| Tibor Frank*
Berlin junction: patterns
of Hungarian intellectual migrations,
1919-1933
Part one |
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:
Róbert Berény
Aurél Bernáth
Dezso Bokros-Birman
Sándor Bortnyik
Miklós Braun
Béla Czóbel
Noémi Ferenczy |
Vilmos Huszár
Béla Kádár
Károly Kernstok
János Máttis-Teutsch
József Nemes-Lampérth
László Péri
Lajos Tihanyi |
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,
|