped bridge the gap between the two cultures. In much of the 18th and 19th centuries, German novels and poetry, written and published in Hungary, were as integral to Greater-German [Gesamtdeutsch] literature as anything written in Königsberg or Prague [29]. The Jewish population of the Empire/Monarchy, and particularly its educated urban middle class, embraced German first and foremost as a new common language and contributed to making the Austrian realm a part, and not just an outskirt, of German civilization [30]. For socially aspiring Jewish families, German was the language of education and upward mobility.
With all this infusion of German blood into Hungarian musical life and education, Budapest in the early 1900s still did not seem comparable to Berlin. Young and gifted Erno (Ernst von) Dohnányi considered the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin a much greater challenge. «To choose Budapest instead of Berlin would have been such a sacrifice on my part which, considering my youth, the fatherland cannot demand and, considering my art, I cannot make», he wrote to the Director of the Budapest Music Academy around 1905. «Berlin is unquestionably the center of the musical world today. Budapest, we must admit, does not play even a small role in the world of music. Even if it is true that the Hochschule of Berlin is simply the center of a clique, that clique is enormous and has played a role for decades whereas the musical world doesn't even notice whether or not I take a dominating position in Budapest» [31]. Dohnányi stayed in Berlin until World War I and, as Ernst von Dohnányi, became one of the internationally most attractive professors of the Hochschule für Musik. Promising pianists from Hungary such as Ervin Nyiregyházi, Imre Stefániai, and Marianne Adler of Budapest, and even international students such as Swedish composer Franz Berwald's granddaughter Astrid of Stockholm, came to study with him in pre-War Berlin [32].
A center for Hungarian culture in Berlin, Collegium Hungaricum was founded in 1916. Robert Gragger went to teach Hungarian studies at the University of Berlin and became director of the Collegium. He also published the Ungarische Jahrbücher, a quality journal presenting Hungarian scholarship. Gragger's Collegium attracted particularly young Hungarians at the beginning of their careers.
Berlin in the early pre-War era proved to be an irresistible magnet for the new Hungarian intellectual and professional classes. Many of the young Hungarians who frequented Berlin around the turn of the century were Jewish. The Jewish-Hungarian middle class felt at home in imperial Germany and sent their sons and daughters there to study. After completing their courses in Budapest before World War I, Hungary's up-and-coming mathematicians saw Göttingen and Berlin as the most important places to study. As a very young man, the celebrated Lipót Fejér spent the academic year 1899-1900 in Berlin where he attended the famous seminar of Hermann Amandus Schwarz. In 1902-1903, he studied in Göttingen and in subsequent years returned to both universities [33]. A gifted student of Fejér, Gábor Szego also followed his path and went to study in pre-War Berlin, Göttingen and Vienna, and later became professor of mathematics at Stanford [34].
Men of letters also followed in numbers. The poet and future film theoretician Béla Balázs went to study with Georg Simmel in 1906, and dedicated his doctoral dissertation Az öntudatról (“On Self Consciousness”, later renamed Halálesztétika, “The Aesthetics of Death”) to his German master [35]. The heroin of Balázs’s first literary opus, Doktor Szélpál Margit, spent three years in Berlin as a student, a typical pattern in pre-War German-Hungarian relations [36]. Critic, author, and art-patron Baron Lajos Hatvany studied classics with the prestigious Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Berlin--an experience which he came to denounce in his sarcastic Die Wissenschaft des nicht Wissenswerten, first published in Leipzig, Germany [37]. His second book, Ich und die Bücher, was published simultaneously in both German and Hungarian in 1910 [38]. Others who went included important businessmen such as stock exchange wizard Alfred Manovill who, well before the War, joined the Berlin bank Mendelssohn & Co. at the age of 24 and acted as the honorary president of the Berliner Ungarn-Vereins through the advent of Hitler [39].

The Amerikanisierung of Berlin

While visiting Berlin, the young Henry Adams found very little of interest in 1858-1859 and noted that «the German university and German law were failures; German society, in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to an American»; and he spoke about the «total failure of German education» [40]. Until well after 1871, Berlin seemed very little other than a provincial garrison town. Henry Adams described Berlin as

a poor, keen-witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from discipline, activity scarcely existed [41].

Three decades later, another American, E.A. Ross, saw it very differently:

The long lines of brilliant electric light globes, the rows of the brilliant shop windows, the omnibuses, the carriages, the streams of pedestrians – all this made me exult. ‘Hurrah!’ I cried to myself, ‘This is what you are preparing for. You will be one of similar streams of humanity in the cities of the Great Republic... You shall be in the tide. Work and wait and watch’ [42].

For Ross, Berlin was the big city, a glittering summary of all possibilities that could lie ahead.
For German cultural critics such as Julius Langbehn, Paul de Lagarde, and Moeller van den Bruck, Berlin a mere couple of decades later had taken on an American flavor which seemed to be evil itself. «Spiritually and politically, the provinces should be maneuvered and marshaled against the capital», exclaimed Julius Langbehn in his hatred against Berlin [43]. It was he who thought that the ancient spirit of the Prussian garrison town was corrupted by the poison of commerce and materialism which he identified with the Amerikanisierung (Americanization) of Germany. Langbehn bitterly resented «the crude cult of money which» he insisted, «was also a North American trait, which takes over more and more in today's Berlin; a German and honorable spirit should definitely stand up against it. Coins of money are mostly dirty. For the Germans of today, they should be the tool and not the purpose» [44]. Langbehn’s was a typical voice crying out against the big new cities across the continent of Europe as well as in the United States. His tract appeared approximately at the time when Josiah Strong described the American city as one of the great perils of his day [45]. Eventually, however, Langbehn identified «the crude cult of money» not only with North America but, as he inserted it in subsequent editions of his phenomenally popular book, it was «also a Jewish trait» [46].
Changes quickly occurred when, after the unification of Germany, the nation needed a large national political capital city to govern the new Reich. Just as Budapest after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, or St. Petersburg under Peter the Great, the new, cosmopolitan and culturally important Berlin was created largely by political exigencies. The big newspaper concerns and the many new theaters helped the city become preeminent by invigorating its cultural life and making it, by the beginning of the new century, «an important gathering place for artists who casually defied Imperial and bourgeois cultural standards, and cultivated everything that was artistically modern» [47]. Though it was not as charming and easy-going as Vienna, it was also less traditional and conceited and welcomed experimental art and artists, science and scientists. Richard Strauss made his reputation there, and even Feruccio Busoni went from Italy to Berlin [48]. The city had the ill-fame of being a crazy place and Berliners made fun of themselves through a little verse in the local dialect:

Du bist verrückt, mein Kind,
Du mußt nach Berlin,
Wo die Verrückten sind,
Da jehörst de hin [49].

Largely as a result of the influx of its new residents, Berlin underwent remarkable changes in the late 19th century, generating concern among Conservatives about the “Americanization” of their country, the coming of a mass society with its materialism, mechanization and idolized riches. The first to use the term in a speech in 1877 was Emil Du Bois-Reymond who warned of «Amerikanisierung in terms of the growing overweight of technology» [50]. Du Bois-Reymond made frequent references to the threat of Amerikanisierung for Europe, her intellectual life as well as for her economy.
“Americanism” assumed an even more complex meaning in the 1890s. James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore initiated a movement within the American Catholic Church, trying to adapt it to the complexities of a new industrial society like that of the United States. This movement was seen as a modernist opposition within the Church, and cultural critics like Langbehn must have also been aware of this double secular and religious meaning of “Americanism”. The dispute over this modernizing program became such an issue in both Germany and France that in 1899 Pope Leo XIII dispatched an encyclical, Testem benevolentiae, to Cardinal Gibbons, condemning Americanism, especially the view that «the Church ought to adapt herself somewhat to our advanced civilization and, relaxing her ancient rigor, show some indulgence to modern popular theories and methods» [51].
By the turn of the century the term was so widely used and considered such a pernicious threat in Germany that Paul Dehn spoke of the potential dangers of an «Americanization of the Earth» in a paper published in 1904:

What is Americanization? In the economic sense Americanization means the modernization of the methods of industry, commerce, and agriculture as well as in all areas of practical life. In a broader sense, socially and politically considered, Americanization means the [uncontrolled], exclusive, and [inconsiderate] drive for possession, riches and influence... [52]

The term Amerikanismus became widely used and adversely interpreted by the post-War years. «Deutsche Rundschau», one of Germany's most respectable periodicals, discussed its history and meaning in two subsequent articles in 1930 [53].
For contemporaries with a knowledge of both cultures, it was post-World War I Berlin that had become most thoroughly Americanized. The Diary of Lord D'Abernon, British Ambassador to Berlin in the early 1920s, is full of references to the American features of Berlin and Germany, and to the affinity of Germans to American style and methods. «The similarity of Berlin to an American city has impressed many travellers», the Ambassador noted in an Introductory Survey to his Diary [54]. «The methods of American trade and finance are derived from Germany rather than from England, being based in the main on the traditions of Frankfurt and Hamburg» [55]. «The close sympathy and instinctive understanding between Americans and Germans is difficult to analyse and explain. The German accepts an American argument far more readily than that of a European. ... The American he at once finds practical and convincing» [56]. Berlin in these ways was not German at all, but an American city planted in Germany and temporarily dominating it. Berlin became essentially non-German and foreign. «Berlin, with its broad regular streets and squares at fixed intervals, with an entire absence both of the picturesque and the squalid, is much more like an American than a European city»[57]. Towards the end of his term in Berlin, in 1926, the British diplomat concluded:

A parallel is sometimes drawn in this respect between America and Germany. Both appear to me animated with similar ambitions, and to measure success almost exclusively by wealth. ... The Germans will adapt themselves to American industrial methods much more easily than the English. In business there is a temperamental affinity between them [58].

The American industrialist Henry Ford was very popular in Germany and his 1922 My Life and Work was published almost instantly in a German translation which sold 200,000 copies. F.W. Taylor’s book on Scientific Management was equally popular, both as a slogan and as a practical way to deal with the economy. Also, there were American-type high rises, jazz bands, Black American musicians, and the entire American entertainment industry to dazzle the German mind and mold the German way of life according to American patterns. Josephine Baker, Fred Astaire, Greta Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were just as popular with the German audience as they were at home [59].
Berlin's open-mindedness to contemporary music was also, to some extent, an American-like feature: in the mid-1920s, the various opera companies of the city presented Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, Arnold Schoenberg's Die Glückliche Hand, and several of the new operas by Richard Strauss under the baton of some of the most celebrated conductors of operatic history such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and by composers such as Richard Strauss and Stravinsky. It was in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zu Berlin that Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch's Amerika was first performed in the 1930-31 season, almost exactly at the time when Dr. Charlotte Weidler lectured on Amerikanische Kunst in the Lessing-Hochschule in a Berlin series on modern art [60]. Berlin's attraction to anything new and, often, American, which foreshadowed the spirit of innovation and experimentalism, became one of the fundamental experiences when a few years later this generation of Europeans escaped the rise of Nazism by leaving Hitler's Germany for the United States. German author and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann pointedly commented on the Americanization of Europe in 1929, suggesting that it went hand in hand with «the cultural and artistic Europeanization of America» [61].
It had a certain logic that after 1918-1919, intellectual refugees from Hungary, many of them future Americans, migrated first to Berlin, a city which later reminded many of them of the United States.

'The Babel of the World'

That “American” meant “modern” and Berlin was “American” in that sense became most evident in Weimar Germany after World War I. With most German cities turning conservative, Berlin became progressive and truly the cultural capital of Germany [62]. «Berlin harbored those who elsewhere might have been subjected to ridicule or prosecution», wrote historian István Deák, and added:

Comintern agents, Dadaist poets, expressionist painters, anarchist philosophers, Sexualwissenschaftler, vegetarian and Esperantist prophets of a new humanity, Schnorrer ("freeloaders" – artists of coffeehouse indolence), courtesans, homosexuals, drug addicts, naked dancers and apostles of nudist self-liberation, black marketeers, embezzlers, and professional criminals flourished in a city which was hungry for the new, the sensational, and the extreme. Moreover, Berlin became the cultural center of Central and Eastern Europe as well. Those who now dictated public taste and morals, who enlightened, entertained, or corrupted their customers were not only Germans but [also] Russian refugees from the Red and Hungarian refugees from the White terror, voluntary exiles from what was now a whithering and poverty-stricken Vienna, Balkan revolutionaries, and Jewish victims of Ukrainian pogroms [63].

«The Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, the Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt, the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, the phenomenal operetta singer from Budapest Gitta Alpár, and the Polish embezzlers Leo and Willy Sklarek were some of these famous 'Berliners'», Deák concluded [64].
In the 1920s, in what turned out to be a brief but shining moment, a splendid cultural life emerged in the city. It became the European center for film and theater, photography and literature, opera and the performing arts, architecture and the social sciences. German conductor Bruno Walter remembered this creative splendor suggesting that it seemed «as if all the eminent artistic forces were shining forth once more, imparting to the last festive symposium of the minds a many-hued brilliance before the night of barbarism closed in» [65]. «Berlin aroused powerful emotions in everyone – ‘delighted most, terrified some, but left no one indifferent’», commented the biographer of piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz [66]. Berlin was the center of Germany's cultural upheaval, «a magnet for every aspiring composer, writer, actor, and performing musician» [67]. The playwright Carl Zuckmeyer remembered it as a city that «gobbled up talents and human energies with unexampled appetite». He added,

one spoke of Berlin as one speaks of a highly desirable woman whose coldness, coquettishness are widely known. She was called arrogant, snobbish, parvenu, uncultivated, common, but she was the center of everyone's fantasies [68].

Cosmopolitan Berlin supported nearly 120 newspapers, while 40 theaters, some 200 chamber groups and more than 600 choruses gave performances in 20 concert halls and innumerable churches. «Ten or fifteen years earlier, Paris had been the undisputed queen of Europe... But Berlin with its sensitive restlessness and unerring instinct for quality, had emerged after the First World War as Paris' rival...» [69]. Such was the attractiveness of life in Berlin, that housing was in great demand and hard to obtain. Michael Polanyi and mathematician Gábor Szego each had to wait for several years to get a decent apartment [70].
All this modernism, cultural import, and obsession with innovation produced numerous difficulties. «Material problems, lodging miseries, an introduction to life's sad chapter called 'wie man Professor wird,' etc. would easily explain, even in your young age, your passing depression», said Professor Lipót Fejér trying to cheer up his student Gábor Szego, who was on his way to becoming a professor of mathematics in Berlin [71]. Michael Polanyi in 1920 complained about the joylessness (Unerfreulichkeit) of the city, which his Karlsruhe friend Alfred Reis described to him as a «serious jungle» [72]. Berlin also changed in terms of social behavior, sexual ethics and the moral code. Austro-German author Stefan Zweig, one of the most significant and popular figures of modern German literature, was shocked to remember the Berlin of the 1920s which for him became a crazy, highly eroticized whirlwind, «the Babylon of the world».

In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakeable in their probity. ... Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms. ... Along the entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered...; in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. ... hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, to be sixteen and still under suspicion of virginity would have been considered a disgrace in any school of Berlin at that time ... At bottom the orgiastic period which broke out in Germany simultaneously with the inflation was nothing more than a feverish imitation; ... the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely. ... Whoever lived through these apocalyptic months, these years, disgusted and embittered, sensed the coming of a counterblow, a horrible reaction [73].

From Budapest to Berlin

Most Hungarians who made their way toward Germany did not easily find ideal places for their studies or for their ambitions. It was somewhat easier to succeed before the War, though Theodore von Kármán was an exception. When he completed his Habilitation in Germany in 1908 he «was emphatically warned that no one could guarantee that he would ever get a [university] chair. But I received a call after a waiting time which would have been considered short even for Germans»[74]. More typically, introductions for students were expected by prospective Berlin professors; mathematics student Gábor Szego in 1914 needed a letter for E. Landau from his Budapest colleague Lipót Fejér [75].
The situation became considerably more difficult during the War. When in 1916 Michael Polanyi inquired about his prospects for a Habilitation under Professor G. Bredig at the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrical Chemistry of the University of Karlsruhe, he was politely turned down.

We are compelled, now after the War [had started] more than ever before, to take into account the public opinion which urges us to fill in the available places for Dozenten by citizens of the Reich as much as possible. Even though we like to treat the citizens of our Allies the same way as our own, you must have seen in my Institute that the situation was pushed so strongly in favor of them, that as of now, and more than ever before, I must see to attracting more Imperial Germans [76].

A year later, Polanyi tried Munich and turned to Professor K. Fajans in what was then the Chemical Laboratory of the Bavarian State. Though his request was well received and an offer was made to become an assistant to Dr. Fajans, Polanyi's German plans did not materialize until after the War [77].

After the War ended, the prospects for Hungarians in beaten Germany became worse still. Well established in Germany since receiving his Ph.D. in Göttingen in 1908, University of Aachen Professor Theodore von Kármán described the 1920 situation in chilling terms to Michael Polanyi, who was still undecided about his future as a scientist and prospects of his Habilitation or a job. An assistant to Georg de Hevesy during the Hungarian Commune, Polanyi left Budapest at the end of 1919 and went to Karlsruhe where he had already studied chemistry from 1913-14 [78]. «The mood in the universities vis-à-vis foreigners is momentarily very bad but it may change in a few years. ... The inflation conditions are very unpleasant today and it is much more difficult to wait for a job» [79]. From 1920 on, Von Kármán helped a number of Hungarians start their careers in Germany, readily sponsoring friends of his family, often under the most adverse circumstances [80]. Several years later, in 1923, American visiting scholar Eric R. Jette described the German university scene in remarkably similar terms:

conditions in the universities were very bad, of course, in all places. The same story was heard everywhere, no money, no new professors or docents but laboratories filled with students who had almost nothing to live on. Yet the research goes on and the students still keep at their books [81].

In little over a year, however, Jette received better news from Werner Heisenberg who «said that while the university people were not as well off as before the war, they were infinitely better situated than a year ago» [82].

Nevertheless, Hungarians were difficult to turn down. Networking, using available contacts and relying on people already established in Germany, were among the most natural methods used to secure a place somewhere in Germany. Michael Polanyi turned to Von Kármán for help; in turn, the future engineering professor, Mihály Freund asked for Polanyi's assistance for a young relative, Tibor Bányai, who had just completed high school in Budapest and wanted to become an engineer at the University of Karlsruhe, where Polanyi had been active for some time. More importantly, in 1922 Polanyi paved the way for Leo Szilard who tried to get an assistant's job at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Szilard was well on his way to becoming a scientist in his own right and the degree he just received in Berlin under Max von Laue was the best letter of recommendation he could possibly present. Yet, under the circumstances, he needed Polanyi's letter to Frankfurt professor B. Lorenz which called him a «wonderfully smart man» [83]. Of all the Hungarian scientists, however, Von Kármán proved the most active and successful contact person whose German and subsequent U.S. correspondence provides a wealth of information on half a century of Hungarian networking. A typical letter from his German period was sent in 1924 by a Hungarian friend in Vienna, asking for his assistance with Hungarian chemical engineering student Pál Acél to continue his studies «in Germany, preferably under you» [84]. Correspondence on these matters sometimes had to be clandestine: in dangerous years such as 1920, such mail was better sent to Vienna, rather than Budapest, and picked up there personally [85].
Students continued to try to go to Germany for several reasons, one of them being the high level of commitment of the German professors to their gifted students and the great deal of time and interest they allotted to young people in general. Results of even a short stay in Berlin promised to be significant, as in the case of young John Von Neumann. Professor Lipót Fejér asked fellow mathematician Gábor Szego in Berlin in early 1922: «What does little Johnny Neumann do? Please let me know what impact do you notice so far of his Berlin stay» [86]. In an 1929 interview, Michael Polanyi, since early 1923 a habilitierter Berlin professor himself [87], proudly yet sadly described the essential difference between the contemporary Hungarian and German education scenes declaring that

professors in Germany grab with avid interest the hand of any student considered to be gifted. They are like the art-collector whose utmost passion is to discover talent. This is part of the profession of a university professor [88].

It is important to note that his generation shared a similar experience later in U.S. universities: for émigré scholars and scientists, the welcoming atmosphere of German universities became happily rediscovered in, and partly transferred to, the United States.
One of the outstanding characteristics of the post-World War I German environment was its tolerance – political, religious, professional and artistic. People, professions, ideas and artistic products harassed at home in Hungary were welcome in the open atmosphere of Weimar Germany. Béla Bartók's pioneering ballet Miraculous Mandarin, unaccepted and persecuted in Budapest, found a sympathetic audience in Cologne where Hungarian-born Eugen Szenkár performed it for the first time in 1926[89]. Moving to Germany was not only a question of survival in terms of studies, jobs, and promotions: it also meant an opportunity to resume one's original professional activities or intellectual directions. It was not merely the acquisition of a new address; it led to the reconstruction of spiritual (and often bodily) health, the realization of the self, a restoration of the mind.
A case in point is psychoanalyst Michael Balint who decided to leave Budapest for what was then a typical combination of political and professional reasons. «It was very difficult — it was 1920 then — and it was the worst period of the Horthy Regime, very anti-Semitic and anti-liberal and so on», he declared in a Columbia University Oral History interview toward the end of his life [90]. «So it was with my interests in [psycho]analysis... It was almost impossible to get any [position] at the university, so I started to work as a biochemist and bacteriologist. ... But I didn't think that anything could be done in Budapest. So I decided to leave Budapest and try something in Germany» [91], Balint further explained why he went to Berlin as a chemist. He used the introduction of his friend and former colleague Michael Polanyi to get a job at the AGFA laboratories there [92]. «So we departed to Berlin, where I got a small job as a research chemist, with permission that I work for a Ph.D. degree» [93].
Physicist Imre Brody also complained of the political situation when trying to get to Germany.

You know very well - he wrote to Michael Polanyi to Berlin - as you did what you did for that very reason, what it means to me to be able to get out of here, so that I could work, getting out of here, where scientific work, at least for me, is both physically and psychologically equally impossible. Your encouragement and active support, I believe, made successful work possible [94].

Derailed as a result in his scientific activities, Brody indicated that he could not work in physical chemistry, and as a result, devoted his energies to the theory of relativity [95]. «For the moment I find Berlin the most appropriate to go to», he added, though scientists Max Born and James Franck had helped him to get a job at the University of Göttingen [96]. Brody was one of the few notable émigré scientists to return to Hungary and fall victim of Nazism there.
Joining pre-War Hungarian groups and friends in Germany, Hungarians, most of Jewish origin, came by the hundreds to Berlin in the 1920s. They came to study, to find a job, to start their career. They found what increasingly amounted to a Hungarian community, with bass Oszkár Kálmán singing in the Staatsoper and tenor Pál Fehér in the Städtische Oper, and a host of Hungarian singers including Gitta Alpár, Rózsi Bársony, Oszkár Dénes and Tibor Halmai featuring in Paul Abraham's popular new operetta Ball im Savoy. Even after the Nazi takeover, Maestro Fritz Busch presented Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera in the Städtische Oper with Hungarian stars soprano Mária Németh and tenor Koloman von Pataky. Accompanist Árpád Sándor was an organic part of the musical life of the city [97]. Hungarians assembled in four different circles which alternately organized the annual Hungarian ball, helped introduce the new Berlitz method for studying German, and socialized around the Collegium Hungaricum of Berlin, which attracted influential people like the Prussian Minister of Culture Karl Heinrich Becker, physicists such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein, and linguists Bang Kaup and Lévy [98].
Berlin was certainly not the only place to go or stay in, however. Mathematician Gábor Szego was happy to accept a full professorship at Königsberg in 1926, chemist Ferenc Korösy went to study at Karlsruhe in 1923, philosopher Karl Mannheim settled in Heidelberg, where he had studied before World War I [99], and mathematician Otto Szász gave up a position at the University of Frankfurt a. M. in 1933 to leave for the U.S. where he taught mostly in Cincinnati [100].
The history of Jewish-Hungarian scientists and social scientists is the best documented but certainly not the only example of step-migration through Germany to the United States. Several German-Hungarian filmmakers also left Hungary after the Summer of 1919, a well-documented pattern of left-wing intellectuals who participated in some form of Hungary's Soviet-type political experiment, the Republic of Councils. This group included the versatile poet and author Béla Balázs and, more importantly, the scriptwriter for Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard’s Castle, also one of the leaders of the writer's directory of the 1919 Republic of Councils. Written and published in Germany in 1924, his pioneering Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) was the first systematic theory of film, which left a lasting imprint on film directors such as Eizenstein and Pudovkin. Balázs left Berlin in 1931 for Moscow, to return to Hungary in 1945 [101]. Less well-remembered is the fact that both director Michael Curtiz and actor Bela Lugosi were Hungarians who supported the left-wing adventure of 1919 and fled Hungary for Germany. Curtiz directed a propaganda film which tried to popularize the ideals of the short-lived régime of 1919; Lugosi was active in politics and organized an actors' union. Both Curtiz and Lugosi left Berlin soon for the U.S. [102]
Hungarian filmmakers formed an integral part of the German film industry immediately after World War I. German film established its independence from foreign influence after World War I and film production was supported by massive government aid: UFA (Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft) was founded in 1917 and remained the dominant force of the film industry until the end of World War II. The 1920s became known as the golden age of the German cinema.
A large number of Hungarians served their film apprenticeship at the UFA studios in Berlin-Babelsberg. As they did not all work there continuously until Hitler emerged, they did not all leave Germany as a group after 1933. Director Michael Curtiz (Mihály Kertész), director (Sir) Alexander Korda, actor Bela Lugosi, Paul Lukas (Pál Lukács), director Charles Vidor, screenwriter Ladislaus (László) Vajda, and actor Victor Varconi left Germany for the United States well before the Nazis came, as they had found Hollywood's offers more attractive [103].

Temptations and Pressures

The attachment Germany held for Hungarian immigrants can best be illustrated through cases when émigré Hungarians were, successfully or unsuccessfully, lured to some other country in the pre-Nazi period.
The first test of immigrant loyalty in Germany came in 1923-24 when inflation and unemployment suddenly destabilized the economic and social situation of most newcomers. Some Hungarian émigrés, particularly those who essentially failed, or felt themselves to have failed in Germany, were lured back to Hungary in hope of greater personal stability. Frightened by the rampant inflation that swept across Germany in 1923, several newcomers gave up their good German jobs only to become quickly disillusioned in Budapest.
Engineer Imre Pártos was employed as a leading engineer at the Cologne firm Heinrich Butzer, but decided to return to Hungary when the German currency dramatically collapsed in the late Fall of 1923. But within a year and a half, it had become evident that he had made a big mistake.

Life is very sad here in Budapest, unemployment grows almost by the hour, people are naturally sad, the city is desolate in the evenings, and the Winter will be unbearable unless conditions get better in a month or two. The famous good old spirit is gone and few companies may survive these critical times in good health.

Pártos complained to Professor von Kármán from Budapest [104]. «The local situation is best shown by the case of our mutual friend Tibor Szivessy who ... accepted a job in Saloniki, ... but so many Hungarian engineers emigrated there that the salaries became so low that one can hardly survive from them» [105]. At this point, engineer Pártos desperately tried to get back to Germany to find a decent job there, and was eventually supported by Professor von Kármán.
Several psychologists returned from Germany after a few years. Lajos Kardos studied with Karl Bühler in Vienna and published his first major articles in Germany [106]. A Rockefeller grant later took him to Columbia University in 1930-31 [107]. Psychoanalyst Michael Balint became dissatisfied with his Berlin experiences and also returned from Germany in 1924. Though he admired the Berlin psychoanalytical clinic in its heydays under Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel, with colleagues such as Max Eitingen, Franz Alexander (himself a Hungarian by birth), Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Mary Chadwick and others, «We had enough of Berlin. I had my Ph.D. by that time», Balint remembered the mid-1920s. But he soon discovered that times were also hard in Budapest. «We were very squashed in the University, with the Horthy Regime and anti-Semitism, and analysis was a very left wing thing. All sorts of troubles» [108]. Balint left again and went to the U.S. for a year in 1926. In 1930 he opened his own clinic in Budapest, associated with the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, and consciously modeled after the Berlin clinic he had known so well. It lasted for eight years only: when the Germans occupied Austria, Balint «thought that was the time to go. I didn't want to be caught up in it. So I tried to move all sorts of things, and eventually we got permission to come to England» [109].
Though many Hungarian painters were lured to Germany, most of them had little success there and returned in desperation to Hungary through the 1920s. The list of returnee artists compares unfavorably with almost all other professional groups:

Hugo Scheiber was the last of this group to return, in 1934.
Few of these artists were versatile and experimental enough to enter into the European artistic mainstream of the 1920s, though some of them such as László Moholy-Nagy and László Péri, exhibited their work with the best-known contemporary avant-garde visual artists, such as Archipenko, El Lissitzky, Gabo,