A GEOGRAPHER'S TALE: NATION, MODERNITY, AND THE NEGOTIATION OF SELF IN "TRIANON" HUNGARY, 1900-1960

by

Steven A.E. Jobbitt

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of History

University of Toronto

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada Dissertation Abstract "A Geographer's Tale: Nation, Modernity, and the Negotiation of Self in 'Trianon' Hungary, 1900-1960" Steven A.E. Jobbitt Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Department of History, University of Toronto

Drawing on the private papers and scholarly publications of the Hungarian geographer Ferenc Fodor (1887-1962), this dissertation examines conservative-nationalist identity formation in Hungary between 1900 and 1960, a period which was marked, amongst other things, by the signing of the territorially devastating Treaty of Trianon after World War I, by Hungary's defeat in World War II, and by the postwar consolidation of communism. Looking in particular at how Fodor attempted to negotiate a stable sense of self against the backdrop of a conservative vision of the nation, the dissertation argues that, though Fodor was able to construct a relatively comfortable, middle-class life for himself and his family as a nationalist intellectual, he was unable to overcome the sense of fragmentation, dissolution, and alienation which had burdened him since his youth. Reading his letters, notebooks, diaries, and collections of photographs against his published and unpublished work, the dissertation argues that his on-going quest for meaning and wholeness was undermined not so much by a series of traumatic events, but rather by the nature of both nation and self as unstable "fictions." Acknowledgements

This project has been a long time in the making, and I owe a number of people a deep debt of gratitude. First and foremost I would like to thank my wife and best friend,

Rafaela, and my children, Marta and Matilde, for their enduring love and support as I worked to finish my dissertation. Rafa has always believed in me, and was always there for me when I needed her the most, even after she began her own Ph.D. in African history almost two years ago. I can only hope that I can be as great a support for her as she has been for me. My daughters, Marta and Matilde, have been a never-ending source of joy, solace, and inspiration. Born while I was muddling my way anxiously through the various stages of the Ph.D., they have helped to put this project, and indeed my entire life, into perspective. I can't imagine how I ever would have finished if they had not come into our lives when they did. It is to these three most important women in my life that I dedicate this dissertation.

I would also like to thank my own family, and especially my mother, father, brother, and sister, as well as my wife's parents and family both in Canada and in

Portugal, for all they have done for Rafa and me over these last years. A big "thank-you" also to our friends Ailsa Kay and Julia Greet, and indeed to everyone on Gang Green, arguably one of the most notorious hockey teams ever to darken the ice at Moss Park

Arena in downtown Toronto. The goals may have been few and far between, but the beer was always cold, and the camaraderie second to none. Those Sunday morning games, and the refreshments that followed, made the whole writing process all the more bearable.

iii At the University of Toronto I am very grateful to all my friends and colleagues, and especially to Biljana Bijelic, Christopher Ernst, Tatjana Lichtenstein, Wilson Bell,

Martha Solomon, Sveta Frunchak, Steve Maddox, and Michal Kasprzak for their friendship and support, and also for their careful reading of my work. Their kindness and generosity has helped to keep me afloat over the last eight years, and in particular during those times when I felt it would be easier to quit than to carry on. I am also indebted to

Robert Austin, who has been a great supporter of my work from the very beginning, and who made it possible for me to be affiliated with the Central European University in

Budapest while I conducted my research in Hungary in 2003-04. While in Budapest, I benefited greatly from numerous conversations with Balazs Ablonczy, Gergely Varga,

Robert Gydri, and Batezs Trencs^nyi. I can honestly say that without their early guidance and advice, I wouldn't have been able to produce this dissertation, at least not as it is presented here. I am also thankful to Ivan Zolt&n Deries, Andras Ger6, Istv&i ReV, and Ignac Romsics for their valuable input as I began my research in Budapest in the autumn of 2003. Archivists and librarians at the Danube Hydrological Museum in

Esztergom, as well as at the Academy of Science and the Szechenyi National Library in

Budapest were instrumental in helping me locate sources pertaining to Fodor's life and work. In this respect, I am especially indebted to Fodor's grandaughters, Klara and

Maria, for inviting me into their home, and for allowing me to copy and use the letters, photographs, and scrapbooks that they still have in their possession. Also deserving of thanks are Dr. S6ndor Pallaghy and Zoltan Mike, both of whom gave me access to a number of Fodor's documents in their private collections.

iv I am grateful as well to John Swanson, Thomas Lorman, and N&idor Dreisziger for reading some of the later drafts of my dissertation, and for taking the time to give me invaluable feedback as I worked to revise it for submission. I am especially grateful for the very useful comments and criticisms offered by my committee members Lynne Viola and Derek Penslar, as well as by my internal reader, Paul Rutherford, and my external reader, Robert Nemes. Their immensely valuable insights and suggestions will be of great help to me as I work to revise my dissertation for publication. Finally, an immense debt of gratitide is owed to my supervisor, Thomas Lahusen. Without his constant support and often undeserved patience, I doubt this project would have seen the light of day. This dissertation has come a long way under his guidance, and I honestly cannot find the words to thank him enough for all he has done for me.

My dissertation has benefitted greatly from the generous input of everyone listed above. It goes without saying that the remaining errors of fact, interpretation, and translation are all my own.

Funding for this project came in the form of a number of scholarships, grants, and fellowships: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Fellowship, the

Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Hungarian Helicon Foundation Graduate Award, the

University of Toronto Graduate Fellowship, the School of Graduate Studies Travel

Award (University of Toronto), the Patricia and Alan Marchment Travel Award

(University of Toronto), and the H. Gordon Skilling Fellowship (University of Toronto).

I would like to thank the Social Sciencs and Humanities Research Counil of Canada, the

Ontario government, the Hungarian Helicon Foundation of Ontario, and the University of

Toronto for their generous support of my dissertation.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii

Table of Contents vi

List of Figures vii

Introduction: Finding Fodor 1

Chapter One Layers of Trauma: Trianon, Modernity, and the Long Twentieth Century.. .25

Chapter Two Balkan Fantasies, 1917: The Ebb and Flow of the Self. 78

Chapter Three A "Lucky" Break: Scholarship and Opportunity in Interwar Hungary 129

Chapter Four On The Brink of Being Forgotten: Marginalization, War, and the Retreat into Memory, 1940-1945 181

Chapter Five The Remapping of Nation and Self: Geographies of Survival and Resistance under Communism, 1948-1960 236

Conclusion: Remembering Fodor 290

Bibliography 304

vi List of Figures

Figure 1 An aging Fodor in his boy scout uniform (c. 1956) 2

Figure 2 Fodor and other boy scout leaders (1922) ....65

Figure 3 Fodor and other boy scout leaders (1929) 66

Figure 4 Fodor and family (c. 1917) 74

Figure 5 Resting in a clearing in Bosnia (1917) 110

Figure 6 Fodor's prized flag 275

Figure 7 Scrapbook montage 286

Figure 8 Watercolor of bird (painted by Fodor in 1904) 288

Figure 9 Fodor's house reclaimed 294

vii Introduction: Finding Fodor

"Life can be regarded as a constant effort, even a struggle, to maintain or restore narrative coherence in the face of an ever-threatening, impending chaos at all levels." David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (1986)

There is a photograph of Ferenc Fodor, the Hungarian geographer whose tale this dissertation seeks to tell, that has been foremost in mind almost fromth e beginning of my research into his life and work (see Figure 1). Taken sometime late in his life—perhaps even in the summer of 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution—the photo shows an aging and slightly emaciated Fodor sitting in a simple chair in the backyard of his

Budapest house. Partially reclining to his left, Fodor leans on his elbow, and with an almost vacant expression, peers off to his right, past the camera. Dressed in his boy scout uniform, he looks tired but proud, and by no means ridiculous despite the fact that his khaki shorts have been hiked up to just below his rib cage. There is, in fact, a certain nobility to him, one which he evidently struggled hard to retain despite his failing health, and despite the dark shadow that state socialism continued to cast over his beloved

Hungary. One might even suggest that the photograph was staged in an act of defiance against a regime that had seized power against the people's will, and which had stripped him both of his academic rank and of outright ownership to his own house. Having worked throughout his life not only to defend the nation against its godless enemies, but also to build a comfortable middle-class existence for himself and his family, Fodor appears to have been unwilling to give up without a fight, no matter how symbolic it may have been by this point.

1 2

Figure 1 An aging Fodor in ids boy scout uniform (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks)1

It was this admittedly one-dimensional mental image of Fodor that I took with me to the Hungarian Academy of Science's manuscript collection when I began my archival research on Fodor in January 2004. Looking for hard evidence to back up stories I had

1 This and all other photos of Fodor in the dissertation are printed with the permission of Fodor's surviving family. been told of clandestine boy scout activities and Catholic youth meetings that he had reportedly organized out of his house in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I spent weeks pouring over three lengthy, unpublished manuscripts, one begun during the Red Army's

Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944-45, and only finished in 1949, and the other two compiled between 1949 and 1953.2 Approaching questions of Hungarian geography and identity from the point of view of a conservative-nationalist intellectual, these unpublished studies confirmed that, at the very least, Fodor had continued to pursue his interwar research and writing during the communist period, and perhaps even derived some satisfaction from his "secretive" nationalist work. Writing with passion and conviction that his underground geographies would one day be crucial to the "proper" rebuilding of a post-communist Hungary, these unpublished studies reinforced the image of the embattled but defiant patriot that his backyard, boy scout photograph seemed to capture.

This defiant, even heroic, image of an aging Hungarian geographer clinging proudly to his pre-communist identity was thrown into question, however, when I came to realize that, in addition to these underground studies, Fodor had also written and published a handful of "socialist" geographies during this same period (why I didn't start with his published work, I can no longer remember). Fodor's declaration mat this body of work would contribute to the building of socialism in Hungary obviously ran counter to the conservative-nationalist language of his clandestine geographies, and forced me to reconsider the overly-simplistic picture that I had of him. A discovery of some personal

21 first heard of these clandestine activities from Fodor's granddaughters. Fodor, I'm sure, would have been thrilled to hear them recount with a discernible pride the way they and other children used to disguise themselves as communist pioneers in order to participate in the nature walks mat he is said to have organized and secretly led in the Buda Hills. 4 papers fromth e 1950s only confirmed my growing suspicions that Fodor's tale was much more complicated than I had initially assumed. Reading his letters, diaries, and a number of autobiographical fragments against his published and unpublished work, I came to realize that he was motivated as much by opportunism as he was by a sincere concern for the fate of the nation, and that, against the seemingly incongruent backdrop of his nationalist and socialist work, he was, in fact, engaged in a complex, though by no means contradictory, negotiation of self. Running parallel with, rather than contrary to, his underground nationalism, Fodor's opportunism provided important insight into the multiple strategies he employed to navigate the cultural, political, economic, and intellectual landscape of the post-World War II period. Looking back to bis photograph,

I wondered if, through his sunken eyes, he might not be pleading with future generations to forgive him for the apparent inconsistencies between his public performances, and his private convictions.

It was in light of this more nuanced image of Fodor that I began working more systematically through the documents that he produced over the course of his life, looking for evidence of where the personal appeared to overlap with the political, and the opportunistic with the sincere. Convinced that his scholarly work was a product of a complicated and on-going negotiation of self, I began sifting through the considerable collection of personal documents that I had managed to find, looking for insight into his nation-building geographies, and beyond this also for clues as to who he was, and what made him "tick." My own task, in fact, was not dissimilar to the one that W.G. Sebald sets for himself in his 1992 novel The Emigrants? Much like Sebald, who chases after narrative fragments in an attempt to uncover the secrets of four Jewish emigres whose

3 See W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1992). 5 lives intersected in one way or another with his own, I began pulling at the threads of

Fodor's life-story in the hopes that Fodor's inner world would somehow unravel and present itself to me.

Unlike Sebald, however, who was forced to pick away at scraps of memory in order to retrace outlines of the inner lives of the men he pursued, I was quite literally flooded with documents, and with the often vivid, and sometimes confusing and contradictory, memories that they inevitably contained. In addition to the Academy of

Science manuscripts already noted above, and the numerous books, essays, and popular articles that he published between 1908 and 1957,1 managed to track down two important collections of private papers which proved to be key to my research. Perhaps the most significant in this respect—at least in terms of the relative size of the collection—was my unearthing of nine boxes' worth of documents that had somehow found a home in the Danube Hydrological Museum in Esztergom, a small, picturesque city situated on the Danube Bend some sixty kilometres north-west of Budapest. Here, amongst the numerous hydrological maps that Fodor painstakingly drew and collected during his life, I found a veritable treasure trove of personal and scholarly papers.

Diaries, travel logs, letters, personal photos, boy scout reports, and essays from his days as a gymnasium student at the turn of the century were just some of the more illuminating primary sources to be found. Indeed, in the absence of these documents, my project, at least as I offer it here, would not have been possible.

As vital as these documents ultimately became to my research, a second important

"discovery" came with a visit to the Fodor house in March of 2004. Entering the house was very much like stepping into a living museum. Inhabited by no fewer than three 6 generations of Fodor's descendants and their families, the three-storey dwelling—one that Fodor himself had built in the interwar period—was crammed so full of images, books, and papers that it gave the distinct impression of a functioning archive, a repository of both family and national memory. I had been invited, in fact, by Klara

Hunek Kollar, a professor of engineering and youngest of three Fodor grandchildren.

She currently lives on the main floor of the house with her husband and youngest daughter. Her elder sister, Maria Hunek Gozsi, a retired music teacher and eldest granddaughter who retains a tiny apartment upstairs, was also present As veritable keepers of Fodor's memory, Klara and Maria had inherited a collection that had been carefully organized and preserved since their grandfather's death in 1962, first by their grandmother, Vira Fenczik Fodor, and then by their mother, Vira Hunek (nee Fodor).

The granddaughters were, admittedly, a bit surprised that a Canadian researcher with no Hungarian roots had managed to track them down, and was now sitting in their parlor asking at times very personal questions about their late grandfather. But they were not at all surprised that I should be interested in Fodor's life and work. As it turned out, I was by no means the first historian to pay the sisters a visit. Since the mid-1990s, in fact, a number of scholars, and not a few interested collectors, had been around to examine the impressive collection of personal papers, photo albums, scrapbooks, and unpublished manuscripts still in their possession. Most of the scholars and collectors who had come to visit in the past were admittedly less interested in Fodor than they were in Count Pal

Teleki, a prominent conservative-nationalist politician who, in addition to serving as prime minister in 1921 and again from 1939 to 1941, was also one of Hungary's leading 7 revisionist geographers in the interwar period.4 Only eight years his senior, Teleki was

Fodor's mentor, and perhaps even friend, fromth e time he helped Fodor get a position in

Budapest in 1919 working at the Foreign Ministry, compiling maps and statistical data to be used to support Hungary's case at the Paris Peace Conference, to the day he committed suicide in 1941. It was under Teleki's tutelage that Fodor first learned of, and then refined, his synthetic approach to the study of Hungarian geography, an approach which, with its focus on the ongoing dialectic between the active human spirit and the dynamic forces of nature, sought to understand the historical and geographical evolution of the Hungarian nation from an integrated subjective and objective point of view.

Given the considerable interest that historians have shown over the last decade in

Teleki and other prominent conservative-nationalist figures of the interwar period, it came as no surprise to me to find that the letters and personal papers in the family's possession that dealt with the relationship between Fodor and Teleki had long ago been picked over, a number of them becoming part of the personal collections of some of

Hungary's leading historians and biographers of Teleki's life and work. This is not to say, however, that there was nothing of interest left to be discovered in the family's personal collection. In fact, the documents that others had overlooked, and which the family would probably never relinquish anyway, were, for me at least, the most significant and enlightening of all. When I asked if there might be some of Fodor's

4 It was under Teleki that Hungary passed the notorious numerus clausus act in 1921, a law which limited Jewish participation in Hungary's professional and intellectual vocations. It was during his second term as prime minister that the subsequent First and Second Jewish Laws were enacted. It was also under Teleki's leadership that Hungary made the fateful decision to join the Nazis in their invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. If we can believe some of his biographers, it was this act that led him to take his own life only hours after the invasion had begun. For accounts of Teleki's life and work, see Lorant Tilkovszky, Teleki Pal titokzatos haldla (Budapest: Helikon Kiadd, 1989); and Balazs Ablonczy, Pal Teleki (1874-1941): The Life of a Controversial Politician (Boulder, CO: Social Sciences Monographs, 2006). See also Ferenc Fodor, Teleki Pal (Budapest: Mike es Tarsasag, 2001). 8 personal correspondence still around, Maria produced a large shoe-box, saying that I could look through and copy whatever I wanted fromit , but insisting that there would be nothing of value to a historian interested in Hungarian geography and nationalism.

Luckily for me, she was wrong. When I opened the box I found nearly two hundred letters organized in neat bundles and bound with thin silk ribbons. This body of correspondence, letters that Fodor and his wife had written to each other at various points over their long relationship, offered the sort of intimate emotional and psychological insight into Fodor's life and work that I had been hoping to find. Read alongside the family's photo albums and scrapbooks that I had been allowed to copy page for page, these letters drew me into the private and sometimes stormy world that Fodor and his wife had created for themselves, providing me with yet another glimpse into the complex code that informed Fodor's nationalist geographies and nation-building work.

Drawing heavily on his private papers, this present study charts the inherently complex and often troubled trajectory of Fodor's life from the turn of the century to 1960, reflecting as it does so on his never-ending attempts to negotiate a meaningful and stable sense of self. The intent, however, is not simply to write a biography of Fodor, though a strong biographical element admittedly helps to frameth e themes and overall structure of the dissertation. It is, rather, an attempt to explore the way in which this negotiation of self was a response to the intersecting imperatives and overlapping anxieties generated by both nationalism and modernity. Centered as it is around Fodor's nationalist geographies and nation-building work, the dissertation attempts to show how nationalism itself is not merely a modern political device cynically employed by a ruling, nation-building elite to 9

shape the passive, ignorant masses.5 Though it is undeniable that nationalist discourse

does serve the practical political needs of those in power (and those seeking to gain

power), it cannot, I think, be denied that those who create these discourses also seek some

sort of comfort in them, and that the energy they invest in their creation is itself an

indication of deeply emotional, and fundamentally psycho-ontological needs on their

part.

It is in light of such an hypothesis that Fodor presents an excellent focal point for

this study. The abundance and variety of unpublished personal papers provides the

necessary primary material against which his scholarly and popular work can be read. A

close reading of these primary sources will reveal, I hope, the complex and very personal

processes at work at the heart of nationalist discourse and practice.

Mapping the Inner World of a Nation-Building Intellectual

In one of the concluding chapters to his seminal study Nations and Nationalism, Ernest

Gellner contends that "generally speaking, we shall not learn too much about nationalism

from the study of its own prophets."6 Writing with a barely concealed contempt for the

output of nationalist thinkers, he argues that their doctrines "are hardly worth analyzing."

Suggesting that nation-building intellectuals are responsible for the creation of myths

5 As Alon Confino argues, "cultural history often reduces the cultural to the political." This is perhaps understandable where the cultural politics of nationalism is concerned. But I want to argue that nationalism is not necessarily always about politics, at least not in the sense of power politics. Following in the footsteps of Confino's critique, what I want to avoid is reducing nationalism, and by extension cultural production in the name of nationalism, to politics alone. See Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History," American Historical Review (December 1997), 1395. 6 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 125. 10 which "invert reality," Gellner criticizes them for the perpetuation of nationalist ideologies which "suffer from pervasive false consciousness."

Gellner's low opinion of nationalist intellectuals, one which is shared by many theorists of nationalism, is in part tied to his obvious disdain for what he considers to be the relative intellectual poverty and logical inconsistencies of nationalist thought. But, taken within the context of his entire study of nationalism as a product of the industrialization, modernization, and centralization of modern societies, his dismissal of nationalist intellectuals can also be linked to his assumption that one's adoption and maintenance of a national identity is itself determined by a conscious calculation of the material and economic benefits to be derived from identifying with, and participating in, a particular nation. Viewing modern society as a massive bureaucratic machine in which the individual is compelled to conform or perish, Gellner points to the underlying opportunism that motivates individuals to accept and then cling to their national identity.

Nationalist intellectuals, he implies, are no less immune to this opportunism. If anything, their heightened awareness of what the nation has to offer renders them perhaps more opportunistic than most.8

Despite Gellner's disparaging remarks, the study of nationalist intellectuals—or, to be more precise, their nationalistic writings and political activism—has remained central to the much broader study of nationalism and nation-building in the modern

7 Ibid., 124. 8 See Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), 158-69. Here Gellner argues that "men do not in general become nationalists from sentiment or sentimentality, atavistic or not, well-based or myth founded: they become nationalists through genuine, objective, practical necessity, however obscurely recognized." To this he adds: "For intellectuals, [national] independence means an immediate and enormous advantage: jobs, and very good jobs. The very numerical weakness of an 'underdeveloped' intelligentsia is its greatest asset: by creating a national unit whose frontiersbecom e in effect closed to foreign talent (except in 'advisory' short-term capacity), they create a magnificent monopoly for themselves." 11 period. This is especially true in the case of east central Europe, where intellectuals have typically assumed, and continue to play, a central and very visible role in nationalist politics. Looking past the philosophical inconsistencies that underline the particular nationalistic program being promoted, scholars have given serious thought to the crucial role that intellectual elites have played in the construction and perpetuation of nations and nationalism. As Liah Greenfeld argues in her illuminating article 'Transcending the

Nation's Worth," the practical appeal of nationalism and national structures cannot be underestimated when analyzing the attraction of intellectuals to the nation-building process. Though ultimately no less disparaging than Gellner in her assessment of the obvious opportunism of many nationalist intellectuals, Greenfeld nevertheless attempts to understand them on their own terms, suggesting that, in the case of eastern Europe at least, the nation has traditionally offered the promise of enhanced social standing, and beyond this also dignity.9 Noting that professional intellectuals who give themselves over to the articulation and dissemination of nationalist ideas are invariably rewarded for their efforts with career opportunities and "high social status," she suggests that they have become, in many ways, "the new aristocracy."10

Taken together, the work of Gellner arid Greenfeld provides useful insight into the opportunistic motivations behind nationalist scholarship. But, as I have mentioned

9 Pondering the conversion of German intellectuals to nationalism in the nineteenth century, Greenfeld explains that "while cosmopolitanism and the idea of a world intellectual community offered German intellectuals a form of escape, [and] a possibility to dream about social fulfillment and advancement, partnership in a nation offered real possibilities of such advancement." Liah Greenfeld, "Transcending the Nation's Worth," Daedalus 122/3 (summer 1993): 53. For a similar argument, see Brian Porter When Nationalism Began to Hate. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth- Pentury Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10 Greenfeld, "Transcending the Nation's Worm," 53. See also Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 11. Nemes argues that "Nineteenth- century nationalists may have spoken in terms of freedom, progress, and emancipation, but they often had their sights on more tangible rewards." These rewards included, amongst other things, state-employment, social status, and economic power. 12 above, and as I argue throughout the dissertation, opportunism can only partially explain a nationalist intellectual's interconnected pursuit of nation and self. Beyond the desire for material or social gain, nationalist intellectuals are no doubt also motivated by an equally important quest for personal meaning. Writing on the role that historians and other scholars have played as nation builders in east central Europe, Katherine Verdery has argued that, as inherently divisive and violent as nationalism may be, the "structured processes" of nationalistic projects nevertheless provide a mechanism through which human subjectivities are not only formed, but also linked to a broader organic totality.

Though utilized as a political tool by a nation-building elite keen on transcending on the symbolic level "any social divisions internal to the nationality," the nation itself, and the discourses and practices that it embodies, can and do create a meaningful, if in many ways fundamentally incomplete, sense of self and belonging.11

As Ross Poole argues in his study Nation and Identity, it is for this very reason that we are not only justified in looking more closely at nationalist intellectuals in our desire to arrive at a more complete understanding of the relationship between nationalism, modernity, and identity, but also unwise if we choose not to. Countering the criticism leveled by Gellner, and following in the path of ground-breaking theorists like

Benedict Anderson and Miroslav Hroch, Poole contends that the nation has been central to the way that nationalist intellectuals have come to negotiate "social and political life" in the modern period.12 Writing from the perspective of political philosophy, Poole argues that, under the conditions of modernity, nationalism has become not just an

11 Katherine Verdery, "Introduction," in National Character and National Ideology inlnterwar Eastern Europe, ed. Katherine Verdery and Ivo Banac (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1995),xiv-xv. 12 Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 5. 13

"inescapable political project," but also a fundamental moral imperative.13 In setting the course for what Charles Taylor has described as "the good and meaningful life," nationalism—along with the social, cultural, and political structures that are erected in its name—functions as a fundamentally "creative response" to modernity itself.14

Poole's observations go a long way to helping us understand the underlying psycho-ontological impulses behind nationalism, and beyond this also the nationalist intellectual's "creative" engagement with modernity. In the end, however, his study tells us only half the story. Though he is absolutely correct to suggest that nationalism provides an important moral or philosophical platform for the (attempted) realization of the modern self, he is nevertheless hopeful to assume that it can and does provide nationalist intellectuals with the enduring sense of meaning and stability that they are seeking.15 Indeed, as Rogers Brubaker and other students of nationalism have recently argued, the quest for national identity (a process Brubaker defines in terms of

"identification") is a fundamentally open-ended project, one in which the end goal of absolute unity or totality remains elusive, and ultimately unachievable.16 Drawing on the work of the postmodern theorist and cultural critic Slavoj 2izek, we might even go so far as to suggest that the nation, and with it the desire for a unified self, functions more or less as a fantasy, one whose resolution is ultimately impossible. Though the intent of this

13 Ibid., 5-8. In defining nationalism as a moral imperative, Poole is not suggesting mat it functions simply as an ethical code for the determination of "right" and "wrong." Nationalism, instead, functions as a guide to "the good life." 14 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 15 Poole writes: "Each nation is its own world, and each national language provides its own specific and unique mode of access to that world....For those who find their identity in the nation, the nation is the whole which gives meaning to their lives." Poole, Nation and Identity, 22. 16 See Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity,'" Theory and Society 29 (Feb., 2000): 1-47. 14 fantasy may be to reassure the individual by positing an imagined resolution to existing tensions, the idealized, future-oriented vision that it creates actually serves to heighten, and in some cases even produce, the anxieties that they were originally supposed to mask.17

This basic existential uncertainty, one that Zizek and others suggest is linked to identity formation as a psycho-ontological project whose fulfillment is deferred to some unspecified date in the future, is captured by historian Luisa Passerini in her remarkably personal Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968. Framed around an oral history of the student movement in Italy in the 1960s, Passerini's book is as much, if not more, a memoir as it is a social or cultural history of the student movement itself. Based on the fact that the primary research she conducted in the mid- to late-1980s occurred at the same time that she was undergoing psychoanalysis, Passerini insists on alternating throughout her study between interviews with her subjects and accounts of her therapy.

Implicating herself in the tale she weaves around the experiences of others who, like her, were actively involved in the student rebellions that erupted on campuses in Italy in 1968,

Passerini's work is a fascinating example of what Susan Crane calls "self-conscious historical writing."18 As in her earlier work on Italian fascism, Autobiography of a

Generation is essentially an attempt on her part to understand her roots and, beyond this, to understand how she herself fits into and continues to be shaped by the collective

17 See Slavoj Zi2ek, Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 1-7. 18 Susan Crane, "Writing the Individual back into Collective Memory," American Historical Review (December 1997): 1384. Noting the theoretical and even methodological significance of Passerini's work, Crane adds: "Historians are always 'from' not only their own pasts but also the pasts that they write, insofar as Ihey work on that past in their own lives. Therefore, it is not necessary to strictly segregate the genres of autobiography and history." For other studies which examine this "self-conscious historical approach," see Bonnie G. Smith, "History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic and Baroque Life of Germaine de Stael," and Jeremy D. Popkin, "'Ego-histoire and Beyond': Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers," in French Historical Studies 19 (Fall 1996): 1059-83 and 1139-67. 15 experiences and memories of an entire generation. Driven by an autobiographical imperative not unlike Fodor's, her work is motivated by a desire to unearth a "meaningful connection between the individual [in this case herself] and the collective."19

On one level, the strategy works. Providing her with a mirror of sorts, Passerini acknowledges that the subjects of her study "plunge" her into her own past, reassuring her that she is indeed a part of this generation, all the while reminding her of aspects of her identity or subjectivity that she had lost touch with, forgotten, and perhaps even repressed. But this insight, she soon findsout , has the ability to cut both ways. Drawn into a community she had once known so intimately (or so she thought), Passerini immediately recognizes differences where she had hoped to find similarities, and conflict where she had thought she would find peace and fellowship. She is drawn, moreover, ever deeper into the dark recesses of her own conflicted ego. Discovering that she is in many ways not part of this generation, Passerini recognizes the extent to which, even as an "insider," she remains outside and alienated, even from herself.20

There are important parallels here between what Passerini finds in her work, and what I think Fodor finds in his. The more Fodor searches for evidence of wholeness, unity, and meaning—for himself and for the nation—the more he recognizes the fragmented nature of both. The more he relies on Hungarian history and geography to provide him with an intellectual or psychological escape from a host of threats and anxieties, the more fragile and unstable he findsth e imagined national fortress into which

19 Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: May, 1968, trans., Lisa Erdberg (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 31. See also idem., Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans., R. Lumley and J. Bloomfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 20 Passerini writes that the "mirror" in which she saw herself reflected was itself "opaque," and that the flood of memories that her research and analysis unleashed remained for her largely "weighty," "enigmatic," and "unresolved." Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 1. 16 he has retreated. Underlying Fodor's work, in fact, is the tacit, and in rare cases even explicit recognition that the nation itself does not exist, at least not in the way that he and numerous others have conceived it. Put another way, there is a recognition by Fodor that the social, cultural, material and, beyond this, the symbolic foundations upon which the nation is founded are shaky at best.

Indeed, underneath Fodor's confident pronouncements of a long-standing, perhaps even predestined territorial and national unity, lies an anxious realization that borders not only between nations, but also between race, gender, and class, are transitory, arbitrary, problematic, and potentially self-destructive. Despite the best efforts of nation builders (or re-builders) like Fodor, there are cracks which permeate the discursive facade of nationalist rhetoric, fissures which become all the more visible, and thus worrisome, during periods of crisis. The tenuous boundaries between race, gender, and class become more problematic, for example, and threaten to break down. Even physical boundaries appear more porous.

For her part, Passerini, as a committed postmodernist, takes the unresolved nature of subjectivity, memory, and identity for what it is, and resigns herself to the very real possibility that psycho-ontological wholeness is indeed impossible to achieve. But for

Fodor, and so many others like him, this is simply not an option, and instead of accepting the fragmentary nature of nation and self, he invests even greater energy into his quest for the absolute, with predictable results. The failure to find any sort of resolution in the geography and history of the Hungarian nation, in fact, only serves to heighten the sense of trauma and paranoia that fuelled his investigations in the first place, which in turn perpetuates Fodor's futile quest for resolution and meaning. Ultimately, this circular, 17 unfulfilled quest for the absolute that both nationalism and modernism encourage, and even demand, constitutes what might usefully be called the "creative paranoia" that has fuelled nationalist discourse and practices in Hungary, and indeed throughout the so- called modern world, since at least the late nineteenth century.

It is to a better understanding of the roots of this creative paranoia that the dissertation turns in the first two chapters. Rethinking the notion that interwar Hungarian nationalism can be reduced to a collective trauma wrought by the territorially and psychologically devastating Treaty of Trianon ratified in 1920, Chapter One digs deep into Fodor's unpublished autobiographical sources to show how his own sense of trauma had its origins in the pre-Trianon period. Excavating the layers of this trauma, the chapter suggests that, in order to understand Hungarian identity formation in the twentieth century, we must understand this process against the backdrop of modernity, rather than within the context of the nation's territorial dismemberment after World War

I. Chapter Two explores this idea of continuity between pre- and post-Trianon identity formation by looking closely at a field diary written by Fodor during a two-week geo- botanical expedition to Bosnia-Hercegovina in the summer of 1917. Though focused on an admittedly brief episode in the Balkans in the later stages of the war, the chapter nevertheless shows how Fodor's on-going attempts to assert an imperial masculine identity were blocked and challenged time and again over the course of the expedition, and in so doing establishes what I describe as the destabilizing "ebb and flow" of identity formation in the modern period.

Chapter Three picks up Fodor's trail in 1919, the year that he was invited to

Budapest to compile maps and statistics to defend Hungary's interests at the Paris Peace 18

Conference. Fodor's positive reaction to this invitation, and the more or less enthusiastic and optimistic attitude that he managed to maintain despite the numerous hardships and uncertainties that had plagued his family and the nation since 1918, is an indication that

Trianon had little traumatic impact upon him personally. Despite the fact that his family had suffered under the Romanian occupation at the end of the war, and that they had been compelled to flee from the city, Fodor was in no way discouraged or traumatized, at least according to his private papers. Even the liberal and communist revolutions of 1918-

1919, and the violence and uncertainty of the counterrevolution that followed, failed to discourage or dishearten Fodor, a young scholar whose academic promise was finally being recognized. For Fodor, Trianon and the national upheaval that it came to represent offered important personal, professional, and even social and political opportunities.

Looking in particular at what Fodor stood to gain professionally, materially, and psychologically in the post-Trianon period, this chapter aims to shed some light on the inherent complexity of conservative-nationalist opportunism in the interwar period.

Certainly, Fodor stood to gain a great deal in the interwar period, at least on the level of self. But to see this as a mere cynical manipulation of the post-Trianon situation would be shortsighted. As it would be later under communism, Fodor's opportunism was tempered by a profound sense of duty to the nation. Even as he strove to build a career at the nation's intellectual centre, and began to build a secure home life for himself and his family, he dove into cultural work aimed at the moral rebuilding of a nation weakened by what he and others saw as decades of decadent neglect. Though, as we shall see, these cultural activities were by no means devoid of opportunism, it would be a mistake to 19 regard them as hollow or cynical gestures of a man focused solely on his own social status or material well-being.

Chapter Four revisits the dynamic examined in earlier chapters by exploring

Fodor's reaction to his growing sense of personal marginalization and existential anxiety during World War II. Destabilized by what he considered to be an academic and even political demotion at the beginning of the war, and then later by his experiences in

Budapest during the siege of the city in the winter of 1944-45, the chapter analyzes his heightened engagement with both autobiographical and geographical projects in light of his own fears that he would be forgotten along with the nation. Perched on the edge of utter oblivion, Fodor's "retreat into memory" ultimately tells us much, I think, about his overriding fantasies of, and on-going search for, unity and completion.

Chapter Five builds on Chapter Four by showing how the overlapping obsession with autobiography and national memory was, in part at least, driven underground after the communists seized power in 1948-49. Reading Fodor's unpublished nationalist geography "Szatm&r fSldje, Szatm&r n£pe, Szatma> elete" (The Land, People, and Life of

Szatmar) (1953) against a number of autobiographical fragments, the first half of the chapter examines the way in which the interconnected politics of nation and self informed and shaped his underground work. The second half of this chapter then reads this work against the scholarship that Fodor managed to have published in the 1950s.

Inspired by Thomas Lahusen's reading of socialist realist literature in How Life Writes the Book, the chapter attempts to uncover and analyze the complex code that runs through

Fodor's "socialist" geographies.21 Taking into consideration the obvious opportunism

21 Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 20 that motivated Fodor in his production of this work, the chapter concludes by suggesting that these socialist-era studies provided a welcomed, if obviously circumscribed, forum for the remembering of both nation and self.

Of course, the experiences of one individual do not necessarily speak for an entire generation, and so the analytical utility of such an approach can, perhaps, be seen as limited. However, as political scientist Henri Vogt points out in a recent study on the post-1989 political transformation of Eastern Europe, with careful contextualization, micro-studies such as this one can indeed shed new light on the past. As he writes of his own work, it is only in relation to the experiences and memories of the individual mat the context "becomes meaningful." Stressing this point, he adds that it is possible to

"contextualize" history itself "with pieces of fragmentary information."22

By drawing on the many fragments that are left to us of Fodor's life, it is my hope that, at the very least, my study will contribute to a better understanding of conservative- nationalist culture and identity formation in twentieth-century Hungary. In a more general and perhaps theoretical sense, however, I hope my study will also help us to understand more clearly the complex relationship between nation and self as quintessentially modern projects (projects which, as I have suggested above, are doomed to failure from the outset). By interrogating the ultimately dysfunctional dynamic between the two, I would suggest that it is possible to see how the two projects feed off one another, heightening the anxieties of both. By looking at a nationalist intellectual—

22 Henri Vogt, Between Utopia and Disillusionment: A Narrative of the Political Transformation in Eastern Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 4. For studies which effectively work fromth e perspective of the individual to "contextualize the context," see (amongst others) Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book; Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Steele: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). 21

at someone who simultaneously produces and internalizes these interconnected

discourses—we can, I think, learn much about the complex, and even traumatic, relationship between nation, modernity, and the negotiation of self.

Indeed, by incorporating the insights of scholars and theorists doing similar work on the problem of identity formation in the "west," the dissertation also hopes to rethink—if perhaps only by default—the marginalization of the east central European experience within the context of modern European history. Certainly there are differences in the way that modernity and the construction of identities have played out in

Hungary in the modern period, but there are also fundamental similarities that need to be recognized. Foregrounding some of these similarities will no doubt help to problematize the conventional, yet inherently arbitrary, distinction made between west and east and, by extension, between so-called good and bad nationalism; a distinction which, in many circles, continues to plague the writing of Hungarian history.

What is Conservative Nationalism? A Short Note on Terminology

In characterizing Fodor as a conservative-nationalist intellectual, I am following the thinking of historians such as C.A. Macartney.23 Like him, I find this term useful in describing the politics, as well as the social, cultural, and intellectual disposition, of someone like Fodor. As a moderate right-wing supporter of Admiral Miklos Horthy's counterrevolutionary regime, Fodor was attracted to the anti-liberalism of the regime that

23 See C.A. Macartney, Hungary: A Short History (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1962), 211-14. See also GyQrgy Ranki, "A n&net-magyar kapcsalatok neliany problemaja, 1933-1944," Valosdg 24/9 (September 1981), 2; and Steven B. Vardy, "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind: Irredentism and Hungary's Path to War," in Hungary in the Age of Total War, 1938-1948, ed., Nandor Dreisziger (New York: Columbia University Press/East European Monographs, 1998), 30. Like Ranki, Vardy is reluctant to equate Horthy's interwar regime with fascism. For a useful and very engaging account of the Horthy era, see Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklos Horthy, 1918-1944 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1994). 22

took power in Hungary in the wake of successive left-wing revolutions. Like many of

Horthy's supporters, Fodor was encouraged by the religiosity of the Horthy regime, and

by the desire of its more moderate leaders to steer a course to the future while adhering to

the aristocratic traditions of the past. As leery of the violent and what he and others saw

as the dangerously anti-modernist tendencies of the radical right as he was of the

"Godless" cosmopolitanism of the prewar liberals, Fodor counted himself amongst the

conservative, morally- and historically-informed defenders of the Hungarian nation.

I could, of course, have followed Paul Hanebrink's lead and called Fodor a

Christian nationalist, rather than a conservative nationalist.24 Fodor's nationalism was,

after all, informed by his Catholic upbringing, and by his lifelong devotion to God and the Church. However, as accurate as this characterization may be, it is ultimately too narrow. Though Fodor lived and promoted a religious life, he was by no means shy to embrace Hungary's pre-Christian roots as well. An adherent to the Turanist movement in

Hungary, Fodor was in many ways as captivated by the glory and romance of the nation's pagan, warrior past as he was by its civilizational capacity as a progressive, western- oriented state.25

See Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890- 1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 25 Turanism originated in Germany as a linguistic hypothesis in the early nineteenth century. In the narrowest sense of the term, the Turanian idea included speakers of Magyar, Finnic, and Turkic languages. In its broadest sense, however, the Turanian hypothesis came to embrace cultural-linguistic groups as far- flung as the Japanese and the Dravidians of the Indian sub-continent. German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to describe Turanians in negative terms, seeing them as barbaric, warlike peoples who were, at best, merely half-developed Aryans. In Hungary, however, the idea of the nation's supposed Turanian roots became a source of pride for many nationalists, and eventually evolved into a central nation-building myth, especially amongst conservative and right-wing thinkers and ideologues. Though Turanism had been largely discredited by serious scholars as a linguistic theory by the 1880s, it nevertheless continued to have great cultural, political, and ideological appeal. In the interwar period, Turanism fed essentialist fantasies of Hungarian uniqueness and racial strength, and quickly became the basis of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy in the Balkans. For discussions of Turanism and the Turanian idea, see Joseph Kessler, "Turanism and Pan-Turanism in Hungary, 1890-1945" (University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1967). See also Judith Wintemitz, "The 'Turanian' Hypothesis 23

By emphasizing Fodor's conservative nationalism, I am also consciously distancing him from the more fascistic tendencies in interwar Hungary, tendencies which expressed themselves during the so-called "white terror" of 1919-1920, and ultimately in the consolidation of the Arrow Cross party in the late 1930s and early 1940s.26 As attracted as he may have been to the romance of Hungary's warrior past, Fodor rejected the destructive, amoral, and ultimately anti-Christian tendencies of fascism and national socialism, and was certainly appalled by the openly violent antisemitism of the radical right. Of course, we need to be careful not to put too fine a point on these differences, at least as far as antisemitism and the Holocaust are concerned. On the one hand, Fodor did not appear to be affected in any way by Jewish suffering in Hungary, not even during the

Holocaust. Although it is rumored that he helped Jewish colleagues during the war, there is no reference made to this in any of his personal papers, not even in the autobiographical fragments that he produced under communism. On the other hand, though Fodor may have found interwar forms of anti-Jewish sentiment increasingly distasteful, a racially motivated antisemitism was nevertheless woven into Fodor's geographical work, one which cast Jews as the perennial outsiders; as rootless, materialistic, inscrutable foreigners incapable of assimilation, and thus detrimental to the health and welfare of the nation. Though Fodor himself was in no way directly

and Magyar Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century" in Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Roland Sussex and J.C. Eade (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1983), 143-158. 26 On fascism and the radical right in Hungary between 1920 and 1945, see Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267-76; M. Sz5H8si-Janze, Die Pfeilkreutzlerbewegung in Ungarn (Munich, 1989); Gy8rgy Ranki and Gy6rgy Barany, "Hungary," in Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918-1945, P. Sugar, ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1971): 63-82; Mikl6s Lack6, Arrow Cross Men, National Socialists, 1935-1944 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1968); Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: The History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Stanford: Hoover Institute, 1968); and Istvan Deak, "Hungary," in The European Right: A Historical Profile, ed. Hans Rogger and Eugene Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 364-407. responsible for the brutality of the Holocaust, the act of writing the nation's Jewish

minority out of Hungarian history, and of erasing them fromth e map entirely, helped to

lay the necessary foundations for the evolution of Hungarian antisemitism in the post-

Trianon period, and may even go a long way to explaining why Hungarian society later

stood by while the Jews were deported and massacred during the war.

A Note on Place Names

In order to be consistent with Fodor's text, I refer to cities and villages no longer part of

Hungary by their Hungarian name whenever Fodor does so. However, the first time

these places are referred to in each chapter, I have put their current Romanian name in

parentheses. For example, Karansebes (Caransebes), Tenke (Tinea), and so on.

List of Abbreviations

FP Fodor Family Private Papers

MTAKK Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia KSnyvtar Keziratar

MTAL Magyar Tudomanyos Akademiai Leveltar

MVMDGy Magyar Vizugyi Muzeum Dokumentacids Gy. Chapter One Layers of Trauma: Trianon, Modernity, and the Long Twentieth Century

"The true revolution... of modernity is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation, and of history." Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994)

On June 4,1920, representatives of the Hungarian government signed the Treaty of Trianon in France. Formalizing legally what had become by 1920 the de facto break­ up of the former Kingdom of Hungary, the treaty officially handed over to Hungary's neighbors a full two-thirds of its former territory, and nearly one-third of its prewar population. The outcry within truncated Hungary was immediate. On the day the treaty was signed, shops and schools were closed throughout the nation, daily newspapers were printed with black borders, while hundreds of thousands took to Budapest's streets in protest. As an expression of the nation's suffering and loss, and as a statement of the perceived injustice of the treaty, the national flag was lowered to half-mast throughout the country.1

In denouncing the treaty as unnecessarily harsh and unjust, politicians and intellectuals of all political stripes tended to stress the excessive "violence" of Trianon, returning time and again to graphic descriptions of Hungary's once-healthy national body now torn apart, and of its people left traumatized, defeated, and in a precarious existential state both inside and outside the borders of truncated Hungary. Often overlapping with overtly Christian themes and images, this discourse of violent dismemberment tended to cast Hungary as a martyred nation, one whose resurrection would only be possible with

1 Ignac Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), 124. As Margaret Macmillan notes, flags were also flowna t half mast in Germany following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June, 1919. See Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 478.

25 the revision of the unjust borders. Backed by popular slogans like "Nem! Nem! Soha!"

(No! No! Never!) and "Csonka Magyarorszag nem orszag, egesz Magyarorszag

Mennyorszag" (Dismembered Hungary is not a Country; a United Hungary is Heaven),

Hungarian nation-builders quite literally flooded the public sphere with pamphlets,

articles, and books which, in lamenting the nation's losses, pleaded for justice whilst

simultaneously preparing the people for the desperate struggles which lay ahead.

As a young geographer very much at the beginning of bis academic career, Ferenc

Fodor was just one of many voices that contributed to the pervasive sense of shock and

outrage that gripped public discourse in Hungary in the wake of the nation's

dismemberment.3 Having himself been displaced as a result of the Romanian occupation

of eastern Hungary at the end of World War I, Fodor was well aware of what had been

lost. In a 1925 essay entitled "A magyar allam fSldje 6s nepe Trianon utan" (Hungary's

Land and People after Trianon), Fodor anguished over Hungary's territorial losses, writing in a venomous tone that "it is a savage task to depict our now-truncated nation

geographically, since the Hungary we put to paper is merely a shadow of its former self."

2 Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 111. For extended discussions of irredentist discourse and imagery, see Miklos Zeidler, A revbios gondolat (Budapest: Osiris, 2001), and Katalin Sinko, "A megsertett Hungaria," Neprajzi ErtesitQ 77 (1995): 267-82. This image of Hungary as a broken, and ultimately martyred nation, has had a powerful hold on the Hungarian imagination since 1920, serving, as the historian Stephen Borsody argued in the early 1980s, as the "symbol" of a "national catastrophe" which has defined Hungarian history since 1920. See Stephen Borsody, "Hungary's Road to Trianon: Peacemaking and Propaganda," in Kir&ly, Pastor, and Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe Volume VI: Essays on World War I: A Case Study on Trianon (New York: Social Science Monographs, 1982), 23. It is worth noting that this discourse of the "martyred nation" was by no means unique to Trianon Hungary. During the nineteenth century, Polish intellectuals and poets also portrayed "partitioned Poland" as a martyred nation, or as "the Christ of Nations." 3 The sense of injustice and outrage was almost universal, in fact, at least amongst the political and intellectual elite. Even the bourgeois radical Oszkar Jaszi, one of the most vocal Hungarian critics of the Horthy regime in the interwar period, referred to the terms of the treaty as "cruel and unjust" See Oszkar Jaszi, "Neglected Aspects of the Danubian Drama," Slavonic Review XTV (July 1934), 65. These sentiments have been echoed by numerous Hungarian historians. See, for example, Nandor A.F. Dreisziger, Hungary's Wayto WorldWarll (Toronto: Hungarian Helicon Society, 1968), 24-25. Listing what was lost to the nation in terms of resources, Dreisziger quite understandably suggests mat no sober- minded person could deny that this was unfair. Noting that "its once mighty features are now deformed," Fodor wrote that all that was left to him as a geographer was to draw mere "caricatures of this ruined land."4 Quoting from the work of Elisee Reclus, a nineteenth-century French geographer who had famously claimed that the former Kingdom of Hungary "could justifiably be regarded as a perfectly integrated geographical unit," Fodor lamented the desecration of what had been a life-giving organic totality, noting that what was left to the nation and its people was nothing short of "hideous," "unnatural," and "grotesque."5 With the country now

"torn to pieces," and with the "unique symbiosis" between Hungarians and their land thus shattered, Fodor reflected on the "sad and broken" present as an ominous portent of the future. Surrounded by enemies much strengthened by Hungary's losses, and deflated by the terms of an unjust treaty that had been so viciously and contemptuously forced upon them, Fodor wondered whether Hungarians would be able to muster the inner fortitude needed to recover from this their "most recent tragedy."6

It would be tempting, I think, to read Fodor's irredentist scholarship and his subsequent support of the Horthy regime in light of the collective "trauma" or

"psychological syndrome" which is said to have descended upon Hungary in the wake of the nation's dismemberment.7 Indeed, as he himself would declare in 1930, "the

4 Ferenc Fodor, "A magyar allam fbldje es n6pe Trianon utan," in Vildgistol Tricmonig. A mai magyarorszdg kialakuldsdnak tdrtenete, Sandor Petho and Ferenc Fodor (Budapest: Enciklopedia R.T. Kiadasa, 1925), 249-50. 5 Ibid. Hungary was not alone amongst the defeated nations in portraying itself as a dismembered body. As Count Harry Kessler, the one-time German minister to Poland, wrote in 1923: "What was left [to Germany after Versailles] was nothing but a torso, the slashed and battered trunk of what once had been the third most powerful wealth producing organism in the world." Count Harry Kessler, Germany and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 1923), 45. 6 Fodor, "A magyar allam fSldje es nepe Trianon utan," 253. 7 For a very recent reflection on the relationship between Trianon and a collective Hungarian trauma, see Kristian Gerner, "Open Wounds? Trianon, the Holocaust and the Hungarian Trauma," in Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in Twentieth-Century Europe, Ed. Conny Mithander, John Sundholm, and Maria Holmgren (Brussels: P..I.E. Peter Lang, 2007), 79-110. See also the work by Steven Bela Vardy discussed below. For a similar discussion of the impact of Versailles on German 28 menacing shadow of Trianon" showed no signs of lifting even a full decade after its ratification. Having struck a melancholy chord within the Hungarian psyche, it remained central to "the great despair and great pain which lingered in the hearts of all

Hungarians."8 Yet, no matter how compelling such an interpretation may be, I argue that

Fodor's interwar psychological disposition cannot be reduced to Trianon alone. Indeed, as I hope to show below, the anxiety that so determined Fodor's outlook in the interwar period had roots that ran much deeper than Trianon itself.

Shifting the focus away fromTrianon , this chapter seeks to present a more nuanced picture of the nature and root causes of the so-called "Trianon syndrome" in conservative-nationalist Hungary. Indeed, if we want to retain the idea of trauma—and, in the interest of deepening our understanding of modernity and the modern condition within a Hungarian context, I think it is useful to do so—we must rethink the notion as it is applied to both the collective and personal experiences of Hungarians in the early twentieth century. If trauma can be said to have been a historical factor, at least for a conservative-nationalist intellectual like Fodor, it cannot be located exclusively, or even primarily, in the political upheaval and physical dismemberment of Hungary in 1920.

Trauma must instead be linked to a host of socio-political structures and moral and cultural imperatives which characterized and gave shape to the modern condition in early twentieth-century Hungary. As I hope to show, the immediate shock caused by Trianon was a symptom of a deeper and much more insidious trauma (or "web of trauma"), one

consciousness, see Wolfgang Shivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), in particular the introduction and Chapter Three. 8 Magyar Vizugyi Muzeum Dokumentacios Gy. [Museum of Hungarian Hydrology and Environmental Protection (Danube Museum) Archives, henceforth MVMDGy], H-20/1 28-97.6/6, Ferenc Fodor "Oregcserkesz utakon," (text for a radio address delivered on March 25,1930), 6. 29 which was linked simultaneously to modernity, and, perhaps more concretely, to the on­ going project of becoming modern.

The Specter of Dismemberment: Trianon in the Hungarian Historical Imagination

Given the magnitude of Hungary's combined territorial and demographic losses, and taking into consideration the seemingly widespread and deeply emotional public reaction to Trianon throughout the interwar period, it is perhaps no surprise that many historians have come to view Trianon as a fundamental break in Hungarian history, one which not only gave rise to increasingly extreme manifestations of right-wingnationalism , but also, more generally, pulled Hungary out of an otherwise "healthy" stream of development.

This is especially true of the history of this period written since the 1980s. As communism's hold over Hungarian scholarship started to wane, liberal-minded historians and dissident intellectuals alike began to reevaluate the monumental changes that

Hungary had undergone in the first half of the twentieth century, rethinking not only the rise of right-wing extremism in the post-Trianon period, but also the nature and legacy of the long and, in their view, progressive nineteenth century in Hungarian history. Anxious to explain away the Horthy years as a lamentable, even irrational, blight on the nation's otherwise progressive historical record, many of these historians reached back to the preceding century, and in particular to the fin de siecle, to findevidenc e of Hungary's past achievements and, by extension, of its future potential as a civilized, liberal- democratic nation-state. Social, political, economic, and intellectual historians working both within Hungary and abroad contributed to this reassessment of modern Hungarian history, contrasting (albeit sometimes only implicitly) the relative humanism and 30 tolerance of the late Habsburg period to the uncharacteristic violence and hatred which temporarily gripped right-wing, "irredentist" Hungary between the wars.9

Though numerous studies have undoubtedly emerged to challenge, or at least qualify, this often overly-idealized view, the search for a usable past continues unabated in many historical circles, and especially amongst historians promoting a progressive, integrative vision of Hungary's past and future. Mario Fenyo's work on Hungarian writers and poets at the turn of the century provides a particularly poignant example of this still-influential school of thought. Building on John Lukacs's popular history of

Budapest at the turn of the century10, and echoing the sentiments of some of the scholars to be explored below, Fenyo turns to the work of Hungary's so-called pre-Nyugat generation of writers and poets, literary figures who, by virtue of their very position as social observers and critics, are said to offer a perspective on Hungarian society which is at once "more insightful and perceptive" than "any historical or sociological monograph" on the subject.11 Reflecting on works written between 1895 and 1907 by the likes of

K&lman Mikszath, Zoltan Ambrus, Gyula Knidy, Sandor Br6dy, Ferenc Molnar, Jeno

Heltai, Ferenc Herczeg, Geza GaYdonyi, and others, Fenyo paints a picture of a nation that had succeeded in overcoming the bloodshed and violence of its alternatively tragic and heroic past in order to create a progressive, happily cosmopolitan society. Neatly sidestepping a serious discussion of gender and class, and dismissing fin-de-siecle

9 See for example George Barany, "Political Culture in the Lands of the Former Habsburg Empire: Authoritarian and Parliamentary Traditions," Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998); and Istv&i Dedk, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10 John Lukdcs, Budapest 1900 (Budapest: Europa Konyvkiado, 2004). 11 Mario D. Fenyo, "Literature and Society: Hungary at the Millennium," East European Quarterly XXX74 (January 1997), 422. Fenyo's ideas presented here are also made in another context in a later essay. See idem., "The Future of the Nineteenth Century," in Hungary's Historical Legacies: Studies in Honour of Steven Bila Vdrdy, D. Hupchick and R.W. Wesiberger, eds. (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2000): 62-73. 31 antisemitism as a regrettable but limited form of ethnic intolerance completely divorced from its more violent interwar successor, Fenyo effectively romanticizes a nation in which upward mobility was not only possible, but also predominant, and in which the disagreeable voices of integral nationalists were barely audible, and racial hatred was all but absent.12 Fixating on the "atmosphere of peace" which permeated the work of these accomplished writers at the turn of the century, Fenyo reaffirms the idea of this period as a veritable golden age in the history of modern Hungary; a period, he suggests, which can be looked upon as a benchmark of Hungarian civilization.

Though there is some truth to Fenyo's claim that the fin de siecle represented a golden age of liberalism in modern Hungarian history, his reading of this period is ultimately lacking in scope and complexity, in part because, beyond ignoring issues of gender, race, and class, it overlooks the wide range of conservative, aristocratic, and right-wing groups and individuals who, though they may have benefited in one way or another from modernization in general, were by no means satisfied with the evolution of the nation as a moral, cultural, or political entity. What Fenyo's analysis ignores, in fact, is the vast divisions within Hungarian society that existed at the time, even amongst the cultural and intellectual elite. Like the writers and poets he studies, Fenyo is blind to the deeply-rooted tensions and fissures which cut across Hungarian society at the turn of the century, and withdraws into a hopeful, even Utopian vision, of a nation at peace.

Fenyo, of course, is by no means alone in this view. As Ignac Romsics suggests in his important post-communist overview of twentieth-century Hungarian history, the interwar period marked a significant departure socially and politically from that which had come before. Though he does not go as far as Fenyo in his assessment of the relative

12 Fenyo, "Literature and Society," 424. 32 unity and harmony of pre-Trianon Hungary, he does cling to the view that the nation was, at the very least, working constructively towards such a progressive state prior to World

War I.13 Though he admits that the right-wing chauvinism which accompanied irredentist politics in the interwar period had its roots in the nineteenth century, he suggests that this negative, integral form of nationalism was marginalized and otherwise contained by a host of progressive forces which characterized mainstream Hungarian political culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The upheaval and

"psychological shock" which is said to have marked the immediate postwar period, however, created an environment in which both right-wing and conservative-nationalist movements could thrive and grow, with the subsequent dismemberment of the historic

Kingdom of Saint Stephen in 1920 then clearing the way for Horthy's counterrevolutionary derailing of the nation's progressive development14 Though obviously critical of the "reactionary" politics which followed in the wake of Hungary's defeat and dismemberment, Romsics singles out Trianon itself in order to explain the hold that right-wing nationalism and conservative thinking came to have on Hungarians in the post-Trianon period. Focusing primarily on the state-building policies pursued by conservative-nationalists and right-radicals alike, Romsics argues that the treaty served as

13 This view is consistent with Stephen Kern's suggestion that the general shift or "reorientation" which occurred in European political culture at the turn of the century was "essentially pluralistic and democratic." See Kern, The Culture of Space and Time, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 152. 14 Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 96. For other accounts which identify psychological shock as a contributing factor in the rise of the right in the interwar period, see ZsuzsaNagy, Magyarorszdg t&rtenete, 1918-1945 (Budapest: Tort&ielmi FigyelS KSnyvek, 1995); Ferenc P6l8skei et al., eds. 20. szdzadi magyar tortenelem, 1900-1994 (Budapest: KoronaKiad6,1997); and Laszlo Maracz, Hungarian Revival: Political Reflections on Central Europe (Nieuwegein: Aspekt, 1996), 18. Maracz adds to the notion of a "Trianon syndrome" with his suggestion that: "For other peoples, Trianon constitutes a psychosis because they very well know that it is because of Trianon and the later 'peace' conventions that they have been so richly rewarded at Hungary's expense. People in Hungary's neighboring countries are plagued by the fear that one day the Hungarians will band together and claim the right to self-determination mat has been withheld from them for so long because of Trianon." 33 an unavoidable social, political, and even psychological framework for post-Trianon development, one which so constrained the thinking of Hungarian politicians that it

"determined everything" in the interwar period.15

Though Romsics points to psychological shock as but one of many factors that determined the course of Hungarian politics and society during the interwar years, there are others who focus solely on the notion of collective trauma to explain the apparent discontinuity between Hungary's supposedly progressive, democratic evolution prior to

Trianon, and its tragic, backward descent into irrational, counterrevolutionary extremism after 1920. As the Hungarian-American historian Steven Bela Vardy has argued on a number of occasions, and most recently in an article published in 2001, the combination of military defeat, revolutionary upheaval, and territorial dismemberment which came to define the period between 1918 and 1920 marked a profoundly devastating psychological rupture in Hungarian history. Like Romsics and others bent on interpreting the long arc of modern Hungarian history in progressive terms, V£rdy is keen to locate the cause of

Hungary's shift to the right in forces more or less beyond the nation's control, arguing that the reactionary politics that came to dominate the interwar period can be understood primarily as a traumatized response to a fundamentally destabilizing series of events which began with the nation's military defeat in 1918, and which was later amplified by the shock of territorial dismemberment in 1920. Basing his assessment on a rather simplistic, if more or less clinical view of trauma, Vardy writes that the Trianon shock gave rise to a widespread, long-lasting "national malady" or "syndrome," one which

15 Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 116. "ravaged the minds and hearts of most Hungarians," and in so doing limited the scope of political thought and action in interwar Hungary.1

Vardy's view on Trianon's collective psychological impact, one which understands Hungary's interwar shift to the right in terms of a rupture, rather than continuity, with the past, is based in part on an earlier assessment put forth by Peter

Hanak, a historian whose work has done much to shape our understanding of modern

Hungarian history. As one of the growing number of scholarly voices which emerged in the 1980s to break the silence around Trianon which had persisted under communism,

Hanak stressed the role of psychological dislocation in the consolidation of conservative right-wing politics in the interwar period, emphasizing as a number of historians later would that, as a symbol of the nation's dismemberment, the treaty "conscribed all elemental patriotism, all inclination to reconstruct one's nation, all justified emotions of grief into the service of.. .the counterrevolutionary regime."17 Grounding his analysis in the idea that efforts to create a modern, progressive nation had not only made great strides in the decades leading up to World War I, but also had generated a clearly defined sense of collective identity rooted in a widespread belief in Hungary as a historically and territorially unified geo-body, Hanak argued that the dismemberment of the nation in

1920 led to "the sudden relativization of such formerly absolute concepts of the nation and national destiny." Linking the trauma of dismemberment to an overriding culture of defeat, Hanak suggested that "everything which, up to that point, used to be absolute, concrete and unambiguous was suddenly shattered. The unity of our country and of our

16 Steven B. Vardy, "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind: Irredentism and Hungary's Path to War," in Hungary in the Age of Total War, 1938-1948, ed., Nandor Dreisziger (New York: Columbia University Press/East European Monographs, 1998), 30 and 28. 17 Cited in Ibid., 29. 35 nation vanished... [as did] all historical and geographical realities." Penetrating and disrupting the "life-foundations" of the nation itself, Trianon left Hungary and its people fragmented and broken, producing a sense of psychological dismemberment fromwhich , he argued, the nation continues to suffer.18

As compelling as this notion of the Trianon trauma or syndrome may be for historians interested in introducing a psychological dimension to the study of conservative-nationalist culture and politics in the interwar period, the general interpretation of post-Trianon Hungary as a nation of individuals traumatized both collectively and individually by the physical dismemberment of the country is limited and deeply problematic. On the one hand, such a view overlooks, or downplays, the role that political opportunism played in the perpetuation—and even creation—of the so-called

Trianon syndrome. Vardy, in fact, goes out of his way to dismiss political opportunism as a factor to be considered when assessing not just the source and nature of the Trianon trauma, but also its short- and long-term impact on the collective Hungarian psyche.

Though he admits that "some elements of the country's political and social leadership were... unwitting 'beneficiaries' of the Trianon disease," he goes on to rebuff claims leveled by both realist historians and contemporary critics of the Horthy regime alike that opportunism was widespread, suggesting as he does so that public expressions and displays of Trianon-related trauma were authentic manifestations of a nation-wide syndrome. Underscoring his main thesis that Trianon gave rise to a collective psychological disorder which reflected the nation's violent and sudden break with its supposed progressive and civilized roots, he concludes that "one did not really have to

18 The notion that Trianon represents a trauma which still haunts the Hungarian psyche is also shared by Vardy. use artificial means to make it into the number one cause of the nation's problems during the interwar period."19

Such a view, however, overlooks the fact that Hungarian nation-builders and revisionists in the post-Trianon period did, in fact, put a great deal of energy into reminding Hungarians of the nature and meaning of the nation's losses. These efforts were focused especially on the nation's youth. In schools throughout truncated Hungary, for example, children were called upon daily to repeat the "Magyar Credo," a revisionist incantation in which boys and girls declared their belief in "God," "homeland," "divine eternal justice," and "the resurrection of Hungary." Running parallel with this was a constant reminder that, as Hungarians, they should feel both saddened and angry about the dismemberment of the country. A booklet prepared in 1924 for boy scouts about to embark for a jamboree in Denmark, in fact, underscored the importance of what might accurately be called a "traumatized" performance of the Hungarian condition.

Emphasizing that, as representatives of their country, they needed "to act in harmony with Hungary's past and present," the authors of the booklet added: "we cannot live as well and as cheerfully as other nations."21

"Ibid., 30. 20 The text of the shorter version of the "Magyar Credo" (magyar hiszekegy) is as follows: "I believe in one God/F believe in one Homeland/! believe in one divine eternal justice/I believe in the resurrection of Hungary/Amen." 21 MVMDGy, H-20/1 28-97.6/3, "Jamboree Kopenhaga, 1924," 8. It is worth noting that Fodor, though he was one of the leaders of the delegation that traveled to the jamboree in Copenhagen in the summer of 1924, would later have second thoughts regarding the pedagogical utility of such an admonition. Though he was certainly willing to invoke the traumatizing memory of the nation's territorial dismemberment in order to mobilize support for the Horthy regime's conservative-nationalist program at home, and to evoke sympathy for Hungarian revisionism abroad, he was nevertheless critical of people who relied perhaps too heavily on Trianon as an excuse for Hungary's "misery and woe" in the interwar period. Writing in his capacity as the editor of Fiatal Magyarsdg (Young Hungary), Fodor complained bitterly about how Trianon was being "exploited expertly by some," noting how it was also commonly invoked as an excuse for moral, cultural, and political inaction by an increasingly "lazy and idle" generation who sought merely "to cloak their sins behind the death shroud of Trianon." Far from being truly traumatized, Hungary's interwar generation had instead allowed themselves to be "dazed, blinded, and deceived" by leaders But beyond failing to take into consideration the role that political opportunism and emotional manipulation may have played in the creation and perpetuation of the

"Trianon syndrome," Vardy and Hanak also place too much stock in their assessment of pre-Trianon Hungary as a unified, pre-traumatized nation. Basing their respective analyses on the assumption that Hungary was a geopolitical and cultural-moral totality evolving in a more or less healthy and progressive way, they overestimate not only the impact that dismemberment had on the Hungarian psyche in general, but also the role that the so-called Trianon shock or syndrome played in the emergence of right-wing cultural- politics during the mterwar period. Cleaving perhaps too closely to the irredentist discourse and imagery that they aim to critique, both scholars perpetuate the idea of fin- de-siecle Hungary as a cultural-territorial absolute, and in so doing ignore the profound internal fragmentation which plagued Hungary and Hungarians both collectively and individually in the pre-Trianon period. Despite the immediate emotional impact that

Trianon may have had, the territorial dismemberment of the nation in 1920 both reflected, and was subsequently mapped onto, pre-existing fears and perceptions of dismemberment and dissolution. If trauma was a factor behind conservative-nationalist politics and culture in the interwar period, then its roots ran much deeper than Trianon itself.

claiming that "others" were to blame for their current misery. Arguing that many Hungarians had "sunk conveniently into lethargy," Fodor concluded that the memory of Trianon had begun to function as a serious block to the sort of moral, nation-building work that desperately needed to be done. See Ferenc Fodor, "Trianon az oka...," FiatalMagyarsag(April 1,1931), 17. 22 For a view which echoes those of Vardy and Hanak, see Rebecca Ann Haynes, "Hungarian National Identity: Definition and Redefinition," in Contemporary Nationalism in East Central Europe, Paul Latawski, ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 91. Haynes argues that "The events of the twentieth century.. .profoundly weakened the mythological and intellectual underpinnings that gave Hungarian identity its coherency before the First World War." Ibid., 100. 38

As, I think, Fodor's case will suggest, the conservative-nationalist intellectuals who were engaged in re-imagining the nation in the interwar period were by no means psychologically or ontologically secure prior to Trianon. In fact, no matter how hard

Fodor tried to mask his ever-present unease behind fantasies and performances of completion and unity, an inescapable sense of insecurity and anxiety rose up time and again to undermine his confidence in the nation, and beyond this in his sense of self. In part, of course, this persistent sense of dislocation and inner fragmentation in the years leading up to 1920 was grounded in his admittedly youthful, and very personal, existential engagement with the world around him, and thus could be written off by some as having little relevance to the bigger historical picture. However, no matter how personal or philosophical this often troubling engagement with the world may have been,

Fodor's pre-Trianon angst was rooted in a much broader social, political, cultural, and intellectual context, one which for Fodor was determined not only by his status as an ethnically "pure" Hungarian male born on the social and geographic periphery, but also, amongst other things, by his training as a scientist, his upbringing as a Catholic, his desire to become middle-class, and his undying devotion to the Hungarian nation. His sense, therefore, that the material world around him did not conform to his preconceived notions of it, or that the nation itself was being undermined by a host of disintegrative forces

(especially internal ones), was not reducible to a set of neuroses unique to him, but rather was conditioned by a worldview that he not only shared with others, but also, as a nation- building intellectual, actually helped to construct and perpetuate. Peeling Back the Layers of Trauma

Though more work definitely needs to be done on the lived experiences and personal dispositions of individual conservative-nationalist intellectuals in the pre-Trianon period, studies by Andrew Janos, and more recently by Paul Hanebrink and Stephen Herzog, suggest that Fodor's case is generally representative of the fin-de-siecle concerns and anxieties of his peers and colleagues. In his seminal work on Hungarian politics between

1825 and 1945, for example, Janos points to the growing political tensions in Hungary in the post-1848 period, and in particular after the Compromise with Austria in 1867, when dissenting political factions on the loosely-defined "right" rose up to challenge the hold that liberal modernizers had on Hungarian politics and society. Focusing in particular on the Party of Forty-Eight established in 1868, and the Party of Independence formed in

1874, Janos argues that political opposition fed off the growing discontent and economic insecurity that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s. Becoming increasingly conservative and nationalist, and in many cases chauvinist and racialist, by the turn of the century, this nationalist opposition won a major electoral victory in 1905. Despite the split between the more moderate Independence faction, which envisioned a reworking of Hungarian politics and society within the existing structures of the Habsburg empire, and the more radical Forty-Eighters, who sought a more drastic and far-reaching restructuring of the nation, they nevertheless managed to form a coalition government between 1906 and

1910.23

Although this coalition government was largely ineffectual, and the Liberal party managed to regain power again in 1910, the admittedly short-lived political gains of the

23 Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 135. On the political, and ultimately ideological, divide between these two opposition factions, see pp. 136-39 nationalist opposition were indicative of the growing discontent not just of the socially, politically, and economically marginalized gentry (an "essentially middle-class element" comprised primarily of the lower nobility24), but also of members of the upper nobility or aristocracy, and especially the larger-estate owners and magnates, who felt that their political power and social standing, not to mention their economic base, had been irredeemably eroded by the modernizing policies pursued by the ruling Liberals. Though they were opposed to the often secular, and sometimes radical, forms of nationalism being espoused by the opposition, and in particular by the Forty-Eighters, this conservative and largely traditionalist element was similarly motivated by the belief that the nation had been cast adrift morally and culturally by the misguided liberalism of its modernizing leaders. Lobbying for the so-called restoration of "traditional society," the conservative movement which emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century worked in its own way to redefine the overlapping processes of modernization and modernity at the fin de siecle, and in so doing added their voices to an otherwise dissonant chorus demanding a new social, political, and moral direction for modern

Hungary.

As Paul Hanebrink argues in his study of the rise of Christian nationalism in the interwar period, the late nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a veritable "culture war" in Hungary, one which was waged not only against the policies and mores of the ruling Liberal party, but also between elements of what he calls the "New Left" and the

"New Right" as they coalesced into distinctive fronts in the struggle against cultural

Ibid., 19. 41 decline and moral decay.25 Indeed, for those on the right, the battle to save and ultimately rebuild Christian Hungary was a multi-front struggle against decadent,

"Godless" liberalism on the one hand, and an emergent group of left-wing bourgeois radicals and socialists on the other. Though, as we shall see, the Christian nationalist movement itself was often beset by internecine struggles between Catholic and Protestant factions, and beyond this between conservative and radical elements, they were nevertheless united in the conviction that "a nation cut loose from ties of tradition, bound together only by wholly theoretical civic bonds, would weaken, becoming in the end a hollow shell that would certainly break mto pieces in the first storm."

As Hanebrink points out, the anti-liberal position upon which this anxious view was based persisted in conservative-nationalist discourse well into the interwar period.

However vague and even contested the Christian nationalist idea may have been, the association of liberalism with the forces of degeneration, decadence, and decay provided an important rhetorical basis for both religious and secular conservative-nationalists in their efforts to redefine and regenerate a nation which, in their minds, had been weakened socially, culturally, and morally by nearly half a century of Liberal rule. Drawing on

Tibor Zinner's work on the interwar counterrevolutionary organization the Association of

Awakening Magyars (EME), Hanebrink notes how this group "reached back to the past, looking for and finding the basis for the dissolution of Christian society and the

See Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary, in particular the first chapter. For a more general, comparative discussion of so-called "culture wars" in Europe at the turn of the century, see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, "The European Culture Wars," in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26 Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary, 25. Here Hanebrink is referring to the Catholic critique of the Liberal party's efforts to reduce religion more or less toth e private sphere in order to achieve their goal of building a modern, secular state. His analysis, however, also holds for Protestant factions. [subsequent] collapse of Hungary in the decades of liberalism. These "Awakening

Magyars" were by no means alone in their interpretation of the past. "Across Hungary's resurgent nationalist Right," Hanebrink argues, "there was a common belief that long- suspected threats to national sovereignty inside and outside the nation had become real."28

Such sentiments were, of course, employed by the largely conservative, Christian- nationalist right in their efforts to consolidate their power in the post-Trianon period.

However, despite the obvious political opportunism at work, Hanebrink's study makes it clear that, for Christian-nationalist intellectuals and politicians alike, the vision or memory of Hungary as a weak and divided nation—no matter how politicized this memory would ultimately become—was grounded in very real, and very troubling, experiences or perceptions of socio-political marginalization and cultural-moral decay in the pre-Trianon period. Faced not only with the growth of cities and the rapid expansion of industry, but also with the birth of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, the rise of the trade union movement, and a significant influx of immigrants (especially Jews from

Galicia), many on the loosely-defined, pre-Trianon "right" felt constricted socially, politically, and culturally. Forced as they were to negotiate a modern world not at all of their making, this element sought out new and sometimes radical ways to overcome the sense of disempowerment and emasculation that they felt.

Adding much to Janos's study of the complicated socio-economic dynamics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungarian politics, Hanebrink's long view on the origins of Christian nationalism—though it constitutes only one chapter of his

27 From Tibor Zinner, Az ebredokfenykora, 1919-1923 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiadd, 1989), 15. Cited in Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary, 69. 28 Ibid. 43 book—offers important insight into the angst-ridden, and perhaps even traumatized, political culture of conservative-nationalist Hungarians in the pre-Trianon period. A recent doctoral dissertation by Stephen Herzog, however, takes the analyses of both Janos and Hanebrink a step further. Shifting the focus from social, political, and economic factors to predominantly cultural ones, Herzog suggests that the "culture war" which began in Hungary the late nineteenth century and subsequently spilled over into the post-

World War I period needs to be seen within the broader context of modernity. Though he clings perhaps too closely to the conviction that conservative-nationalist attempts to redefine the nation culturally in the interwar period were a response primarily to

Hungary's post-imperial, post-Trianon condition, Herzog nevertheless suggests that the sense of ambivalence and fragmentation which Hungary's nation-building elite sought to address during the Horthy era was by no means new or unique to Hungarian cultural and political discourse, but rather was linked philosophically and practically to debates which had been raging in Hungary—and indeed the rest of Europe and the modern (or, more accurately, modernizing) world—since at least the turn of the century. Looking in particular at the reformation of Hungarian cultural institutions in the interwar period,

Herzog contends that the cultural-political agenda pursued by Hungary's educated, conservative-nationalist elite was motivated by an ongoing desire to negotiate the

"contradictions of modernity" while simultaneously attempting "to reposition themselves in time and space."29 Linking the instability which plagued conservative-nationalist

Hungary at this "particularly crucial juncture in history" to a longstanding, European- wide (perhaps even global) feeling or perception of psycho-ontological destabilization

29 Stephen Herzog, "Negotiating Modernity: Cultural Reform in 1920s Hungary," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003), 30-31. and uncertainty, Herzog's work goes a long way towards problematizing the notion of

Trianon as an historically limited, and uniquely Hungarian, trauma.

Herzog's own work, in fact, owes much to Brian Porter's When Nationalism

Began to Hate, a ground-breaking study on the relationship of integral Polish nationalism to modernity. Focusing in particular on the intelligentsia's ongoing "search for coherence and singularity" within a world of "irreducible multiplicity," Porter suggests that the late-nineteenth-century shift towards a more conservative and ultimately chauvinist definition of the nation must be seen as a product of a lengthy dialogical process, one which became increasingly complicated and divisive in the late nineteenth century as groups and individuals on both the right and left emerged to demand the freedom and equality that had long been promised to them.30 The emergence of mass political movements at the turn of the century was crucial in this respect. Confronted by an ever-growing chorus of voices demanding access to power, and driven, as Theodore

Zeldin has argued in the case of modern France, by the need to "master variety and make it uniform,"31 the Polish elite was forced to abandon an earlier, more progressive and revolutionary, vision of the nation and national time,transformin g it "so that it could sustain, rather than subvert, hierarchy and organization."32 Besieged by the masses,

Polish nationalists retreated into nationalist discourse as a means of "ordering and disciplining" the very same democratic forces which they had unleashed. Following

Anthony Giddens' contention that "totalitarian possibilities are contained within the

30 Claude Lefort develops a similar argument in "On Modern Democracy," Praxis International 3 and 4 (1996). 31 Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1900: Ambition, Love, and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3. Cited in Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Centruy Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. According to Porter, Zeldin's work is important because it was the first study to link nationalism and nation-building to the modernist obsession with unity and totality(a t least on the level of the collective). 32 Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, 8. 45 institutional parameters of modernity rather than being foreclosed by them,"33 Porter concludes that we must view the emergence and consolidation of right-wing politics and culture as an aspect of, rather than a departure from, the modernist project.34

Porter's work on the nineteenth-century roots of right-wing extremism in Poland provides a particularly useful counterpoint to analyses like those noted above which link

Hungary's interwar shift to the right solely to the overlapping traumas of military defeat, revolutionary upheaval, and territorial dismemberment between 1918 and 1920. As was the case with Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, Poland benefited greatly—at least on paper—from the redrawing of boundaries in east central Europe in the wake of

World War I. And yet, as in these other newly-formed or territorially-enhanced states, a host of conservative-nationalist, proto-fascist, and fascist parties and movements emerged to exert great influence on the culture and politics of nation building in the interwar period, even in a country like Czechoslovakia, which has often been held up as an notable

"democratic" exception to this general trend towards the right between the wars. As

Porter argues, and as the work of Romanian scholars like Irina Livezeanu seems to suggest, this shift can only partially be explained by the general trauma of war, or the fear of Bolshevism, or the political and economic uncertainty which plagued this region and the rest of Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s. To fully understand and appreciate the scope of conservative-nationalist politics and right-wing extremism in the interwar period, one must look to the menacing shadow that the unresolved tensions of the

See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 8. Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, 12-13. nineteenth century continued to cast over the whole of Europe in the years leading up to

World War II.35

One of the most provocative and still-controversial expressions of this notion that the anxieties and traumas of the nineteenth century continued to inform European culture and politics into the interwar period is Klaus Theweleit's remarkable two-volume study

Male Fantasies. Originally published in German in the late 1970s, Theweleit's work examines the individual experiences and reflections of Freikorps soldiers in Germany in the 1920s (and especially as these experiences were expressed in memoirs and fiction).

Seeking to understand the emergence and nature of fascist culture, Theweleit uses psychoanalytic theory to probe not only "maleness" and its insecurities, but also the fascist obsession with notions of unity and totality, particularly as these concepts were applied to both the individual soldier and the militarized, "molar" collective of which he was an integral part. Drawing heavily on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

(and in particular on their so-called "schizoanalytic" insights into the alternatively paranoid and liberating structures of capitalist society), Theweleit situates his own study of the fascist male within a broader critique of modernity as a fundamentally destabilizing or traumatizing psychological process. Though he admits that the German psyche, and in particular the psyche of the soldier male, was "imprinted with the loss of war,"36 he nevertheless suggests that neither Germany's defeat in World War I, nor the

35 Though a full discussion of this goes well beyond this dissertation, it is worth speculating here that independence and territorial enlargement did not so much generate anxieties within these ethnically mixed and divided countries, but rather "made real" or otherwise amplified a host of existing social, cultural, political, and moral tensions which had bedeviled the nation-building elite on a personal and collective level in the decades leading up to the war. See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 36 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (vol. 2): Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 357. 47 national humiliation and economic hardship which was to follow, was a sufficient motivating "cause" behind the rise and consolidation of fascism in the interwar period.

Writing in his typically bold and penetrating style, Theweleit argues that:

Any analysis that claims the foundations of German fascism to have been laid by war and its aftermath, or subsequently by the world economic crisis, obscures the fact that the type of man who contributed decisively to fascism's triumph existed in essence long before the beginning of the war in 1914. He was made by Wilhelmine Germany in peacetime; by the superficial peace that is the normal form of the permanent state of war waged by capitalist male society against its youth, its women, and its wage laborers— and, indeed, against its men.

Though Theweleit's psychoanalytically-informed views have been questioned, and even outright dismissed, by a number of historians, his insistence that the roots of

German right-wing extremism must be located in, and linked to, the nineteenth century, cannot, I think, be easily refuted. Certainly the shock of defeat and humiliation caused by the Treaty of Versailles did much to shape right-wing politics in Germany after the war, but, as I argue in the case of conservative-nationalist Hungary, and as Theweleit suggests in his work on German fascism, the emasculating experience of national defeat and territorial dismemberment did not so much produce a traumatic response, but rather, in laying bare the numerous problems (both real and perceived) that had plagued the nation in the decades leading up to war, provided an important basis for the "treatment" of a long-standing "sickness," one which infected the individual as much as the national whole. If anything, the tragedies which befell both Germany and Hungary in the wake of

Ibid., 351. 48

World War I were, at least for those on the right, symptoms of much deeper, and more troubling, national maladies.38

This notion that catastrophic and deeply painful events like Versailles and

Trianon have the ability to reflect, and perhaps even amplify, the internal fragmentation of both nation and self is supported on a theoretical level by Bonnie Burstow in her recent article "Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work," a self-defined

"radical feminist critique" of the medicalized, and inherently narrow, conceptualization of trauma employed in conventional psychiatric practice. Drawing on her own experiences as a radical feminist, a social activist, and a psychiatric practitioner, Burstow calls for a fundamental rethinking of the way that trauma is defined, diagnosed, and ultimately treated. Caught in the crosshairs of Burstow's illuminating critique is the standard medical definition of trauma (one which generally presumes a pre-traumatized state of normalcy which has been disrupted by an unusually violent or troubling experience or event), and beyond this also the underlying therapeutic goal of psychiatric treatment to return the traumatized individual "to a more 'normal' orientation."39 Such a medicalized view of trauma, she argues, is problematic precisely because of the presumed existence of a normative, pre-traumatized state. Taking issue with this normative vision, one which assumes implicitly that "the world is essentially benign and safe," and that

"people who have been traumatized have a less realistic picture of the world than

A much less theoretical, but equally poignant and relevant, expression of this need to look beyond singular traumatic events in order to explain the roots of this turn-of-the-century shift towards more limited, integral definitions of the nation is offered by Michael Stanislawski in Zionism and the Fin de Steele. Looking at the lived experiences of four leading Zionist intellectuals, Stanislawski is particularly critical of hagiographical accounts which link the "Zionist turn" of men like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau primarily to the so-called trauma of the Dreyfus affair in France. 9 Bonnie Burstow, "Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work," Violence Against Women 9/11 (November 2003), 1298. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Biljana Bijelic for bringing this work to my attention. others, Burstow suggests that trauma must be seen not only "as a complex continuum on which we are all located,"41 but also as something which "occurs in layers."42

Looking in particular at "oppressed people" (though I think that, building on Theweleit, we could stretch this to include classes of people, such as privileged males, who are not typically seen as oppressed), Burstow contends that "tying trauma to a physically dangerous event or events per se is inadequate." The point, she insists, is that people— and in particular oppressed people—are "routinely worn down" by the "insidious" day to day trauma involved in living in a society which tends to objectify, exclude, discipline, manipulate, and even dehumanize its members.43

In order to understand trauma, therefore, we have to interrogate the complicated context within which a supposedly discrete traumatic event occurs. Drawing on a growing body of scholarship and theory which seeks to broaden the notion of trauma by incorporating not only the problems of repetitive violence and victimization, but beyond this also the ideas of transgenerational trauma, community trauma, and even global environmental trauma, Burstow writes that a particular or "current" trauma is only one aspect of a much deeper, and fundamentally systemic, web of trauma.44 "Underlying

40 Ibid., 1298. 41 Ibid., 1302-03. 42 Ibid., 1309. 43 Ibid., 1296. 44 For a critique of the normative dimensions of trauma, see L. Brown, "Not Outside the Range," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995). On the idea of transgenerational trauma, see Y. Danieli, ed. Intergenerational Handbook ofMultigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum, 1998). On community trauma see Kai Erikson, "Notes on Trauma and Community," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory. See also his much earlier book Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). Anastasia Shkilnyk's A Poison Stronger Than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), which builds on Erikson's groundbreaking work on community trauma, is also very useful in this respect. On the idea of a global environmental trauma, one which owes much to the work of eco-feminists who argue that "the rift between person and environment has traumatized everyone who is part of'Western civilization,'" see C. Glendenning, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization (Boston: Shambhala, 1994). This idea of a global trauma, one 50

one's own individual trauma history," she argues, "is one's group identity or identities

and the historical trauma with which they are associated." This notion of historical trauma is indeed complex, incorporating as it does not just the "structural oppressions and institutions" through which modern capitalist society exercises its power,45 but also the

forces of industrialization and urbanization which in recent centuries have driven a psychologically destabilizing wedge between human beings and the natural world.

Underlying all this, she concludes, "are the trauma-making features of the human condition itself, what Heidegger would call separateness, throwness, being-toward- death."46

Burstow's rethinking of trauma no doubt threatens to empty the idea itself of its specific "clinical" meaning. But this is, in fact, her point. Though she does not deny that the standard clinical definition is useful, and that certain temporally specific and uncharacteristically violent events can and do have a profound psychological impact on which is linked in Glendenning's book to capitalist society's alienation fromth e environment, could be broadened, I think, to include work like Theweleit's which stresses the traumatizing nature of capitalism itself as a social, political, and cultural system. Besides Theweleit, see also Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). For an excellent and engaging critical study which employs a Lacanian approach to understand American foreign policy in traumatic terms, see Cynthia Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a 'Post-Phallic' Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Like Theweleit and Nelson, Weber's work adds an important dimension to Burstow's framework, one which can be used to understand the psychological backdrop against which privileged and semi-privileged men like Fodor negotiate both nation and self. 45 Burstow includes in this idea of an underlying structural and institutional "trauma" the practice and legacy of colonialism and the north-south divide that this created. Such a framework could easily be applied to the Hungarian case, where a divide, both real and perceived, between west and east had a profound impact on Hungary's social, political, economic, cultural, and ultimately psychological development. 46 Burstow, "Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work," 1309-10. Overlapping with the notion of trauma as a continuum, the layered framework of trauma that Burstow outlines necessitates a redefinition of the "normal" as a state of being that is always-already traumatic. This rethinking of the normative context within which trauma is said to occur is implicit also in Theweleit's work. Theweleit writes: "The problem of fascism has to be seen as a problem of the 'normal' organization of our lived relations—a problem for which, as yet, we have no resolution. The question of whether any given form of bourgeois-capitalist society should be defined as prefascist, not yet fascist, almost fascist, or whatever, is only of secondary significance—a definitional puzzle for political scientists." See Theweleit, Male Fantasies (vol. 2), 358. 51 specific individuals and communities, she nevertheless claims that, in order to be properly assessed and treated, this immediate trauma must be understood against the backdrop of a much broader nexus of interconnected structural, historical, and even philosophical traumas. Indeed, as her allusion to Heidegger's proto-existentialist ontology suggests, trauma may very well be a fundamental aspect of the modern condition itself, a basic psychological disposition that we all share as contingent, vulnerable, and inherently fragmented beings in the world.47

Though this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the potentially wide- ranging philosophical implications of Burstow's thesis, her rethinking of trauma as a complex and historically pervasive phenomenon does provide useful psychological and ontological insight into the interconnected, and often traumatic, negotiations of nation and self which preoccupied Hungarian conservative nationalists in both the pre- and post-

Trianon period. Indeed, such a "traumatized" reading of modern Hungarian history, one that builds on the general framework outlined by Burstow, is suggested, if only implicitly, by the work of scholars like Janos, Hanebrink, and Herzog noted above.

Though none of them, not even Herzog, speaks of the long-standing conservative- nationalist negotiation of modernity in explicitly traumatized terms, each in his own way suggests that Trianon was itself a symptom of a much deeper sickness that had plagued both nation and self in the modern period, and especially since the emergence of

Burstow's reworking of trauma certainly resonates with the theoretical work that has been done on modernity and the so-called modern condition by cultural critics such as Slavoj ZiSek, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Baumann, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to name only some of those who provide a theoretical framework for this dissertation. Despite their differing and sometimes conflicting approaches, each of these thinkers return time and again not only to the disjuncture or gap that persists between lived experience and the fantasies of perfection and completion that individuals and collective bodies such as "the nation" harbor in their efforts to overcome an inevitably dystopian present, but also to the multiple and often violent human and material forces which time and again rise up to undermine these modernist fantasies. 52 liberalism as a dominant social, political, and cultural ideology in the mid-nineteenth century. Seen in this light, the numerous overlapping projects, both personal and national, that were pursued by conservative nation-building intellectuals like Fodor during the Horthy period were not so much expressions of an emotional, knee-jerk response to a limited series of socially, politically, and psychologically destabilizing events, but rather represented the refinement and widespread implementation of cultural ideas and moral imperatives which had long been circulating in conservative-nationalist circles.

In fact, no matter how painful or problematic it may have been at the time for the nation's conservative-nationalist elite, the combination of military defeat, failed left-wing revolutions, and territorial dismemberment provided the opportunity to address in a concrete way the internal fragmentation that they had long been working to overcome on a personal as much as cultural and political level. Indeed, if Trianon was a symptom of a much deeper malady or trauma, then they would provide the cure, one they hoped would go a long way to untangling the modern web of trauma in which they were caught.

Fodor's Web

The layers of Fodor's own pre-Trianon trauma ran deep. Though it is virtually impossible to explore these layers in isolation fromeac h other, and beyond this to determine which ones might take primacy, it is perhaps worthwhile to begin with a discussion of the way in which Fodor's formal schooling at the beginning of the twentieth century may have provided him with an introduction not just to the host of disintegrative forces which "threatened to undermine the nation," but also to the more abstract forms of 53 existential anxiety that he would harbor throughout his life. As Hanebrink points out, education was one of the main fronts in the culture war being waged by conservative

Christian nationalists against turn-of-the-century secularism, liberalism, and materialism.48 Schooled between 1899 and 1906 in a Catholic gymnasium in Szatmar-

N6meti49 (present-day Satu Mare, a city in eastern Hungary that would later be lost to

Romania as a result of Trianon), and educated by Christian-nationalist men who themselves served as a collective, transgenerational link between Hungarian traumas both past and present, Fodor was thus immersed at an early age in nation-building discourses and performances which were as psychologically traumatizing on one level as they were emotionally reassuring on another.50

A collection of twenty-five short essays written by Fodor at the turn of the century, for example, suggest that, even as a young school-boy, he had already begun to cultivate a keen awareness of Hungary's precarious position as a middling power in the ceaseless, and inherently cut-throat, European struggle for territory and resources.

Commenting on work by the seventeenth-century essayist Count Miklos Zrinyi, for example, Fodor stressed the idea that Hungary must be prepared to stand alone against its enemies, both actual and potential. Echoing Zrinyi's observation in 1660 that Hungary could not count on any of Europe's major or minor powers for enduring military support or effective diplomatic aid, Fodor likewise argued that it would be "unrealistic" for

On education and the "culture war," see Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary, especially chapter one. Reflecting on his schooling, Fodor would later write that he had been politicized from a very young age. See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/2 Ferenc Fodor "Eletem esemenyei (1887-1959)," (n.d. 1959?), 4. 4 Fodor tends to refer to Szatmar-N&neti simply as "Szatmar," a practice that I follow in this dissertation. 50 This seemingly contradictory, and even perverse, dynamic will be explored in more detail below, and indeed throughout this dissertation. 54

Hungarians in the present to rely "on the help of a foreign nation."51 Like Zrinyi before him, Fodor concluded that "we just need to improve and rely on ourselves." "In this way," he continued, "we shall never be oppressed."52 This notion that Hungary effectively "stood alone" in the international arena, and that the nation needed to cultivate a disciplined core of morally-pure men who would be ready at a moment's notice to rush to its defense, was reinforced by his reading of poets like S&idor Kisfaludy (1772-1844) and Ferenc Kolcsey (1790-1838), both of whom conveyed dire warnings of future national catastrophes by revisiting disastrous military and diplomatic events in Hungarian history.53

Such observations suggest that Fodor was internalizing, if perhaps only by default, the arguably bleak, "Hobbesian" principles of international relations, principles which had become unapologetically aggressive in an age when the interconnected fates of all European nations were largely determined by the state-building calculus of

Realpolitik.5* As J. Ann Tickner argues in an engaging feminist critique of the "realist" underpinnings of modern international relations, such a harsh, and inherently

"masculine," view of the world legitimates the structural violence that holds the

51 This observation comes as part of his essay on Count Miklds Zrfnyi's, A tdrdk dftum ellen vald orvossdg (Remedy Against the Turkish Opium) (1660). See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.4/8, Ferenc Fodor, "Olvasmanynaplo," (1905-06), 10-11. 52 Fodor, "Olvasmanynapld," 10-11. 53 This themes runs throughout many of Fodor's essays. This almost defeatist sense of Hungarian history was reflected in Fodor's later observations that Trianon was just one tragedy in a long history of Hungarian tragedies. See in particular the introduction to Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia KOnyvtar Keziratar [hereafter MTAKK] Ms 10.739/I./1-2, Ferenc Fodor, "A magyar 1& fiSldrajza"(unpublishe d manuscript, 1945). 54 The ideas of Thomas Hobbes, and with him also Niccolo Machiavelli, have remained central to realist and neo-realist visions of international relations in western political theory since at least the eighteenth century. Based on pessimistic assumptions about the nature of both human and state behavior, realists and neo-realists are skeptical about the possibility of states ever achieving full peace, stability, and security. For a typical realist treatment of international relations, see Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 7th edition (Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2006). For a neo- realist viewpoint, see Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). international states' system together. Beyond this, she contends, it also justifies the social, political, cultural, and moral instrumentalization of an entire citizenry as it is mobilized on a quotidian level by nation-states engaged in what amounts to a perpetual state of war.55 As Cynthia Weber contends in a more narrow, and in many ways more scathing, critique of twentieth-century American foreign policy, such a state of affairs has had, and continues to have, a detrimental psychological impact on the national psyche.

Deconstructing the attempts of successive presidential administrations to mask the tenuous and often ineffective character of American power in the Caribbean, Weber concludes that U.S. diplomacy and military policy in the region must be read in light of traumatized, and by extension traumatizing, imperialist practices and discourses, ones which she claims have been central to American nationalism and state building since at least the late nineteenth century.56

The notions put forth by both Tickner and Weber of entire nations traumatized by an awareness of the state's precarious position in an otherwise aggressive and uncertain world is, I think, reflected in Fodor's personal papers. Listing the important events of his life, for instance, Fodor was careful to record the different international conflicts and wars that had made an impact on him, and indeed on the rest of the nation, during his youth. Fodor made note, for example, of the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War in 1897, the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Boer War in 1899, and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.57 Reflecting on the outbreak of the First Balkan War on October 8,1912, Fodor

55 J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). This masculine perspective is explored in great detail in Theweleit's Male Fantasies noted above. 56 See Cynthia Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a 'Post-Phallic' Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 57 Fodor, "Eletem esem&iyei," 1-2. Fodor also made note of politically- and internationally-destabilizing events such as the assassination of the King of Serbia in 1903. mentioned the unsettling impact that this nearby conflict had had on the collective

Hungarian psyche, writing that "the public feeling was generally quite anxious. The palpable sense of anxiety that international conflicts like these generated was underlined, and no doubt also exploited, by educators and politicians devoted to creating a new generation of Hungarians willing and able to take up the struggle against the nation's adversaries. As Fodor and his classmates were reminded during a school assembly in

1905, for instance, it was their patriotic duty to stand ever-on-guard for themselves, and thus also for the nation. "Let no day pass," they were told, "in which you didn't do something to defend your place in the global competition."59

Onto this nationalist imperative, one which reminded boys like Fodor of their patriotic duty to stand ready to fight for the nation against a foreign enemy, was mapped a similar reminder that they needed to be prepared to fight against the forces of internal dissolution as well. In the same way that they were called upon to be vigilant in the face of external foes, they were also inundated with anxious visions of a nation imperiled by the morally- and spiritually-void principles of liberalism, materialism, and secularism.

Such a vision was articulated by the political and literary figures that Fodor was exposed to as a gymnasium student. His reading of poets like Janos Arany (1817-1882), for example, introduced Fodor to a Hungarian manifestation of a much broader stream of nineteenth-century European thought, one which reflected upon the perceived fragmentation of "traditional communities," and which highlighted the increasing loneliness and alienation of the modern individual. As Fodor himself would comment in response to Arany's epic poem "Toldi," the principal task of the modern Hungarian man

58 Ibid., 10. 59 Fodor Family Private Papers [hereafter FP], scrapbooks, n.p. The original Hungarian reads: "Egy nap se muljek el, hogy valamit ne tettel volna, hogy a vilagversenyen megalld a helyedet." was to struggle against the immoral forces of material determinism, and beyond this also to overcome one's alienation "from all that is human."60

Of course, as it was for so many other Europeans at the turn of the century, Jews came to represent, and were also seen to be the principal agents of, the morally and spiritually impoverished forms of liberalism and materialism that, to conservative and

Christian nationalists at least, seemed to hold the nation in its grips at the beginning of the twentieth century.61 The sense that much, if not all, of Hungary had fallen under the control of an invasive, liberal-Jewish spirit was very real for Fodor. Reflecting on his family's move from the village of Tenke (Tinea) to Szatmar (Satu Mare) in 1898, for example, Fodor recalled with some sadness that the family home—the house where he had been born and raised to the age of eleven—had been sold to a Jewish woman named

Salamon. Though Fodor himself would struggle throughout his life to overcome his impoverished provincial roots in Tenke, it is clear that he lamented the loss of his birth home, not just in actual terms, but also in symbolic terms as well. Having been sold to a

Jew, the house was effectively transformed into something foreign. Permeated by a

Jewish spirit or essence, it had ceased to be a pure Hungarian space.62 This perception of the transformation of Hungarian space into Jewish space was later underscored for Fodor on a much broader scale in fin-de-siecle Szatmar, a city which, like Tenke, was very much on the perceived Hungarian-Romanian frontier.63 Thinking back to his days as a

60 Fodor, "OlvasmanynapUS." VIII form essay (1905-06), n.p. 61 See MTAKK Ms 10.740/1-76, Ferenc Fodor, "Szatmar fdldje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar elete," (1954). 62 It is worth noting that fin-de-siecle Hungarian nationalists regarded Tenke as one of the few ethnically "pure" Hungarian villages remaining in the Bihar mountains. See, for example, Istvan GySrffy "Del Bihar nepesedesi 6s nemzetisegi viszonyai negyedfelszaz ev 6ta," Fdldrajzi Kozleminyek 43, no. 6-7 (1915); and idem., A Fekete-Kords volgyi magyarsdg (1986). 63 Szatmar was a religiously diverse regional center, one in which Fodor's Catholics were outnumbered by Calvinists and nearly matched in numbers by Greek Catholics and Jews. The surrounding countryside was populated largely by Calvinists and Greek Catholics. This demographic reality may well have contributed 58 gymnasium student, Fodor remembered quite vividly the sense of surprise and ultimately disappointment he felt when a Jewish lawyer, identified simply as Dr. Kelemen, was elected in 1905 as the city's representative to the Hungarian parliament. Noting that

Kelemen was "the unanimous choice," Fodor couldn't help but feel that he had somehow become completely submerged in "a liberal world."64 Much like the family home in

Tenke, a structure that, in his father's eyes at least, provided a tangible link to the

"homeland of the family's ancestors,"65 Szatmar had been overrun by a completely alien element, one which threatened to overwhelm both him and the nation completely.6

Situated within the context of a much broader Christian-nationalist critique of fin- de-siecle politics and society in Hungary, Fodor's early introduction to the nation's tragic past and tenuous present no doubt had an important impact on his political, intellectual, and ultimately psychological development. On the one hand, it cultivated within him a heightened awareness of the inherent fragility of both nation and self, pointing in particular to the multiple disintegrative forces (both internal and external) that conspired against the construction and maintenance of unity and totality on a number of different levels. On the other, it instilled within him a sense of duty, one which was inherently defensive in nature, and which often bordered on missionary zeal. Even as a gymnasium student, Fodor was reminded repeatedly of his role as a "loyal and faithful" member of a core group of Christian-nationalist men whose responsibility it was to defend the nation against the numerous disintegrative forces working against it. As he would write much to Fodor's sense of belonging to a threatened minority. I am indebted to Robert Nemes for pointing this out to me. 64 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 4. 65 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/4., Ferenc Fodor, "Emtekezetttl," (1931), 4. 66 It would seem likely that Fodor's antisemitism functioned on the level of a "cultural code." For a classic discussion of this notion, see Shulamit Volkov, "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book23 (1978): 25-45. later in his life "it was from behind the gates of Szatmar's Christian schools, churches, and other institutions that we fought to hold the rootless and unpatriotic spirit of the liberal period at bay."67

Despite sounding apocryphal, there can be no doubt that such a defensive, missionary stance was reinforced during this formative stage of his life, and especially through the spiritual guidance and moral instruction that was central to his education. As a gymnasium student, Fodor and his classmates were reminded time and again of their moral duty to the nation, their families, and themselves. Such thinking was reinforced yet again at the university level, especially in the collegia where students like Fodor lived, studied, and fraternized. Upon his admittance to the Catholic-run St Imre

Collegium in 1908, for example, Fodor received a hand-written letter from the principal indicating that, as a resident and member of the college, he would receive free room and board, and in turn would be expected to show "gratitude" for this support, not just by

"adhering strictly to the rules of the institution," but also by "living a religious and moral life," and by attending to his studies with "untiring diligence and zeal."68 The national significance of such an education was stressed in yet another letter sent by the same principal to Fodor's mother on the occasion of his graduation in 1910. Noting that Fodor would now have to leave the collegium, the principal continued by writing that:

It is my happy duty to inform you that we are very satisfied with the way your son conducted himself while a member of our institution. We would also like to take the opportunity to express our confident hope that, having come to understand the ambitions of our institution under our loving tutelage, he will continue in his future endeavors to live a moral life according to the principles of the

67 Fodor, "Szatmar fbldje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar elete," (1952), 201. This defensive attitude is reflected also in MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/1, Ferenc Fodor, "6n61etrajza/Curriculum Vitae" (Pecs, 1940); and MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/3, Fodor Ferenc, "ElettSrtenet," (Pecs and Budapest^ 941-1950). 68 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, vol. 1, letter to Fodor, Budapest, August 27,1908. "Christian man"; that he will have a sense of duty to the nation; that he will be the pride of the Church; and that he will make our collegium and his family proud.69

This same set of commandments—something which stuck with Fodor as a moral

imperative throughout his life—was repeated in the oath that Fodor took upon receiving his doctorate. Dated June 4,1910, and signed Dr. Ferenc Fodor, the oath reads:

I swear to Almighty God, that I will always show the respect befitting the rector and senate of the Budapest Kiralyi Magyar Tudomany Egyetem [Royal Hungarian University]. I also solemnly pledge that I will devote myself to the service of truth, and that, in accordance with my abilities, I will always strive to use my knowledge for the honor of the university, the betterment of humanity, and the glory of my country (hazdm). God help me in this!70

Fodor evidently took this moral responsibility quite seriously, involving himself almost immediately after graduation in projects aimed in various ways at the moral, spiritual, intellectual, as well as physical regeneration of the nation and its people.

Beyond giving lectures on a variety of scientific, geographical, and cultural topics to various Catholic groups and reading circles in and around Budapest,71 Fodor also lent his support to cultural and educational organizations such as the Szabad Lyceum (Free

Lyceum) and the Hungarian Railway Workers' Association. Much of his time was spent organizing and leading excursions for both groups, some of which, like an excursion he organized for the Physical Sports Section of the Szabad Lyceum in 1911, lasting up to a week or more in duration.72 Such lengthy treks into the Hungarian countryside, it was

FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, vol. 1, letter to Fodor's mother, Budapest, July 6,1910. 70 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, vol. 3. 71 On November 16,1910, for example, Fodor gave a lecture to the Natural Science Section of the Saint Imre Circle entitled "Az evoliici6 kerdesenek jelenlegi allasa" (The current state of the question of evolution). This was followed sometime later by another lecture entitled "Valami a makrokosmosr61" (On the Macrocosm). See FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, vol. 2. 61 hoped, would help primarily city-dwelling Hungarians reconnect with nature, and thus also with essential elements of Hungarian history, and beyond this also themselves.73

A leaflet printed by the Szabad Lyceum in 1912 provides a good example of how

Fodor and others attempted to overcome, or at least counteract, modern society's perceived alienation from nature; a rupture which had been caused not just by the pronounced modernization and urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also by what many conservative-nationalist thinkers had come to regard as an "excess of reason." As we shall see in Chapter Three, the solution was not to abandon science altogether, but rather to reintroduce something of the spiritual, and even mystical, back into one's experience and understanding of the natural world. Noting that the

Szabad Lyceum was established as a means of "popularizing science and learning," and beyond this, "of cultivating a general interest in academic questions," the leaflet went on to explain that:

In keeping with our founding statutes, one of our main purposes is to organize educational and touristic expeditions devoted not only to the on-site study and inspection of certain industrial sites, but also to the examination and appreciation of nature itself, where we can familiarize ourselves with the important connections between the geography, flora,an d fauna of a particular area.

Such intimate, yet scientifically-informed, contact with the natural world, the leaflet concluded, would lead to "the discovery of nature's sublime and majestic secrets," and in so doing would further the organization's goal of developing and promoting a style of learning that doesn't simply inform, but rather "enraptures."74

73 On the organization and role of the Szabad Lyceum, especially in provincial centers, see Ferenc Fodor, Vidiki szabad lyceumok szervezese esfeladata (Kar&isebes: Egyh6zmegyei kSnyvnyomda, 1913). 74 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, vol.3, "Announcement: Szabad Lyceum EgyesOlet," Kar&nsebes, April 18, 1912, Dr. Ferenc Fodor, secretary; Beta Gajda, director. An outing organized in October 1910 for the Hungarian Railway Workers' Association, and led in part by Fodor, provides yet another good example of Fodor's public work and cultural activism only intensified when he took up his first full-time teaching position at a gymnasium in the ethnically mixed town of

Karansebes (Caransebe§) in a south-eastern corner of the Kingdom of Hungary in the autumn of 1912.75 Beyond his regular teaching duties, Fodor was instrumental in organizing and running Karansebes's "folk" or "people's" library, its Szabad Lyceum, and its so-called workers' gymnasium, not to mention the town's very first boy scout troop, and beyond this also a local chapter of the Magyar Turista Egyesulet (the

Hungarian Tourist Society), an organization dedicated in large part to helping people reconnect with nature.76 Focusing on a number of very particular social groups (for example, workers, the middle-class, ethnic minorities, and Hungarian youth), the cultural organizations Fodor helped to establish and lead played specific yet overlapping roles in the broader struggle against the forces of degeneration and fragmentation which threatened Hungarian society.77

this attempt to strike a balance between science and spirituality. The program for the day-trip to Esztergom began with a tour of the Cathedral given by the bishop himself, which was followed by a lecture on the history of the Cathedral, and then a tour of the collection of portraits and religious artifacts housed within. After a short visit to the diocese's library, and then to the primate's palace, Fodor himself led a short hike along the Danube, during which he lectured on the geological formations of the river. As the report notes, there were a total of 52 railway workers in attendance. For a copy of this report on the outing published by the Hungarian Railway Workers' Association, see FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks, vol. 2. 75 Located in the Banat region, Karansebes was less than 10% ethnically Hungarian and was located in a county that was more than 70% Romanian. Again, I thank Robert Nemes for pointing this out to me. 76 See MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenczik FodornS, "Fodor Ferenc &ete," (1962). See also FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks, vols. 4 and 5. Amongst other things, Fodor was also an active member of the Karansebes Dal­ es Zeneegylet (the Karansebes Song and Music Society, for whom Fodor often gave performances on the tarogato, a traditional Hungarian reed instrument not unlike the oboe), and volunteered for committees like the Karansebesi Erzsebet Kiralyne-Szobor committee. For an account of the first quarter-century of the Magyar Turista Egyesulet (written in 1914 by men associated with its development), see J6zsef Dery and Gusztav Thirring eds.,^4 Magyar Turista-Egyesiilet 25 eves multja, 1888-1913 (Budapest, 1914). Organizations like the Magyar Turista Egyesulet had an important nation-building role to play, not just in Hungary, but also throughout the region at the turn of the century (and indeed throughout the modern period). As Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker write, "For eastern Europeans inside multinational empires, tourism became one mechanism to help define self and other, and it contributed to reifying nation-building projects." See Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, "Introduction," in Turixm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2. See also Alexander Vari, "From Friends of Nature to Tourist-Soldiers: 63

Yet, as much as Fodor's efforts were intended to address and assuage the multiple anxieties or traumas associated with life in modern Hungary, the role he adopted as an educator, and thus defender, of the nation served to underscore, and no doubt even enhance, his ever-present sense of psycho-ontological instability. Indeed, the more he tried to address the intersecting moral, social, cultural, spiritual, and political problems which plagued the nation, the more these problems and the underlying anxieties which informed them were reflected back to him. A personal "boy scout testament" written by

Fodor in the early 1940s provides some useful insight into this dynamic as he experienced it in the immediate pre-Trianon period. Reflecting on his "conversion" to the boy scout movement in 1915, Fodor noted that he had first turned to the boy scouts out of desperation, in particular over the "declining ideals and spiritual weakness" that he perceived in his male students. Noting that the scouting movement provided him with an effective "educational tool" that he could use to "reach out to the spirit of the youth,"

Fodor wrote:

There was no ideal [prior to 1915] with which I could kindle the otherwise tired souls of the younger generation. Something needed to happen, something needed to be produced so that, for the good of the nation's youth, we could eradicate the feeling of want that lingered in their souls. So, when I first became aware of the scouting movement, I eagerly enlisted.. .and began leading my spiritually listless students down this new path. 8

Nation Building and Tourism in Hungary, 1873-1914," in Ibid., 64-81; Patricia Dabrowski, "Discovering the Galician Borderlands: The 'Discovery' of the Eastern Carpathians," Slavic Review 64/2 (2005): 380- 402; and Pieter Judson, '"Every German visitor has a v61kish obligation he must fulfill': Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire," in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 147-68. It is important to note mat each of these articles deal in part with ways in which the "periphery" resisted the "imperialisf' advances of the "center." As we shall see in later chapters, this is a theme that runs through Fodor's travel writing and geographies. 78 Ferenc Fodor, personal testament (vallomds) published in the boy scout publication Mit kdszonhetek a cserteszetnek (Budapest: A Magyar Cserkeszmozgalom, 1943), 24. The scouting movement had its origins in England, where it was founded by Sir Baden Powell in the wake of the Boer War. The movement was introduced to Hungary in 1913. 64

However, though Fodor began his "testament" by outlining the need for, and utility of, scouting as a morally-informed nation-building tool, he quickly switched the focus to himself, admitting how his involvement in the movement simultaneously highlighted his own feelings of inadequacy. "At first I thought it would be my job merely to train and nurture the youth," he confessed, "but I soon came to realize that, more than anything else, I had to re-train myself." Recognizing his own "physical and spiritual poverty" reflected back to him in the work he was doing, Fodor noted that he was forced to reevaluate and thus also renew his "relationships with God, the world, the Hungarian nation, society, and its youth—indeed with everything of human value." Concerned that he perhaps lacked the necessary strength and moral fortitude to help both the nation and himself move forward, Fodor admitted that he needed additional "guidance" to help him navigate "the tangle of everyday matters."80 The boy scouts, he contended, provided him with the necessary tools to reconstruct an entire "inner world" for himself.81

Supporting Fodor in his self-conscious rebuilding of an "inner world" were his fellow scouts, men whose unshakable commitment to the nation, its youth, and humanity was guided by a "purity of spirit" which helped to rescue him and so many others from the moral and spiritual "ruins" of the fin de siecle. Noting his need for both guidance and companionship, Fodor wrote that the scouts "not only reinforced and clarified my ideals, but also provided me with all my friends as well."82 Having been rejected on at least four separate occasions from the Austro-Hungarian army for health reasons, Fodor was

79 Ibid., 24. 80 Ibid., 25. 81 Ibid., 24. 82 Ibid., 24. The boy scouts were by no means the only source of friends for Fodor. In an autobiographical fragment written in 1931, for example, Fodor wrote that the Christian men he lived and studied with in the Saint Imre Collegium in Budapest between 1908 and 1910 provided him with many of his "closest friends." See Fodor, "Emlekezetul," 5. 65

Figure 2 Fodor (back row, second from left) and other boy scout leaders at a camp in Hungary, 1922 (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks) obviously grateful for the opportunity to bond with other men in a meaningful nationalistic, and even quasi-militaristic, way.83 Providing Fodor with an important—if

Fodor was called before a draft board in 1908 and again in 1912, but was not taken into the army on either occasion. He served briefly in a reserve unit based out of Nagyv£rad, but was discharged in 1913 for health reasons. When the war broke out in 1914, he reported to his former unit, but was soon dismissed, again for health reasons. In 1915, his health recovered, he was called before an army draft board one last time, but it was deemed that he was performing an "essential" service as a teacher and community leader in Karansebes, and was thus exempted. See Fodor, "Eletem esem&iyei," 5-14. In retrospect, Fodor realized that he had quite literally dodged a bullet (or many bullets) during World War I. In 1931, Fodor noted that his rejection by the army in 1914 "saved" him from a horrible fate as a soldier. "It was because of the mysterious will of God," he wrote, "mat I remained amongst the living at a time when so many million men were being laid to waste amidst the horror of war." Fodor, "Emtekezetiil," 7. 66

Figure 3 Fodor (third from the left, looking at the camera) and other Hungarian boy scout leaders breakfasting at a jamboree in England, August, 1929 (to Fodor's right is Count Pal Teleki) (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks) ultimately illusive—sense of male camaraderie and masculine purpose, the scouts would remain central throughout his adult life to his fantasy of an integrated, masculine self.

Fodor's account of his boy scout "conversion," one which reads very much like a well-rehearsed testimonial intended to advertise the moral, political, and cultural worth of the scouting movement in Hungary, was admittedly formulaic. Indeed, like so many of the other testaments published in the same volume (a volume that was entitled Mit koszonhetek a cserkeszetnek, or What I Owe to the Boy Scouts), Fodor's reflections on a life in scouting suggested how he was "saved" by the boy scouts, and how his involvement in the movement quite literally transformed his life. And yet, though his personal testament no doubt conformed to a recognizable pattern, it would appear from 67 his personal papers that he was very much in need of the security and comfort that the boy scouts offered when he first discovered the movement in 1915. Fodor, in fact, had been quite miserable in Karansebes, a provincial "backwater town" which he described as a degenerative "nest" of unassimilated Romanians. Falling back into the siege mentality that had so occupied him as a gymnasium student in Szatmar, Fodor would later recount his sensation of coming face to face in Karansebes with a "once-pure Hungarian landscape that was now fading away, and in danger of coming to an end altogether."84

Making note of the defensive position he was once again forced to adopt, Fodor wrote of the immense energy and "self-sacrifice" that this vigilant stance required, and even lamented the toll that it took on him physically and emotionally.85 Defending the nation, it turned out, was tiring work indeed.

As Fodor would write a full twenty years later, his first years in Karansebes passed "in great melancholy."86 In part this was because of the distressing ethnic situation noted above, and the associated feelings of isolation and fatigue that this produced. His depression, however, was also fueled by the feeling that he had been destined for greater things, and that this inauspicious return to Hungary's periphery was therefore very much a set-back for him personally and professionally. As Fodor would later admit, though he "gladly accepted" the teaching position when it was offered to him in the summer of 1911, he nevertheless couldn't help but feel that the job and his move to

Karansebes were "a great step backwards" for him, both in terms of his career, and also in terms of the relative contribution that he, as an "unimportant" pedagogue working on

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 6-9. Ibid., 6. 68 the margins of Hungary, would be able to make to the development of the nation itself.

His subsequent efforts between 1911 and 1919 to make a name for himself as a geographer and conservative-nationalist activist, coupled with his obvious desire to return to the centre of Hungary's cultural and intellectual life, suggest not only his undiminished ambition for greater things, but also his deep-seated disappointment and unhappiness as a mere gymnasium teacher on the nation's periphery. "It was through my [nation-building] work and scholarship," he would later admit, "that I hoped I would be successful in making my way [back] to the nation's capital, where I would be able to continue my work in much more favorable and satisfying conditions."88

Fodor's misery during his first years in Karansebes, and his growing feeling that the world itself was resisting his efforts to control it, was only amplified by his love affair with his future wife, Vira Fenczik, the daughter of a prominent Greek Catholic family from Ungv£r (a city in north-eastern Hungary which became part of interwar

Czechoslovakia) whom he met during a field naturalist's outing in the summer of 1908.

From the beginning, the relationship had been a one-sided, and ultimately stormy, one.

Ibid., 6. Fodor's feeling that he was destined for greater things was in large part a product of his own ambition to overcome his impoverished provincial roots, and to "make something of himself." However, his own vision of a life trajectory that would lead him ineluctably to the centre of Hungarian politics and society had only been reinforced by his former teachers and mentors in Szatmar. As he noted on a number of occasions, he had great support from a number of his teachers, and especially from men like Remig Bekefi, a former university professor who was particularly helpful in Fodor's transition fromth e gymnasium in Szatmar to university in Budapest. Writing to Fodor on the occasion of his graduation from university in 1910, Bekefi congratulated his former student on a job well done, and then proceeded to assure him of the "greatness" of his future work. "A well-grounded national success," he wrote, "awaits your future scholarly work." Expressing himself with much confidence, Bekefi concluded by assuring Fodor of the immense happiness that this future success would bring. FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, postcard from Bekefi to Fodor, May 5, 1910. 88 Fodor, "Emtekezetttl," 7. Enumerating the overlapping scholarly and opportunistic strategies that Fodor employed in his attempts to return to the nation's centre during this period would require a short chapter of its own. Indeed, Fodor was nothing short of relentless in his efforts to make a name for himself, and proved to be very adept at "networking," Beyond maintaining professional and even personal relationships with former university professors like the geographers Jeno Cholnoky and Gustav Thirring, Fodor also made contact with a number of leading conservative-nationalist intellectuals of the pre-Trianon period, including Count Pal Teleki. This relationship with Teleki, as we shall see in later chapters, was perhaps the most important to Fodor professionally, intellectually, and personally. 69

For Fodor, who had courted at least two other young women prior to meeting Vira, and who had long fantasized about the sense of completion that marriage would bring, it was love at first sight.89 The same, however, cannot be said about Vira, who was at best lukewarm to his declarations of love in the years that followed their initial meeting in

1908. Though Fodor began writing to her in July 1908, he did not receive a "proper" letter from her until May 1909. But even this was nothing more than a formal response to one of his earlier missives, and hardly constituted the more romantic, and emotionally committed, sort of response he had been hoping for. Having pursued her for nearly a full year, Fodor began to doubt that she would ever be "his."

Vira's indifference to, and even active discouragement of, Fodor's advances did not deter him in his efforts to win her favor, however. In August 1909, in fact, Fodor's hopes were rekindled when he heard from a friend in Szatmar that Vira would soon be moving to Budapest to finish her teacher's training at the Erzsebet Women's College.

Emboldened by the few short and admittedly formal letters he had received from her over the summer, Fodor began seeking out opportunities to meet with her in person. Early in

September, for example, Fodor waited outside the Greek Catholic church in Pest, hoping, as he would later write, to "catch a glimpse of her" as she left the service.90 Two weeks later he wrote to her asking for permission to see her, but his request was refused. By the end of October, however, he could wait no longer, and worked up the courage to approach her in person outside her church. "For the second time in my life," he wrote, "I spoke a few words to Vira."91 Whatever he said was enough, it would appear, to begin their correspondence anew, and for the rest of the academic year they would write

89 For an indication of Fodor's earlier love interests, see Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 3-5. 90 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 7. 91 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 7. regularly to each other, though Vira's letters appear to have been much shorter, and less frequent, than Fodor's.92

Vira's silence would become absolute again in the summer of 1910, something that served as the source of "great anxiety" for Fodor. Noting that he wrote to her often, but that she never answered, Fodor would later write that her silence "tormented him greatly."93 In the fall, Vira once again began writing to him, albeit infrequently and in uninspired, and often terse, notes written on the back of her name card.94 By December, however, Fodor's persistence began to pay off, as Vira, for some reason that is not at all clear from their surviving correspondence, became more attentive to his overtures. After attending a handful of university functions with Fodor in the weeks leading up to

Christmas, Vira invited Fodor to celebrate New Year's Eve in Ungvar with herself and her family. Recounting the events of this evening, Fodor would later write of how they stayed up together talking well into the morning. Noting simply that they managed to

"come to an understanding with each other," he wrote: "On New Year's Day I left

Ungvar as an engaged man."95

Despite their engagement, which they kept secret from their families until April,

1911, and which they didn't publicly announce until December 24,1912 (a full two years after their initial decision to get married), the tumultuous nature of their relationship, and with it Fodor's uncertainty and anguish, would persist. In February 1911, for example,

Fodor received what he described to be a "disappointing letter" from Vira, one which was all the more shocking because she provided no clear reason for her "disparaging

92 See FP, correspondence between Ferenc and Vira, November 1909-May 1910. 93 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 7. 94 See FP, correspondence between Ferenc and Vira, September-November, 1910. 95 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 8. 71

words."96 Two weeks later he was relieved to get a "kind greeting" in the mail from her,

but this emotional reprieve did not last long. On March 23,1911, Vira wrote a short

letter explaining to Fodor that her "heart" was not his, and in fact had "once belonged to

someone else." Her inability to get over her past love, she continued, was the reason she

was incapable of fully "giving" herself to Fodor.97 In desperation, Fodor met with Vira

on April 11, when, instead of reconciling, they "came close to breaking up." The very

next day, however, the situation changed yet again, with Vira rethinking her commitment

to Fodor, and to their relationship. As Fodor would later write: "Vira promised to make

everything better, and to remain mine."98

As if to convince himself of the sincerity of Vira's renewed commitment, Fodor

composed an eight-page letter to his mother the following day, telling her of their

engagement, and gushing over his love for his bride-to-be. In what must be seen in retrospect as the hopeful—even delusional—words of a man desperate to justify his relationship with Vira not just to his mother, but also to himself, Fodor began by

apologizing for not telling her earlier of their decision to marry, and then continued by reassuring her that their love for each other was genuine. Underscoring his belief that

Vira was the perfect choice for him, and convinced that he was not rushing hastily into marriage, Fodor wrote, almost pleadingly:

Please believe me when I say that I know perfectly well what I have done. I truly believe that someday you will come to love Vira even more than you love me!...You will see, we will be very happy together. People back home of course know that I could have had anyone, that I could have chosen someone else, either in Szatmar or

96 Ibid., 8. It is not clear which letter he is referring to here. Could it be the one sent by Vira on February 27,1911, in which she criticizes him for being too overbearing, and for demanding too much from her emotionally? See FP, letter from Ferenc to Vira, February 27,1911. 97 FP, letter from Vira to Ferenc, March 23,1911. 98 Fodor, "FJetem esemenyei," 8. 72

elsewhere. But I don't need anyone else, just her. Please believe me when I say that I see a very comfortable, untroubled, and happy future before me!99

One has to wonder, however, how much inner peace such future-oriented visions could possibly have brought to Fodor. It would seem more likely, in fact, that his letter merely served as a hopeful salve for the emotional suffering that the relationship continued to cause him in the present. Indeed, like so many other times throughout his life, Fodor committed his deepest fantasies for psycho-ontological completion to paper, as if the written word could heal, or at least mask, the wounds that life itself inflicted.

Unfortunately for Fodor, the pain continued, with the engagement suspended indefinitely in August 1911, just days before he received the news of his appointment as a gymnasium teacher in Kar£nsebes. After receiving a letter from her declaring that all she wanted was friendship, Fodor wrote: "Everything is finished. She has shut me out of everything."100 Devastated, Fodor reluctantly took up his teaching position in

Kar&nsebes in late August, noting that he did so with a "heavy heart." "My soul," he wrote, "is completely listless."101 Fodor would remain on the brink of "utter despair" until they finally, and perhaps inexplicably, got married on August 23,1913.102 Yet,

99 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, letter fromFeren c to his mother, April 13,1911. 100 Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 9. 101 Ibid. 102 The letters between them during this period, coupled with Fodor's own account years later, reflect the emotional roller coaster mat he was forced, or rather chose, to ride. In the autumn of 1911, for example, Fodor wrote time and again to Vira expressing his despair, but received very little encouragement from her in return. On November 13,1911, Vira wrote a friendly letter which, according to Fodor, showed signs mat she too was again seeking something more than friendship. "There was new hope," he wrote, "but only for a few days." By the end of November, he had sunk into depression over the matter once again, and was forced to spend "a sad Christmas, and even more miserable New Year's" with his sister. Then, in early January, 1912, Fodor managed to arrange a meeting with Vira in Budapest. Again they came "to an understanding," with Vira indicating that she wished to renew their engagement Despite finding it hard to trust her, Fodor agreed, and by they end of January, they had begun making plans for their wedding. Fodor would later write that the spring and summer were "happy times," but mat mis would change by the autumn of 1912, when Vira once more began writing less. "When she did write," Fodor noted, "the letters were short, and cold." Falling into a familiar pattern, Fodor wrote to her indicating that he could bear no more of 73 judging from Fodor's personal papers (documents which include a considerable body of

correspondence with Vira even after they were married), things between them did not

improve significantly after their marriage, nor even after the birth of their two children:

Vira (who was known to the family as Baba) in May 1914, and Zoltan in the summer of

1916. If anything, the pressures of a family and the uncertainty of war, coupled with

Vira's ill-health and continued "nervous disposition," only deepened the gulf between

them. From Fodor's point of view, Vira remained inexplicably distant from him,

reluctant to show both the affection and respect that he deserved as her husband.

Fodor's disappointment and emotional turmoil came to a head when he was

temporarily separated fromVir a and his children at the end of the war. Leaving his

family with his sister in Torokszentmiklos (a town on the Hungarian Hortobagy then

under Romanian occupation), Fodor had gone on alone to Budapest in the autumn of

1919 to take up a position at the Foreign Ministry. Though his letters to Vira invariably

expressed bis undying love for her, and beyond this his hope for the future, they also gave

voice to his despair over the state of their relationship. In a letter dated April 26,1920,

for example, Fodor wrote to his wife telling her about a weekend spent with friends in the

countryside, assuring her that "I thought always of the family, and especially of you,

darling Vira." This declaration of love, however, was followed by a rebuke for some

unidentified marital transgression. Noting that "I always have you on my mind," Fodor

men continued by admitting that "I would have liked to have heard something fromyo u

"this emotional turmoil." In response, Vira tried to make amends, and in late September "things quickly got better," but during a visit with Vira in Budapest on October 13,1912, Fodor again found her "cold and impatient." Six days later, after having written to her on October 17 stating that he could no longer "bear the uncertainty," Vira wrote to him begging his forgiveness. Such a manic cycle of hope and despair would continue right up to their wedding the next summer. See FP, letters between Ferenc and Vira, 1911-1913. See also Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 9-10. Figure 4 Fodor and family c. 1917 (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks) that I could have been proud of." "I keep thinking about how you are with me," he added, indicating his inability to come to terms with the emotionally unresolved nature of their relationship. Perhaps unable to forget Vira's confession in 1911 that her heart belonged to another, Fodor felt compelled to note that he often lay awake at night thinking about her, and was generally unable to sleep "because of the jealousy."

Fodor's own troubled relationship with his wife during World War I in many ways served as a metaphor for the growing sensation that the world was closing in on him. This became particularly pronounced by the last year of the war, and especially by the middle of August 1918, when word of German "troubles" on the Western frontbega n to reach Karansebes. With the disheartening news of a possible defeat coming at a time when Karansebes itself was in the grips of the Spanish flu, Fodor noted that the mood of the city was "truly deflated."104 "Complete chaos and disorder," he would later add,

"came in November with the arrival of the Romanian army." Aided by the local

Romanian population, who had "remained quiet" during the war, but with the arrival of actual Romanian soldiers "became wild and savage," the Romanians disarmed the

Hungarians, and disbanded the local Hungarian defense force which Fodor had been appointed head of earlier that year. Reflecting on the "unbelievable news" they began hearing in the middle of December "of advances being made on all fronts by the

Romanians, Serbs, and Czechs," Fodor made note of the despair that he and others felt.

Suggesting that "Christmas couldn't have come at a more terrible time," he wrote of how he withdrew from everything and, "retreating entirely into himself," focused his attentions on his scholarly work.105 Hoping to exert some control over the situation at least on a symbolic level, Fodor withdrew into fantasies and performances of the scholarly male, perhaps holding out hope that, through his work, he could achieve the

103 FP, letter from Fodor to Vira, Budapest, April 26,1920. Fodor would later note that, even after they were reunited as a family in May, 1920, Vira remained "completely closed off fromme. " See Fodor, "Emtekezettil," 9. 104 Fodor, "Eletem esem&ryei," 16. 105 Ibid., 17. success, security, and sense of stability that had been denied to him by his wife, and

which had come under siege during the war itself.

In the end, Fodor's arguably "traumatized" pre-Trianon withdrawal into his

academic work, coupled with his continued involvement in cultural organizations such of

the boy scouts, was indicative of his on-going, life-long attempt to negotiate a

meaningful, and ultimately stable, sense of self. However, Fodor's multi-faceted

strategies for the negotiation of self, no matter how meaningful and culturally important

they may have been for him, also had the effect of highlighting, and even amplifying, the

very problems that he was attempting to address and solve on both a personal and

national level. Having internalized the moral imperatives laid out by a generation of

conservative nationalists engaged in a "culture war" against the disintegrative forces of

liberalism and modernity, Fodor had also internalized the collective fears and anxieties

upon which these imperatives were based. Having become an educator, moreover, Fodor

himself had begun to play a conscious role in the transmission of the transgenerational

national trauma that had been so fundamental to his own education. These educational

efforts, no matter how meaningful they may have been to him personally and

professionally, only served to reinforce his ever-present fears of social, political, cultural,

and even psycho-ontological dissolution. As he himself admitted in the "boy scout

testament" cited above, his involvement in the moral, physical, and spiritual training of the nation's youth pointed to the need not just for the regeneration of the nation, but also

for the regeneration of his own self. Ultimately, the cultural vigilance and defensive

moral stance that he adopted in the pre-Trianon period only served to heighten the

interconnected sense of personal, interpersonal, and national insecurity which had rendered such a position necessary in the first place. As we shall see, his efforts to escape this circular dynamic were largely ineffectual, and in fact remained central to the existential anxiety he continued to feel in his never-ending attempts to negotiate modernity, and to construct a modern, and ultimately stable, sense of self. Chapter Two Balkan Fantasies, 1917: The Ebb and Flow of the Self

"Everything I wish for myself, that I would want to write on my gravestone, I could summarize epigrammatically without lying: He was his name. He was Scholem [shalem],1 that is whole, he was as his name demanded, he lived his name, wholly and undivided." Gershon Scholem, Diaries (1916)

On the evening of June 20,1917, Fodor detrained at Bosna Brod, a border town in northern Bosnia-Hercegovina situated where the Bosna River meets the Sava. Traveling under the auspices of the Hungarian Academy of Science's Oriental Committee (a

Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia Keleti Bizottsag), Fodor was part of a five-man scientific expedition on its way to conduct a two-week geo-botanical survey of the

Bosnian region. It was his firstexcursio n to the Balkans, a region of colonial interest to

Hungarian nationalists and would-be imperialists alike.2 Filling him with a sense of power and purpose, the simple act of setting foot on the railway platform at Bosna Brod obviously triggered what might usefully be called the "masculine-imperial fantasy" that

Fodor harbored as a patriotic Hungarian intellectual engaged in what he and others considered to be field research of great scientific, and ultimately geopolitical, import. As he would record in his diary later that same night: "With my first steps I walked upon

Balkan soil just as the mighty Caesar did in Egypt."3

1 Here Scholem is playing upon the Hebrew root "sh'l'm," which, in the context he is using it, can mean complete, full, entire, perfect, or whole. 2 Of course, Fodor's definition of the Balkans was a distinctly Hungarian one particular to his time, and thus differs from a standard western definition of the region, and even fromcurren t Hungarian definitions. For Fodor, the Balkans started at the Croatian frontier, which prior to the dismemberment of the nation in 1920, was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Fodor had, in fact, traveled to Fiume (a Croatian city now considered by most to be part of the Balkans) in 1908, where he was fined for singing patriotic Hungarian songs in a public place. See FP, Fodor's scrapbooks. 3 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.3/8, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 4.

78 Yet, in the same way that Caesar and his men soon found themselves under siege after their arrival in Alexandria in 48 B.C.E., Fodor's confident sense of power and purpose was challenged the very next morning upon his arrival in Sarajevo.4 In the light of day, "the Balkans" looked much different than they had the night before; they were more degenerate and disorderly, and much more foreign and unsettling than he had expected. Spending the afternoon wandering through the Bosnian capital, Fodor searched for evidence of European civilization amidst the incessant noise and confusion that characterized the "Turkish hovels" and marketplaces that he stumbled upon, and which gave Sarajevo its undeniably "Oriental" feel Though Fodor did manage to find streets and neighborhoods that were "bright," orderly, and culturally reassuring,5 his attention was drawn anxiously and repeatedly to the dilapidated buildings and chaotic scenes of a city that was at best only half-European. Far from marching through the streets and markets of Sarajevo like a conquering Roman emperor, Fodor instead scurried nervously from one partially civilized space to the next, ever conscious of the filth and degenerative squalor that lay between.

It was only when he began his field work the next day that he would have the opportunity to try and re-settle himself. But even here in the more reassuring spaces of the Bosnian countryside Fodor was unable to fully live out the masculine-imperial fantasy that he had so confidently embraced on the Bosnian frontier. Rather than acting as a passive, reflective screen against which he could exercise what Rosi Braidotti has

4 For an account of Julius Caesar's time in Egypt between the Autumn of 48 B.C.E. and Summer 47 B.C.E., see Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: The Life of a Colossus (London: Phoenix, 2007), 525-44. As Goldworthy writes, Caesar did not land in Alexandria with an especially strong force, in part because Pompey had already been executed by the Egyptians, but also because he "did not expect to face serious opposition." 527. 5 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok. 1917," 14. called the "transcendental narcissism" of the detached, autonomous, and ultimately colonizing self, the landscape and people of Bosnia offered some stiff resistance.6 In the end, what was reflected back to Fodor was incomplete, distorted, and fundamentally destabilizing.

Building on the conceptual foundations laid by a number of poststructuralist theorists and scholars, this chapter uses Fodor's Balkan diary as a means of understanding and problematizing the integrative fantasy of a unified masculine self that he enacted with his first steps on Balkan soil, and which he attempted time and again to play out over the course of the expedition. Using a variety of theoretical texts and other primary sources, the chapter attempts to read Fodor's diary "against the grain," drawing out as it does so the more troubling aspects of identity formation which he attempted to repress, conceal, or gloss over.7 What emerges is the story of a man struggling to negotiate not only the destabilizing spaces of a foreign land, but also the inherently complex psychological landscapes of modernity itself. As we shall see, this proved to be no easy task for Fodor, despite the heroic, detached image that he constructed of himself—and for himself—in his diary. Driven by the hope for ontological totality,

Fodor was instead forced to confront the inevitable fragmentation of his very being.

6 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 38. 7 As historian Steven Aschheim cautions, "diaries...can be compensatoriry self-deceiving. [Like letters they] are potentially self-serving forms—they may, consciously or otherwise, obscure or even repress, rather than clarify, the issues at hand." But I would argue that it is precisely because they attempt to mask certain anxieties and ambiguities of the self that diaries serve as useful, if methodologically problematic, sources. See Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5. 81

One Night on the Bosnian Frontier: The Anatomy of a Fantasy

It is telling that Fodor should choose to describe his very first encounter in the Balkans

with a reference to Julius Caesar's arrival in Egypt in 48 B.C.E. Though the analogy is

obviously a bit of a stretch, this final chapter in Caesar's successful military campaign against his erstwhile political ally (and former son-in-law) Pompey did have a few general points in common with Fodor's geo-botanical expedition, albeit in a way that is only possible within the exaggerated bounds of the nationalist imaginary. Much like

Caesar, whose pursuit of the intransigent Pompey ultimately involved him in a civil war which had important implications for the future of Roman control over Egypt, Fodor and his team were part of a much broader imperial mission to the Balkans, one which, if successful, would serve to quell the forces of political dissent and disorder in the region, and would ultimately see Bosnia-Hercegovina drawn more closely into the cultural and political sphere of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This part of the Balkans, in fact, had long been an object of Habsburg imperial desire, and the war provided a perfect opportunity to finally control and possess it fully.8

Indeed, as Fodor indicated in the very first entry in his field diary, the Hungarian

Academy of Science used the war as a pretense to begin its "planned" scientific research in the Balkans, noting that "the very conditions of the war have made it easier to

The question of Austria's interest in the Balkans, and especially in Bosnia-Hercegovina, was explored by a panel of three scholars at the American Historical Association's 121st Annual Meeting in Atlanta on January 5,2007. Entitled "Austria's Orient: The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Habsburg Monarchy," the panel featured the following papers: Paula Sutter Fichtner, "Servants of the State and Scholarship: Orientalists in the Habsburg Empire fromth e Renaissance to Romanticism," Diana Reynolds, "Manufacturing Mother Austria: The Cultural Politics of Austrian Rule in Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878- 1914," and Reinhard Johler, "The Occupation of Bosnia and Hercegovina and the Invention of an Austrian Ethnology." undertake this research since virtually the entire Balkans are under our military control."9

The fact that they were not only granted military permission for the expedition, but also had the active support of the army and the Austrian-appointed governor of Bosnia-

Hercegovina, suggests that the expedition might very well have had an important empire- building role to play. However, whatever broader, Habsburg-imperialist purpose the expedition may have fulfilled, there can be no doubt that for Fodor and the rest of his colleagues, this purpose overlapped with, and was quite likely dwarfed by, a more narrow, nationalist agenda.10 Since the formation of the dual monarchy in 1867,

Hungarians had struggled to extricate themselves fromth e overbearing shadow of their

Austrian partners, with both liberal and conservative governments alike toying increasingly with the idea of cultural, territorial, and political expansion in south eastern

Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For some, this expansion was to be effectively symbolic, with Hungary merely setting a civilized example for the rest of the Balkans. Others, in turn, envisioned the creation of a greater Danubian federation, one in which the culturally and politically advanced Hungarians would naturally assume a leadership role as the first amongst equals.11 Still others, however, advocated a much more ambitious, and ultimately aggressive, expansionist scheme, with a handful of radical nationalist politicians and intellectuals promoting the creation of an actual Balkan empire for the Hungarians themselves. As one such advocate wrote in 1902, future generations of Hungarians were destined to dominate south eastern Europe so completely

9 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 1. The first expedition was actually in the summer of 1916, under the leadership of Dr. Janos Tuzson. The plan was to complete the survey in six years, though mis was thwarted by the geopolitical realignment of the Balkans after the war. 10 As Robert Nemes reminds us in his recent study on nationalism and urban development in nineteenth- century Budapest, in pre-Trianon Hungary "nationalists pursued their aims within an imperial framework." Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 8. 11 This second position was endorsed by left-wing thinkers and politicians such as Oszkar Jaszi, and also by conservatives such as Pal Teleki, Fodor's friend and mentor. 83 that they would "live to see Hungarian supremacy over Bulgaria, and hear Hungarian spoken on the streets of Sofia."12

Whether one entertained a cultural, federal, or aggressive imperial approach to the nation's geopolitical ambitions, the question of Hungarian expansion in the Balkans, and especially in Bosnia-Hercegovina, acquired a new level of importance during the war.

After all, ethnic Hungarians were already vastly outnumbered within the dual monarchy, and constituted less than fifty-percent of the population within the Kingdom of Hungary itself. The expansion of the Habsburg empire in the Balkans, therefore, and the anticipated annexation of Serbia, posed a distinct threat to Hungarian political interests and national sovereignty. As an "equal" partner within the Habsburg empire, Hungary thus expected that the monarchy's territorial gains would be equitably distributed

"according to the dualist principle." As the Hungarian prime minister Istvan Tisza reasoned during the war, Bosnia and Hercogovina would automatically become

Hungarian crown provinces in order to offset any Austrian gains made in Poland or

Serbia. Only in this way could the balance of power within the Austro-Hungarian empire be maintained.13

As historian Joseph Kessler and others have noted, intellectuals like Fodor played an important role in the shaping of Hungary's imperialist agenda in the years leading up to World War I.14 Looking specifically at the Hungarian Turanian Society founded in

See Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 139-40. Here Janos is citing the radical nationalist politician and journalist Pal Hoitsy, an assimilated, first-generation Hungarian. 13 See Jozsef Galantai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest: Akademiai Kiadd, 1989), 96-7. It is worth noting in this context that, following its occupation in 1878, Bosnia was administered by the imperial-royal Finace-Ministry, in large part to alleviate tensions between Austria and Hungary over the administration of this region. 14 See Joseph Kessler, "Turanism and Pan-Turanism in Hungary, 1890-1945" (University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1967). See also Tamas Hofer, ed., Hungarians Between "East" and "West": 84

1910 (a society with which leading scholars at the Academy of Science were affiliated),

Kessler argues that, though the aims of the organization were primarily scholarly, the

overtly pragmatic, and ultimately nationalist, dimensions of their work cannot be overlooked. The Society's founding declaration may indeed have stressed "the scientific, rather than the political, nature of its interest in the Ural-Altaic world," but its concomitant aim to further Hungary's "homogenous national purpose" in south eastern

Europe quite obviously spoke to Hungary's underlying cultural and geopolitical ambitions in the region.15 According to Kessler, it was within this context that that the

Society lobbied the Hungarian government with some urgency to increase not only the number of expeditions to the Balkans, but also the scope of the research conducted there.

By creating a "first rate corps of experts," and by maximizing both the quantity and quality of the "relevant data" collected, an accelerated program of scientific research would further Hungary's political, economic, and cultural influence in the region.16

According to Turanist leaders like the geographer and future prime minister Count Pal

Teleki, expeditions like the one sponsored by the Academy of Science in 1917 would

Three Essays on National Myths and Symbols (Budapest: Museum of Ethnography, 1994); and Judith Winternitz, "The 'Turanian' Hypothesis and Magyar Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century," in Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, Roland Sussex and J.C. Eade, eds. (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1983): 143-158. Kessler, "Turanism and Pan-Turanism in Hungary, 1890-1945," 107. Here Kessler is drawing on Gyula Sebestyen, "The Turanian Society," Ethnographia (1910): 360. 16 Kessler, "Turanism and Pan-Turanism in Hungary, 1890-1945," 118-19. The Turanists were by no means the only organization interested in the region. According to Fodor, the war itself gave rise to, and expanded the horizons of, a number of cultural, political, and scientific organizations. These included the Magyar Adria Egyesiilet, the Magyar Keleti Kultukozpont, the Magyar Keleti Gazdasagi kSzpont, the Temsevari Balkan Iroda, and the balkan Akademia. In addition to mis, mere was renewed interest in "Balkan" language classes and the Turan idea. See Ferenc Fodor, A Delvidek is a Balkan kozelkedisi kapcsolata (Temesvar: Hunyadi-Nyomda, 1917). 85 represent an unmistakable projection of Hungarian power in the region, and in so doing would clear the way for future colonial projects.17

As a scholarly contributor to, and later member of, the Turanian movement in

Hungary, Fodor was well aware of the broader significance of his geo-botanical mission to Bosnia, a fact which helps us better understand the inflated sense of self that he felt upon encountering the Balkans for the first time in the summer of 1917. But this elevated

sense of self, and with it his confident self-identification with Caesar, had another more personal meaning that went well beyond the geopolitical. Having spent the war years working as a gymnasium teacher in the provincial town of Karansebes (Caransebes) in eastern Hungary, the expedition provided Fodor with an opportunity to play out his own masculine-imperialist fantasies, something which had been denied to him in August 1914 when he had been declared medically unfit for military service in the Austro-Hungarian army.18 The invitation to join the Academy of Science's Balkan expedition, therefore, came not only as an honor to Fodor, but also as a relief. Having watched for three long years his colleagues and students marching proudly off to war, Fodor was finally given an opportunity to prove his worth as a man.

17 See Pal Teleki, "Introductory Statement," Turan (1913): 4. See also Rezso Milliker, "The Economic Conditions of Anatolia," Turan (1913): 28-43; and Antal Penigey, "The Economic Conquest of the East," Turan (1913): 86-91. For a recent analysis of Teleki's role in the Hungarian Turanian Society, see Balazs Ablonczy, Pal Teleki, 1874-1941: The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician, Thomas J. Held and Helen D. Kornfeld, trans. (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2006), 19-33. As Fodor himself indicated in the introduction to a study published in 1917 by the Balkan Office in Temesvar (o Temesvdri Balkan Iroda), the war in the Balkans underscored the need to better understand the region from a scientific as much as military point of view. Such knowledge, he argued, would be essential in determining the sort of role Hungary might play in the Balkans after the war. See Fodor, A Delvidek es a Balkan kozelkedesi kapcsolata, 3. Other books published in the same series as this one during the war included Zoltan Szavay's Arad es a Balkdn, and Oszkar Faludi's Mi legyen a Magyarorszdg szerepe a magyar-bolgdr gazdasdgi viszony kiepiteseben? The relationship between geographical knowledge and political power mat Fodor and others spoke of during the war was a reflection of ideas pioneered by political geographers like Friedrich Ratzel at the turn of the century. See, for example, Ratzel's essay "The Territorial Growth of States," Scottish Geographical Magazine 12 (1896): 351-361. 18 See MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenzcik Fodor, "Fodor Ferenc elete," 8. On this more personal and even fundamental level, then, the muscular image of

the "mighty" Caesar represented for Fodor the pinnacle of his own masculine fantasy of

subjective unity; the illusion of the self as autonomous ontological totality capable of

exercising sovereignty over himself and others.19 This more or less "Kantian" conception

of the self, one which conceives of the independent human agent as "the sole author of its

own actions," was the cornerstone of Fodor's identity, not only as a man, but also as a

scientist, and as a nationalist.20 As it had been for so many other colonizing subjects both

before and after him, the Balkans were supposed to serve as a passive stage upon which

Fodor could enact this fantasy of the self; a space within which he could project himself

"to the height of imperial consciousness," and, in so doing, mask his own inherent

fragmentation under "the performative illusion of unity, mastery and self-transparence."21

On that first night in Bosna Brod, waiting for the Bosnian station hands to transfer

their equipment and supplies to the narrow-gauge train that would take them the rest of

the way to Sarajevo, Fodor stood apart from the rest of the group. Alone with his fantasy,

he surveyed the station and peered out into the Balkan night. Overcome with a "sense of

Caesar quite obviously represented the muscular masculine archetype that informed the overlapping constructions of national and imperial manhood throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. For works which explore various aspects of the construction of national/imperial masculinity during this period, see (amongst many others) Sinha Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman " and the "Effeminate Bengali" in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise ofHeterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University pf California Press, 1997); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989). 20 Edwina Barvosa-Carter, "Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come," in Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, Margaret S6nser Breen and Warren J. Blumenfeld, eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 177. This notion of the ontological unity of the autonomous subject was widespread throughout Europe and the rest of the "Western" world at this time. In his study of the famous Jewish historian Gershon Scholem, for example, Steve Aschheim notes how the fantasy of an integrated, unified self drove Scholem politically, academically, and psychologically. The quotation that opens this chapter, in fact, nicely captures this modernist, ontological impulse. See Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer. 21 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 12. power" with seemed to surge within him, and "forgetting his sore throat," Fodor

"repeated and repeated Caesar's words."22 Unfortunately, Fodor never did indicate exactly what these words were, and so we can only speculate as to what it might have been that Fodor was repeating to himself (could it have been Caesar's iconic phrase

"veni, vidi, vici"?). The fact, however, that he felt compelled to repeat a celebrated

Julian dictum as a means of confirming and reinforcing the fantasy that he had embraced does perhaps help shed some light on the "performative" nature of identity formation mentioned above. As Judith Butler argues in her seminal work Gender Trouble, identities are actualized through a "regulated process of repetition," one in which, over time, the reiteration of a particular subjective position can actually create the illusion of an integrated, if fundamentally fragile, identity and sense of self.23

Fodor's brief performance at the train station at Bosna Brod was just the first of a never ending string of performances that he enacted and repeated during his nearly two week tour of south-east Bosnia. Through these performances, Fodor attempted to play out his masculine-imperial fantasy of an integrated self, thus demonstrating to himself and to those around him (and, indeed, to those who might later read his diary), that he was the man he imagined himself to be. But, as we shall see, these performances were constantly blocked and disrupted, so much so that his interconnected self-image as a scientist, as a Hungarian, and as a civilized gentleman was undermined, and thrown repeatedly into question.

22 Fodor, "Botanikai kir&idulfcok, 1917," 4. 23 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145. One Afternoon in Sarajevo: Gaps in Fodor's "Imperial" Armor

The rush of power that Fodor felt during his late-night stop on the Bosnian border only seemed to be confirmed the next morning. Having slept a mere four hours, Fodor woke at dawn, noting the progress they had made in the night, and writing in his diary that "we have already penetrated deep into the Bosna Valley."24 Fodor's mission, one with distinctly national-imperial overtones, had begun in earnest. From the window of his compartment, Fodor carefully surveyed the landscape as the Bosnian train lumbered south-east towards Sarajevo. In the early morning sun, the river valley appeared to open itself up to his colonizing gaze. With the assistance of Father Kovacs, a Roman Catholic priest who was part of the expedition, Fodor compiled an impressive list of the flora observable from the moving train (this list takes up no less than four full pages in the diary), making careful note of the geological formations of the river valley as he did so.25

For Fodor this was all very much a terra incognita, a land made even more fascinating and exotic by the uncivilized state of the "scattered" Bosnian settlements they passed

24 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 5. 25 Fodor's lists would only get more detailed, of course, once he started his fieldwork, as would his description of the surrounding terrain. His diary, in fact, reveals a strong need on Fodor's part to map out his surroundings—a product, no doubt, of his botanical work (which required careful descriptions of geological formations, and accurate measurements of altitude), and also of his underlying desire to become thoroughly familiar with (and thus exert some control over) his immediate environment The following is an excerpt taken from his diary entry for the afternoon of June 23 (the omissions in the text represent lists of flora). Fodor wrote: "By 3:45 we reach the edge of the deciduous forest A crumbling, limestone mountain peak stands in fronto f us. It is Bjelasnica's smaller eastern peak. [...] At 1450 m. the view is of the picturesque Sarajevo valley. The mountain pass we are in is called "Bieli vade" (white castle). Water is nowhere to be found. A few meters above us it is snowing. [...] To the south-east we get a good look at the crevacious Mount Treskanica. Above the tree line, on Bjelasnica's barren, limestone peak [are] interesting overlapping limestone rock formations. To the south the snow-covered limestone peak of Visocica(?)-planina - very similar to that of Detunata(?). Finally we come to a river. The water is ice- cold. Right below us is the Hercegovina border. It wasn't long ago mat the Serbs settled here. Looking east to west one can see [the peaks of] Treskanica, Visocica, and even farther off Prenj. In the distance, between Treskanica and Visocica is the Neretya valley. [...] In one exceptionally deep basin it is possible to study layers of snow fromth e past seven years. [...] The snow in places is approximately 50 m. deep. On the top of mount Bjelasnica, there is ahuge basin filled with snow about 100 m. deep.[...] The alpine flora bloom nicely.[...] On the barren peak (2267 m.) there is a strong, cold wind blowing." Ibid., 29-31 89 through. In spots he noticed evidence of Croatian and Austrian influence, but for the most part the scene was one of "poverty and neglect"27 This was, in so many ways, a wild place that needed to be explored, studied, and tamed, a presumably perfect space within which he could play out his fantasy of the culturally superior scientist- adventurer.28

The reception that Fodor and the rest of the team received later that morning in

Sarajevo only served to underscore, at least in his mind, the importance of the expedition.

At the station they were met by an official delegation comprised of three men, referred to in his diary simply as Pfeiffer, Fritz, and Jetnik. Pfeiffer, described by Fodor as "a most excellent Hungarian gentleman," was the region's head forester.29 As a senior government official, he acted as the liaison between the regional authorities and the five- man expedition led by Janos Tuzson, a professor of botanical geography at the University of Budapest. Fritz, a lieutenant-colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, was to serve as their guide, while Jetnik, a captain, would also join the expedition as a meteorological adjunct. Against the backdrop of the city's "unimpressive" and rather "provincial- looking" train station,30 the men exchanged handshakes, and then turned to supervising the unloading of the expedition's considerable equipment and supplies. As Fodor would

26 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 12. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 For an excellent discussion of this link between filed work, masculine fantasies of power, and geographers, see Gillian Rose, "Geography as the Science of Observation: The Landscape, the Gaze, and Masculinity," in Nature and Science: Essays in the History of Geographical Knowledge, ed. F. Driver and G. Rose (N.p.: Historical Geographical Research Series, number 28,1992), 8-18. See also the introduction to Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1-4. 29 Ibid., 12. 30 He writes: "[As we approach the station] we catch our first glimpse of an outlying Sarajevo neighborhood. The outskirts of Sarajevo give the impression of the outskirts of one of Hungary's small towns. The city's train station is small and not at all like the train station of a capital city. It is even less impressive than the train stations of our smaller cities back in Hungary." Ibid., 12. later write: "The official welcome was very pleasant, and we were helped with much courteousness. Pfeiffer made sure everything went smoothly.

After having their papers checked, three government cars sped Fodor and his colleagues into the center of the city along main streets which, given the apparent backwardness of Sarajevo, seemed remarkably "clean and well-kept. At the Central

Hotel, a grand "European" establishment where they were to spend the night, the team was met personally by the manager, a hotelier from Temesvar (Timisoara) who greeted them in Hungarian, and invited them to lunch in the dining room. Though wartime shortages in Bosnia meant that they were served no bread, and that the vegetable dish was thickened with cornmeal, Fodor nevertheless enjoyed the food, noting that the restaurant was "first-rate" and comparable, at least in terms of the prices, to some of the finer restaurants in Budapest. Like the reception at the train station earlier that day, the deferential treatment by the hotel manager appeared, on one level, to fuel the self-image that he had entertained the night before. He was, after all, an important man on an important mission, a representative of a nation whose self-proclaimed historical destiny was to spread order and civilization throughout the Balkans. Armed with science and culture, and backed by the presence of the Austro-Hungarian army, Fodor clung to the masculine fantasy of an integrated self in total control not only of his own person, but also of the people and things around him.

What is important to note at this juncture, however, is the inherent fragility not only of the identity he assumed, but also of the subjective position to which this identity

31 Ibid., 13. 32 Ibid., 13. He follows this observation with the realization that the streets they took led them through "the most European part of the city." 33 Like Karansebes, Temesvar is a former Hungarian city which is situated in the Banat region, and which is now part of Romania. 91 was anchored. Even at this early stage of the expedition, definite cracks had begun to appear in Fodor's masculine-imperial facade. These fissures or tensions were admittedly subtle, but they were there, percolating under the surface of his otherwise confident diary entries. Indeed, despite the self-assurance with which he catalogued the floraan d geological formations visible fromth e train, or the culturally-superior tone with which he passed judgment on the relative backwardness of the Bosnian countryside and its towns and villages, there are hints in his diary of potentially destabilizing anxieties, ones which he no doubt carried with him on the night he crossed into Bosnia, and which his identification with Caesar could only partially mask. Fodor subtly acknowledged, for example, Hungary's precarious position, both culturally and historically, within the region, indicating perhaps subconsciously that the expedition proceeded from a position of relative weakness, rather than relative strength. Even while still in Hungary itself

(which had signed a compromise agreement with Croatia in 1868, granting autonomy over cultural matters such as language and education) Fodor had lamented the visible absence and decline of Hungarian culture, noting as the train shot across the flat expanse of "the once-Hungarian Szerenyseg" on the evening of June 20 mat "there are now

Croatian words everywhere, and Croatian signs at the train stations."34 Over the course of the next morning, as the train penetrated ever deeper into the Bosna Valley, Fodor again made two brief but very revealing observations. At Maglaj Fodor mentioned the ruins of a Turkish castle built into a steep hill towering over the green water of the Bosna river, making note that it was here, at the hands of the advancing Turks, "that Hungarian hussars became martyrs so long ago."35 Later, at Visoka, Fodor revealed that he and the

34 Fodor, "Botanikai kir&idutesok, 1917," 4. 35 Ibid., 5 rest of the members of the expedition had given up looking for "signs of Hungarian influence in Bosnia," admitting that "in the station restaurants it was useless to even try speaking Hungarian."36 All around them, in fact, were reminders not only of what

Hungary had lost as a result of its humiliating military defeats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also of their limited geopolitical and cultural influence in the region. Seen within the context of geographical space and historical time, Hungary appeared to be shrinking, rather than expanding; its borders threatened by hostile enemies without, and its cultural integrity and national memory threatened by "alien" forces within.37

The gaps that had already begun to appear in Fodor's masculine-imperial armor that morning only widened later that same afternoon as he and Jozsef Kiss, a teaching assistant at the University of Budapest and co-member of the expedition, ventured out of the Central Hotel to explore the sights of Sarajevo's inner city. Over the course of the afternoon, the inherent fragility of his masculine-imperial fantasy would become much clearer. Documenting his inability to fully penetrate the core of the oriental mystery being played out all around him, as well as the anxiousness and fear that he at one point admitted to feeling, Fodor's eight-page description of his experiences amidst the oriental

"Other"—one in which Kiss is rendered virtually invisible—reveals, if only gradually

36 Ibid., 11. 37 Such a realization, as implicit as it may have been, must have been somewhat discomfiting for Fodor, a supposition which may help explain his exuberant embrace of Pfeiffer as a proper Magyar gentleman, and the hotel manager as speaker of Hungarian. In the company of these men, and within the confines of the Central hotel, Fodor and his colleagues could retreat into a discursive and physical space which was, at least on the surface, familiar, safe, and reassuring. This idea is certainly borne out during Fodor's second expedition to the Balkans the following year. Again, Fodor was impressed by the generous and overtly civilized behaviour of the Hungarian officials who greeted and entertained mem during their brief stay in Sarajevo. Describing their hospitality, Fodor twice wrote in his diary that "it appears as if the Hungarian winds still blow here even now." As in the first diary, however, Fodor leaves us with a real sense that the extent of the Hungarian civilizing example was extremely limited. See MVMDGy. H-20/1 28-97.3/2, "Masodik Balkan kirandulas" (1918), 3. 93 and inadvertently, how his own position as a detached, voyeuristic subject was challenged and undermined within the liminal, and increasingly degenerate, spaces in which he moved.

Fodor's sense of unease within these spaces is not, however, obvious at first. In fact, quite the opposite would seem to be the case. Having briefly explored the

"European-style" shops which lined the main streets near the hotel, Fodor and Kiss soon found themselves being drawn down a crowded alleyway into one of the city's many bazaars. Fodor's initial reaction, at least as he recorded it in his diary, was one of awe, and even excitement. Bustling with activity, and teeming with "every item imaginable," the bazaar looked to Fodor like "the centre of a Turkish city." "Here," he wrote, "an unbelievably colorful world opens up to us."38 Stalls that appeared to overflow with goods stood "in an endless row," with many of the shopkeepers sitting "unbelievably calmly for hours.. .smoking their pipes, or praying with outstretched hands." Butchers, bakers, goldsmiths, fez makers, silk embroiders and others lined every street and alleyway, working side by side and in the open. Meat stalls stood next to small coffee­ houses, with shopkeepers everywhere hawking "fresh figs, pickles...and huge pieces of roasted goat meat." Sweets such as Turkish ice-cream and jam were particularly cheap and easy to find, leaving Fodor with the distinct impression that he had stumbled upon a veritable land of plenty.39

Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 14. Fodor, of course, had never actually seen a Turkish city. His comparison here is therefore based on what he imagined a Turkish city centre to look like. 39 Ibid., 15-16. Fodor's fascination, even titillation, with his surroundings was consistent with middle-class behavior throughout Europe. As Peter Stalh/brass and Alon White explain, "what is socially excluded or subordinated is central to the formation of desire." Peter Stallybrass and Alon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 152. See also McClintock, Imperial Leather. This is not to say that Fodor openly articulated an overt desire to fully "lose himself in the chaotic, carnivalesque atmosphere of Sarajevo's bazaars. Far from it. As titillating as the marketplace may have been, it was nevertheless a foreign, transgressive, and potentially dangerous space, and thus needed to be navigated with great caution.40

All around him, street vendors speaking broken German and "one or two words of

Hungarian" attempted to lure Fodor to their stalls with promises of "authentic" Muslim goods, while the endless mass of bodies which coursed through the narrow passageways of the market threatened to overwhelm him entirely.4 Individually and at a comfortable distance, the exotic, eastern "Other" could be intriguing, even enchanting, but up close and en masse it was quite a different story. The great numbers of Muslims, and also

Jews, in the marketplace quite literally assaulted his senses. Moving fromon e market to the next, for example, Fodor noted that "the alleys between the bazaars are full of

Muslims," adding derisively that "they are a filthy, wretched people, with something of a constant smell of goats about them."42 He would later note that "the Sephardic Jews, if possible, are even dirtier than their Muslim counterparts," making special note of the women as being "especially disgusting."43

This is not to say that all the people of the marketplace disgusted Fodor completely, at least not from a strictly aesthetic point of view. Fodor was careful to note that amongst the crowd there were also "rich and distinguished" Muslim women

"wearing veils made from finer material," and "young, more educated-looking men

40 As Stallybrass and White write: "Between the secure places of home and... [church], lies the lure of the streets.... In the city one can 'lose oneself." Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 149. 41 Again Stallybrass and White: "In the symbolic formation of the city.. .[the] recalcitrant Other [serves] to trouble the fantasy of an independent, separate, 'proper' identity." Ibid., 148. For a fascinating discussion of this sensation of being lost in, and devoured by, the crowd, see Klaus Thweleit's Male Fantasies. 42 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 15. 43 Ibid., 18. wearing European-made suits. These men and women certainly stood out fromth e others, but there is a distinct sense in Fodor's description of them that they could not be trusted despite their appearance; that what they wore was no more than a conspicuous attempt to conceal their inherent backwardness under expensive veils and European finery. The young Muslim men were particularly suspect. Admitting that "the

Europeanness of their dress" was "patently obvious," Fodor nevertheless drew attention to the fez that each of these men invariably wore, stating that this was not merely a common practice, but rather an "obligatory" one.45 No matter how well-dressed they may have been, their "Otherness" was a trait that they could neither overcome nor hide.

Much like the subtext in the oft-studied Pears' soap ad from turn-of-the-century Victorian

England (an ad in which all but the head and face of a black child is scrubbed "white" with the help of Pears' soap), the obvious implication behind Fodor's essentialist and not- so-subtle sarcasm was that, like the black child in the ad, no amount of civilizing could ever make these men fully European.46

Tempted by the material excess and cultural exoticism of the marketplace on the one hand, but leery of the potential dangers of this transgressive and degenerate space on the other, Fodor strove to remain comfortably detached from it all, his impulse being to survey, catalogue, and analyze his surroundings, rather than to become truly a part of them. This is certainly understandable. As a scientist he was committed to distancing himself from the objects of his study, retreating into a safe position from which he could, in the words of historian William Everdell, observe the objects of bis interest "with an

44 Ibid., 18. 45 Ibid., 18. 46 The Pears' ad ran from 1884 until 1911. For a fascinating analysis of this ad, see McClintock,/wpma/ Leather, 211-19. Olympian assurance that they would not overwhelm him. Moreover, as a middle- class, Catholic intellectual with a refined sense of morality and social propriety, he was obliged to exert considerable self-control lest the desires stirred by the low, exotic

"Other" rise up and engulf him completely. By adopting and maintaining the pretense of a rational, "disenchanted" stance, Fodor hoped to navigate his way through urban spaces which disturbed as much as entranced him.

Fodor's detached, "scientific" stance, in fact, provided him with the moral license to pursue and probe—if only imaginatively—the objects of his repressed desire even more intimately. In the inner city, Fodor put this moral license to good use. As if searching for that one bit of information or insight which would unlock the secret of

Sarajevo's Oriental mystique, Fodor peeked into everything in his efforts to construct for himself a detailed mental map of the city and its people. Streets and buildings were described in minute detail, with the layout of a particular bazaar or the inventory of a particular shop carefully scrutinized and recorded. People were surveyed just as scrupulously, with neither their movement, their attitude, their appearance, nor even their smell escaping his attention. Fodor even went so far as to include crude drawings of people's dress alongside his detailed descriptions of what both men and women wore.

The typical Muslim man, for example, was described as wearing "baggy, Serbian-styled pants.. .a short, close-fitting waistcoat, a fez or, for the older men, a turban, and wooden- soled slippers."49 The typical woman, in turn, was dressed in garments "much more

William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10. 48 This notion of the rational, "disenchanted" stance, at least as it applies to a modem, middle-class intellectual like Fodor, is explored by Michael Saler in his recent article "Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review," The American Historical Review 111/3 (June 2006): 692-716. 49 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 17. slipshod and slovenly than the men's. Of particular interest to Fodor was the way in which their costume functioned to conceal much of the body fromhi s view. Noting that the skirt and bodice were sewn together, he added that "the bodice does not stop at the neck, but continues on to the head, and can be pulled down around the face like a kerchief." The sleeves in particular did much to hide the contours of the female form.

Starting from the "lower back" rather than the shoulders, their looseness did much to block his prying eyes.51

In fact, try as he might, Fodor was consistently "blocked" in his repeated efforts to get a "good look" at a Muslim woman. In part this was due to their costume. But it was also due to their refusal to be fully seen, at least by men. From the train that morning, for example, Fodor had observed the locals with great interest, noting with barely concealed exhilaration his first glimpse of Muslim women working in the fields.52

Describing the encounter in his diary, Fodor wrote: "We see them from the train and, surprised, they cover their heads."53 By drawing their veils across their faces they blocked his view, thus prohibiting him, if only symbolically, from fully "possessing" them. This frustration would dog him throughout the expedition. While working in the mountains five days later, for instance, Fodor would describe a brief encounter with a lone Muslim woman, his diary entry revealing how he attempted to quite literally undress her with his eyes, his gaze following her—even pursuing her—as she rushed past him on the mountain path. Enchanted but simultaneously frustrated, he wrote:

The word that Fodor uses to describe Muslim women both here and elsewhere in his diary is lompos, which, when describing a woman, can mean slovenly, sluttish, or slattern. See Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 17 and 38. 51 Ibid., 17. 52 Ibid., 5. 53 Ibid., 6. In the woods a beautiful Muslim woman descends the mountain path and comes toward us. She appears to have a great figure, and beautiful breasts. When she notices us, she covers her face, and rushes away. Of her body one can really only guess, since it is covered by her slovenly [lompos] dress.54

In the end he could only lament the fact that he was left guessing as to what her body

might actually look like, concealed as it was under her dirty, though curiously titillating,

clothing.55

It was not just the Muslim women that "blocked" him, however. Within the city

he was also prevented from fully viewing and thus mapping physical spaces as well. In

part this was due to the chaos and perceived limitlessness of the marketplace itself; a

disorderly space in which the confusion created by the never-ending flow of bodies and

by the overwhelming sights, sounds, and smells made it difficult to distinguish the parts

from the whole. Moreover, much as it was with the women, Fodor was often denied full

access to certain places as well. The Greek Orthodox church near the Central Hotel was

closed to him, for example, as was the inner sanctum of the Begova mosque in the bazaar

district. This did not, however, discourage Fodor from attempting to gain access to these

spaces. In the case of the Greek Orthodox church, Fodor did his best survey the structure

from the outside. In the case of the Begova mosque, he was even more determined to get

a look inside, despite the fact that non-Muslims were prohibited from entering because of

Ramadan. In his diary he described his abortive "journey" to the inner sanctum, noting how he first passed through an outer ring of trees, and then through a "vaulted Arabic

54 ibid., 38-39. 55 It is worth noting here that Fodor had a reputation in some circles of being somewhat of "a ladies man," though there is no indication in the letters and diaries that he left behind that he ever acted on his desires in an adulterous way. If anything, he did all he could to suppress these desires, even going so far as to criticize those who were less discreet In a letter written in 1929 to his colleague Bela Bulla, for example, Fodor criticizes a senior scholar's decision to hire a "beautiful" female assistant rattier than a male one. See MTAKK Ms 5271/109-112, letter fromFeren c Fodor to Bela Bulla, Budapest, May 13,1929. portico" which led into an inner courtyard where religious believers sat on benches around "flowing Oriental fountains used for ritual baths." From the courtyard a staircase

"full of shoes" led to a "lavishly ornamented Oriental gate" which guarded the entrance to the main mosque. It was here that Fodor's progress was finally barred. As it was with the Muslim women working in the fields, Fodor was only able to catch "a glimpse" of what was inside, the "valuable carpets" hanging on the walls and stretched out on the floor nearly impossible to see "because of the sheer number of people inside."56 As it was in the marketplace, the mass of people prohibited him fromtrul y "seeing," and thus knowing, controlling, and symbolically possessing the object of his inquiry.

This challenge to Fodor's autonomy as a masculine subject became more and more intense as the afternoon progressed. In fact, the deeper he penetrated the narrow alleyways and squalid neighborhoods which connected the larger bazaars, the less control he felt. This disorienting and disempowering sensation became so poignant that, at one point, he actually confessed to feeling afraid. Finding himself in "a neighborhood of unbelievably dirty Turkish hovels in a part of the city just above the [Csarsja?] bazaar,"

Fodor admitted that he felt compelled to hurry "anxiously" through it.57 Of course, this harried flightthroug h a dodgy neighborhood might very well be explained as nothing more than the sensible actions of a sophisticated gentleman with the presence of mind to realize that he had wandered into a space where he did not belong. But I would suggest that there was something more fundamental being played out here, that this moment of panic, however brief it may have been, was indicative of a more pervasive, destabilizing sense of unease that he experienced within the city in general, and amidst the eastern

56 Fodor, "Botanikai kirfcidutesok, 1917," 19. "ibid., 18. 100

"Other" in particular; a sense of unease which, as I have already suggested above, his fantasy of a detached, integrated self could not fully quell or contain. Intimately linked to his frustrating confrontation with the impenetrable and thus unknowable "Other," what disrupted him in the city were the seemingly unmapped, unregulated, and unkempt spaces of the marketplace, spaces that were defined and characterized by what Marshall Berman has called "radical freedom," and what Grilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have called overlapping and inherently uncontrollable matrices of deterritorialized, nomadic trajectories.58 These trajectories were—at least in Fodor's mincl—inscribed into the very landscape of the marketplace (an amorphous space in which one bazaar appeared to blend into the next), and were further traced out by marketgoers scurrying between European- style shops and open-air stalls in their ceaseless pursuit of "every kind of good imaginable." In their movement between main streets and back alleys, and in their apparent willingness to allow the rich to mix with the poor, and the domestic to commingle with the commercial, this mass of bodies that flowed through the deterritorialized spaces of the market traversed and challenged the boundaries between high and low, and between public and private, embodying for Fodor a radical freedom which, though it may have been tantalizing from an imaginative point of view, nevertheless distressed him when it was played out for real.59

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that given his experience within the marketplace over the course of the afternoon, Fodor might want to retreat at the end of it all into a

58 See Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 10; and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 27. 59 The sense of this breakdown between public and private and high and low that emerges from Fodor's description of Sarajevo's public spaces is consistent with a broader discourse typical of the bourgeois class throughout the modernizing world at this time. For a theoretical discussion of this, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics ofTransgression, 125-135. 101 more familiar and reassuring space. This was, in fact, exactly what he did, with the diary account of his voyeuristic sortie into Sarajevo's inner city effectively ending more or less where it began, in a modern, western building. Situated near an obelisk commemorating the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia

Hohenberg, Sarajevo's main post office was to be Fodor's last sight-seeing stop before heading back to the hotel. Like the Central Hotel itself, the post office was both tranquil and orderly, and certainly much less claustrophobic than the streets and alleyways which surrounded and ran past these otherwise isolated outposts of civilization. Depicted in his diary as "a large, beautiful, European-style building" with a "particularly stately and impressive interior," the post office stood in sharp contrast to the "imposing eastern architecture" that characterized much of Sarajevo's cityscape.60 The women working diligently within the post office likewise stood in sharp contrast to the women and men of the marketplace. Noting that each woman "had a military rank," Fodor wrote that

"despite our past relationship, it is interesting that, in terms of the way they treated us, the majority of them were very polite."61 Such behavior was no doubt a testament in Fodor's mind both to their "military" discipline, and to the civilizing power of the post office as a progressive, western institution.

Fodor was certainly appreciative of the fact that some effort was being made to turn Sarajevo into a modern, western city, conceding in his diary that "it appears as if there is a sincere desire to modernize."62 However, as promising as this Bosnian desire for progress may have been, the gains made so far had been largely ad hoc and

60 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 20 and 19. Sarajevo's city hall, for example, is described by Fodor in the following manner: "Done in a truly Arabic style, and with its oriental lines and reddish coloring, the building leaves the viewer with a truly eastern feeling." Ibid., 19. 61 Ibid., 20. 62 Ibid., 13. incomplete. "Plans for development," he observed, "are progressing slowly and haphazardly." "In the inner city," he added with some concern, "modern mansions and

Turkish hovels stand side-by-side," while elsewhere new structures were being randomly erected next to "abandoned Muslim graveyards, dilapidated mosques, derelict shacks, street bakeries, and meat stalls."63 The underlying tenuousness of Sarajevo's few modernizing achievements was only confirmed for him on the last day of the expedition when he managed to make a short tour of the city's newly-constructed museum before boarding the train back to Hungary (though the museum was actually closed at the time,

Fodor was let in by the director who was only "too happy" to accommodate him after

Fodor introduced himself personally). Like the main post office, Fodor praised the museum as a "beautiful modern structure," adding that, given the newness of the institution, and the fact that many of the exhibits were still under construction, the entire project seemed to be "developing in a favorable light"64 But regardless of whatever promise the museum might have held for the future, much of what he found within was cause for some immediate concern. Spending most of his time in the natural history section, Fodor made careful note of which displays were "poor" or "lacking," remarking not only on the relative paucity of many of the collections, but also on the failure to properly mount and label some of those which were on display.65 Even the interior

63 Ibid., 13-14. 64 Ibid., 47. 65 Of the natural history section, Fodor wrote: "They only have a few mammals, and some of the reptiles they have are poorly displayed. Many exhibits lack an indication of where the specimens were found. They have only a few specimens of small birds and fish. There are some species of ocean fish. The display of predatory birds is much richer, though not all have been fully prepared for display. In the botanical section, there are only a few well prepared exhibits, though these are accompanied by some excellent drawings... .In general, most of the rooms are still empty, and everything in the museum is still under construction, with the exception of the entomological section. The insect collection is beautifully laid out They have a number of beautiful exotic insects. The [?] section is weaker....They have a rich geological collection, however, with good geological maps on the wall." Ibid., 47. 103 decorating met with his scrutiny, with the furniture in particular being criticized as insufficiently modern and appealing.

Fodor's critique of a few missing labels and inappropriate furnishings may seem at first glance to be unnecessarily harsh. However, as Tony Bennett argues in The Birth of the Museum, such nitpicking is understandable in light of the social, cultural, and moral function that the museum was intended to fulfill as a modernizing institution. As a civilizing spectacle in the business of "winning the hearts and minds" of the citizenry, the museum needed first and foremost to attract people with clever, well-constructed exhibits, a stunning facade, and an eye-catching interior.66 More importantly, the museum needed to be properly organized and laid-out if it was to serve effectively in its dual role as both a disciplinary and a didactic space. Building critically on the work of

Michel Foucault, Bennett suggests that, much like the normative discourses and practices at work within the bourgeois schools and prisons that came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the modern museum, as it emerged at the fin de siecle, served as an instrument of power which aimed at the inner transformation of the individual, one whose ultimate goal was the manufacturing of a docile, useful, and efficient body public. The strategic use of high culture as a didactic tool, coupled with the creation of well-designed spaces in which everyone could see and be seen, reflected the hopes of modern bourgeois reformers that museum-goers (and especially those of the lower-classes) would not only internalize and emulate the normative moral, aesthetic, and

Drawing on a concept of hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci, Bennett contends that, because the museum was dependent on the voluntary participation of the public, it needed to employ structural and discursive strategies which would appeal to the people as consumers which valued the entertainment value of the museum as much as, if not more than, its pedagogical value. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 62. intellectual standards of the bourgeoisie, but also would be instilled with the capacity to discipline the self, and hence curb their own tendencies toward social delinquency.

It was in this light that Fodor judged the relative merits of Sarajevo's museum as a work in progress. Like the middle-class reformers described in Bennett's study, Fodor viewed the museum, with its normative spaces and didactic displays, as "a machinery for producing progressive subjects."67 The interior, then, needed to be not only open and spacious (which it was), but also properly furnished and decorated in order to encourage the sort of well-mannered behavior befitting of such an elevated aesthetic space. The exhibits, in turn, needed to be more than mere "cabinets of curiosities" intended to astound, astonish, or titillate. Building on discoveries being made at the time in geology, paleontology, anthropology, and evolutionary science, the displays needed to be organized and interconnected in such a way as to capture the teleological narrative not only of the nation, but also of the universal history of humanity.68 If Bosnians were to learn of themselves, and of their place in human history, they would need to be provided with a more detailed map of their past. As it was, Sarajevo's museum hung precariously in the balance. Without the proper vigilance and a concomitant will to succeed, there was a real danger of the institution failing in both its disciplinary and didactic tasks.

In Fodor's view, it was not just the museum, but the entire city that was at an important and potentially perilous crossroads. Given Sarajevo's sporadic and uneven development, Fodor realized, or at least feared, that civilized and potentially "civilizing" spaces like the museum, the post office, and the Central Hotel could realistically serve only as fragile defensive barriers against the destabilizing forces which seemed to

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 39. 105 dominate the rest of the city. As already suggested above, the main problem, as far as he was concerned, was that the modernizing project in general was moving ahead too arbitrarily, with little evidence of careful planning, and with absolutely no sense of moral urgency. In the absence of a comprehensive plan for development, the modernizing project in Sarajevo ran the risk of pursuing modernity for its own sake, rather than for the sake of the moral and material betterment of the people, thus threatening the city as a whole with the very real possibility of decadence and cultural decay. The western architecture of Sarajevo's modern mansions and public buildings may indeed have been impressive—and even praiseworthy—but much of it so far had been a hollow achievement. Like the museum discussed above, or the European-style stores on the main streets which looked "bright and modern on the outside" but were simply glorified bazaars within, these buildings, on their own, were not indicative of real progress.69 At best, these structures represented the promise of a civilizing mission yet to be realized.

At worst, they symbolized all that was wrong with modernization as an unprincipled, misguided, and inherently soulless process.

By jumping blindly into an apparently open-ended project which had the potential to undermine the foundations of an authentic Bosnian identity, Sarajevo's modernizers ran the risk of causing irreparable material, cultural, and moral damage. Fodor, in fact, could already see this happening. In the marketplace in particular, spiritually-empty, mass-produced goods had already begun to make significant inroads, threatening not only the material well-being of local artisans and producers, but also the very core of the

Bosnian "nation." Authentic "Oriental" goods, he noted, were "very difficult to find" despite the relative abundance of items for sale in the bazaars. Admitting that "one can,

69 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 14 of course, find a few Oriental pots or dishes, or a coffee-maker, or some embroidery, or gold pieces," Fodor nevertheless complained that many products, such as "cigarette cases inlaid with mosaics," had unfortunately been made in factories.70 The mass-production of consumer goods like these was no small matter for modernists like Fodor; for people who saw the need for progress and development on the one hand, yet simultaneously lamented the considerable social, cultural, and moral price that had to be paid on the other. Even the mass-production of something as trivial as a cigarette case was cause for concern, since it implied not only the decline and eventual disappearance of a culturally- specific art form in particular, but also the erosion of tradition, and thus of national memory, in general. Beyond this was the question of who stood to profit from modernization itself. Fodor hinted in his diary that it was certainly not "authentic"

Bosnians who profited, but rather an insidious foreign element, suggesting that, though

"proud Muslim merchants" refused, or at least denied, selling these ersatz Bosnian products, Sephardic Jewish shopkeepers had no such reservations. Drawing upon an anti-

Semitic stereotype common throughout Europe during this period, his linking of factory- produced goods to Sarajevo's Jews was an articulation of the widespread fear that an alien capitalist element was working from within to devour and destroy entire nations and

"indigenous" ethnic groups.71

70 Ibid., 16. 71 This sort of antiliberal polemic was common to conservative nationalists like Fodor who, as Alice Freifeld notes, were critical of "the winnowing away of power from the Magyar gentry to the urban middle classes, in which newly assimilated Jews and Germans were quite visible." Alice Freifeld, "The Cult of March 15: Sustaining the Hungarian Myth of Revolution, 1849-1999," in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 274. The fact that Fodor portrayed the Sephardic Jews of Sarajevo as degenerate slum-dwellers, on die one hand, and as immoral capitalists, on the other, is consistent with anti-Semitic stereotypes in Europe at this time. For a detailed discussion of the history of this double-edged stereotype see Derek Penslar, Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Fodor's concern over the state of Sarajevo's modernizing project ultimately tells

us a great deal about his own fears and anxieties with respect not only to urban spaces, but also to modernization and material progress in general. Though Fodor's impressions

of Sarajevo were obviously filtered through an orientalist (or quasi-orientalist) lens, much

if not all of what he saw in the Bosnian capital resonated with him on a deeply personal

level. Indeed, as he would write much later, these early years of his life, the years between his days as a gymnasium student in the Transylvanian town of Szatmar-Nemeti and his appointment as a professor of geography in Budapest in 1921, were spent primarily on the "defensive."72 If anything, what he saw in Sarajevo only confirmed some of his worst fears, and perhaps convinced him that, until urban spaces were developed in such a way as to eradicate the degenerative "Other" while simultaneously guarding against decadent, material excess, the only useful strategy to adopt was a defensive, prophylactic one.

Ten Days in The Bosnian Countryside: The (De)Stabilization of Self

On the morning of June 22, Fodor woke at 4 a.m., "still tired," he would later write,

"from having gone three nights with little sleep," and exhausted, no doubt, by his ambitious tour of Sarajevo's inner city the day before.73 After a rushed breakfast, Fodor and the rest of the team were taken by car to the train station, where a slow train was waiting to take them as far as Blaznj. Boarding the train, Fodor was reminded of the

72 Whether in his capacity as a student, a teacher, a naturalist, a boy scout leader, or a nationalist writer, Fodor positioned himself against both the tyranny of the low and uncivilized, and the tyranny of the high and immoral. See in particular his unpublished, semi-autobiographical geographical study "Szatmar fSldje, Szatmar n6pe, Szatmar elete" (1954). Paul Hannebrink's In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006) provides an excellent analysis of this general trend in conservative-nationalist politics and culture in interwar Hungary. 73 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 21. 108 tragic events of June 1914, even going so far as to imagine that the very car they were traveling in might have been the same as the one which transported the body of the

Archduke Franz Ferdinand back to Austria after his assassination.74 The melodramatic, and even morbid, linking of his own departure to that of the body of the assassinated heir to the Habsburg throne might not, of course, have been intended by Fodor to signify anything terribly profound. But, based on the evidence provided in his diary, it is hard to overlook the fact that, like the murdered prince, Fodor had found himself challenged and ultimately overwhelmed in Sarajevo. Indeed, far from being allowed to strut through the streets of the city with the imperialistic poise of an Austrian prince or a conquering

Roman emperor, Fodor had met with considerable resistance, and in the end was defeated—if only symbolically so—by this now-notorious, recalcitrant city.

Given his destabilizing experiences in Sarajevo the previous afternoon, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that the team's departure came as somewhat of a relief for Fodor, and that he was quite obviously grateful to be able to put some distance between himself and the deeply troubling urban spaces which had done so much to upset and disrupt his masculine-imperial sense of self. In fact, whatever residual tension or anxiety there might have been seemed to dissipate rather quickly as the train passed through the outlying neighborhoods of Sarajevo, carrying Fodor and his colleagues once again into the Bosnian countryside. From the window of the saloon-car Fodor soaked in

"the beautiful.. .dewy morning," and busied himself with the cataloguing of passing flora.

Everything about the countryside they traveled through was refreshing and reinvigorating; a sight, no doubt, for sore eyes, and a soothing balm for an otherwise troubled soul. At Ilidze he made note of the picturesque spa which, as "one of Europe's

74 Ibid., 22. favorite holiday spots," was a fineexampl e of a pastoral Bosnian landscape. Not far from Ilidze were the headwaters of the Bosna river, its "surging" torrent a product of the wild hills of this mountainous region. It was into a space like this, or so Fodor thought, that a man could retreat to rejuvenate himself physically, mentally, and spiritually.

It took only a matter of a few hours to reach the station at Blaznj, where the members of the expedition detrained and transferred their equipment and supplies onto the horses that were waiting for them there. After purchasing some food and wine at a nearby pub, the team began the first leg of what would be a long and arduous day. The trek into the mountains above Blaznj, in fact, proved to be grueling, the hot sun making the climb and their botanical work even more demanding. At midday, having climbed nearly 300 vertical meters, Fodor wrote in his diary that "we are exhausted and dying of thirst." Later he would add that at least one member of the team was finding the day's

"march" to be exceedingly difficult. But whatever concerns or complaints he may have had, Fodor could hardly conceal the immense joy and satisfaction that he derived from the experience. With every step Fodor seemed to become more at home. The higher he climbed, the further the more troubling aspects of "the city" seemed to recede into the distance, to the point where the only trace of civilization he could see in the valley below was the serpentine path of the rail line heading towards Mostar.78 He may have been

75 Ibid., 22. 76 This idea of the countryside as a comforting, rejuvenating, and empowering space was a common trope at this time, with pristine nature serving as a foil to the destabilizing and emasculating forces of decadent and degenerative urban spaces. For studies which explore this idea, see, amongst others, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984); and Raymond Williams, City and Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). "Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 24. 78 Ibid., 22. 110

Figure 5 Resting in a clearing in Bosnia, June 25,1917 (Fodor is in the middle of the photo, standing; he has marked himself in the photo with a white cross) (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks)

exhausted and parched with thirst, but in the lush mountain meadows that they came

upon, he and the others rested in the grass and replenished themselves at springs "that

gushed forth from the rocks."79 In the evening, after making camp and organizing and

cataloguing the specimens they had collected during the day, Fodor sat out in the "cool

refreshing air," chatting with some of the other men, and drinking tea until midnight.80

With the majestic Mount Bjelasnica in full view, its peak "illuminated by the beautiful

moonlight," this must have seemed to Fodor to be nothing short of paradise.

79 Ibid., 26. 80 This was fairly typical of their evening routine while in the field. On June 24, for example, after what was perhaps their easiest day, Fodor wrote: "Before long we find ourselves a place to camp for the night, on the south slope of Treskanica, near the springs at Gladna voda....We feel great. The weather today was not too hot, and the route was not that tiring. We have supper, and then have tea, until 10:00 in the evening. Jetnik cooked the supper: potatoes and soup. It is a beautiful, starry night. The fire blazes in front of us. We sleep wonderfully on the hard ground." Ibid., 34. Ill

Each of the next nine days passed more or less like the first. The team typically rose early, breakfasted, and then spent an hour or more making sure that the specimens they had collected the previous day were properly dried, pressed, and stored away. By

10:00 or 10:30 they would be on the move, spending the rest of the day hiking and working either at altitude, where they were often at the mercy of the snow and the cold winds that howled above the tree line, or in the river valleys, where the sun was so oppressive that on one particular day the rocks "burned red-hot in the fifty-degree heat."81

The team's work was only made that much harder by the rugged and sometimes quite dangerous terrain that they had to traverse in order to carry out their botanical survey.82

Even the mountain paths that were maintained for tourists and hikers proved to be "tough going."83 On most days, work would continue well into the evening, with bedtime not coming until 11:00 p.m., or even midnight.

Despite the rigors of the expedition, Fodor obviously relished the challenge; the unforgiving landscape and exhausting work providing him with a real opportunity to assert his masculinity. Fodor, in fact, judged his worth as a member of the team, and thus as a man, by comparing his own performance to those of the other team members, some of whom at times appeared to crumble under the physical and mental strain of the entire adventure. Of all of them, it was Father Kovacs who suffered the most, succumbing on

81Ibid.,44. 82 According to his diary, the most dangerous and difficult outing came on June 25. Of their decent on Mount Treskanica, Fodor wrote: "At the top [of the cliff] we head south along a short bend above the precipice. The snow-fields are melting. We send rocks tumbling over the edge of the cliff into the horrifying abyss below where they are shattered into pieces. It is interesting that even at 1600 m. there is still a mass of snow. In one bowl the melting snow creates a spring which flowsdow n the wall of a cliff. We descend Treskanica's steep southern slope by following the path of a river of rocks [kSforyasu ment6n]. It is a dangerous descent as every rock is loose and tends to move. The men above send rocks rolling onto those below. It is hard to keep one's footing. What grass there is is wet and slippery, and the rocks crumble beneath our feet. It takes us nearly two hours to negotiate the perilous 700 m. cliff face. Because of the great effort it took to make the descent, I was completely drenched in sweat by the time we reached the bottom." Ibid., 36-7. 83 Ibid., 29. 112 no less than four separate occasions to the harsh conditions the expedition was forced to endure.84 But he was not the only one to suffer from the long days, the lack of sleep, the perilous climbs, the incredible thirst, and the oppressive heat. On June 28, for example— the day the temperature supposedly rose to fifty degrees Celsius85—Fodor wrote of how, one by one, the members of the team succumbed to the extreme conditions, with he himself seemingly the last to falter. Like a captain leading the ragged remains of his platoon to safety, Fodor described how they arrived "barely conscious" at a hunting lodge, with him in the lead. "The heat is so oppressive that I can no longer focus," he wrote, adding that "Kovacs and Kiss have been left back at the station; only Tuzson,

Kansky and the hunter Jimmet are with me."86 As it was throughout the rest of the diary, there was very little sense here of Fodor as a "follower." If anything, the suppression of other men's voices and the diminishing of their experiences gave the impression that he saw himself not only in the vanguard, but also as the sole member of the team with the stamina required to fulfill their mission of discovery.

In fact, it was here in the Bosnian countryside that Fodor attempted to resume the confident posture which he had adopted when stepping from the train at Bosna Brod on the evening of June 20. More than just giving him room to prove his manhood to himself and his colleagues, the serene landscapes and simple peasants of the Bosnian countryside appeared on the surface to provide Fodor with a more or less passive backdrop against which he could play out, and thus ground, his fantasies of an integrated self. The land, for instance, was seen as a pristine space as yet untouched by civilization; a space which, unlike the crowded and chaotic markets of the city, he could openly survey, catalogue,

84 Ibid., 26,32,41, and 44. 851 am guessing that Fodor was exaggerating here. 86 Ibid., 44. 113 and thus "possess." Likewise, the quaint mountain villages surrendered themselves quite willingly—even innocently—to exploration and discovery, their rustic backwardness simultaneously reinforcing in Fodor his own vision of himself as a progressive, modern man. Observations of the Bosnian "Other," in turn, helped to shore up his own fantasized self-image. The men of the countryside, for example, were categorized and dismissed by

Fodor as being at best only "half-Europeanized," while the simple peasant women, with their "bright, spirited eyes" and "firm, round breasts," were rendered disempowered objects of Fodor's masculine desire, and thus stood in stark contrast to the sometimes alluring, but thoroughly veiled, Muslim women who so often crossed his path.87

Objectified and non-threatening, the rural folk were used to reinforce the virile and culturally superior self-image that Fodor so desperately wanted to project. Here, in the rugged yet innocent spaces of the countryside, he could feel, or at least attempt to perform, like Caesar again. Strong, powerful, and in control, Fodor could once more entertain fantasies of himself as a unified, self-sustaining subject.

Or so he might have hoped. In fact, as he would soon discover, the destabilizing forces of modernity—or, more accurately, the modern condition—pursued him even here, with every scientific pronouncement barely concealing a growing awareness that his knowledge was both limited and incomplete, and every judgment of the low "Other" pointing to the fragmentary nature of his own being. At every turn, it seemed, he found the objects of his gaze pushing back against him, resisting his control, and undermining his sense of self. Even here in the countryside he found his identity to be in constant flux, with every attempt to solidify his masculine-imperial self-image ironically posing a serious threat to the subjective position he was attempting to reinforce. Though the

87 Ibid., 45-6. 114

Bosnian mountains may have provided a welcomed refuge from the degenerative effects of the city, Fodor was hardly able to escape the modern condition itself.

Indeed, as so many postmodernist theorists have shown, entertaining fantasies of ontological totality is one thing. Actually fulfilling them is quite another. As Stuart

Hall—amongst many others—argues, identities and the subjective positions upon which they are erected are far from stable. Since one's identity is constructed within an ever- shifting discursive nexus, there is no fixed, natural, or universal essence to which an identity is attached. Suggesting that an identity "is not determined in the sense that it can always be 'won' or 'lost', sustained or abandoned," Hall insists that one's sense of self must, in the end, be "conditional, lodged in contingency."88 No identity, he concludes, can ever be secure or eliminate entirely the threat of ego dissolution for the simple reason that the process of identity formation is "never [fully] completed."89 In the end there is no privileged position from which an identity can be played out.90

Every identity, in fact, bears within it the roots of its own instability. As Hall himself contends, no matter how deeply we retreat into the illusion of a unified identity, we cannot escape the destabilizing forces from which we are fleeing. For one, this is because we continue to be pursued by what we have excluded from our definition of self.

"Every identity" Hall argues, "has at its 'margin' an excess, something more," and is thus inevitably "destabilized by what it leaves out."91 But, more fundamentally, we are also haunted by an awareness, implicit or otherwise, that the identity we have created for

88 Stuart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds. (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 2. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. 89 Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" 2-3. 90 Rosi Braidotti articulates this well in her book Nomadic Subjects, stating that "there is no triumphant cogito supervising the contingency of the self." Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 14. 91 Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" 5. 115 ourselves, no matter how carefully-crafted and "over-determined" it may be, is fundamentally incomplete. Hall writes: "Identities are, as it were, the positions which the subject is obliged to take up while always 'knowing' (the language of consciousness betrays us here) that they are representations, that representation is always constructed across a 'lack', across a division, fromth e place of the Other, and thus can never be adequate—identical—to the subject processes which are invested in them."92 In the end, we are perhaps threatened as much, if not more, by this internal "knowledge" than we are by what assails us from without.

In Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zi&k sheds some important light on this phenomenon, suggesting that fantasies themselves often create the anxieties and

"horrors" that they were originally intended to obfuscate or mask. On the psychological level, fantasies such as the one entertained by Fodor can actually serve to heighten an individual's sense of personal insecurity by creating desires and setting standards that are simply too demanding to satisfy. The persistent indulgence "in the notion of...an organic

Whole" kept afloat by the illusion of unity or totality not only prohibits a full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse the self, but also underlines the possibility that these antagonisms may never be overcome.93 Ultimately, fantasies open us up to the fact that no matter how much we may hope to overcome this primordial lack, no matter how much we wish to be fully integrated into some greater unity (the self, the family, the community, the nation), the project will always be incomplete.94

92 Ibid., 6. 93 Slavoj Zizek, Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 6-7, 94 Zizek essentially echoes Hall's basic position, though he spins it in a much more existential way. Writing on the notion of fantasy in general, Zizek argues mat it is fantasy itself which "grounds" every notion of order and totality by attempting to conceal, at least on a superficial level, the underlying "horror of the Real" (i.e., Nothingness). But, as I have indicated above, there is more to this story. Zizek writes: "the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy cannot be reduced to mat of a fantasy-scenario which obfuscates the 116

French theorists Grilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari provide yet another way of looking at this same basic dynamic, their critical, neo-Marxian approach to Freudian psychoanalysis perhaps best capturing the ebb and flow of identity formation that the constant (and simultaneous) formation, breakdown, and reformation of Fodor's Balkan fantasy seems to illustrate. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari write of the modernist impulse to reduce random, chaotic systems into meaningful totalities by "imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy." This process of "giving form to matter," a process they refer to alternatively as stratification, territoiialization, or coding, is fundamental not only to the formation of social systems, but also to the formation of the self. However, no matter how carefully the self is stratified, territorialized, or coded, and no matter how vigilantly this ontological fortress is defended and repaired when it is attacked or undermined, the entire process collapses into a dialectical cycle in which the self is perpetually

"destratified, decoded, deterritorialized." As Hall and £izek would both agree, every pronouncement or performance of the territorialized self is always already a failed

95 project. This consistent failure is exactly what Fodor experienced in the Balkans. Of course, it is very difficult for a historian to gain access into, let alone analyze, a psychological disposition which Fodor himself, even if he was "aware" of it, was either true horror of a situation; the first, rather obvious thing to add is that the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its 'repressed' point of reference." See ztizek, Plague of Fantasies, 7. See also Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), especially 70-73,85-6. 95 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 40. See also their earlier study Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). The concept of the "inner fascist" that they develop in this work is a good illustration of the self as a territorializing entity. 117 unwilling or unable to articulate. Nowhere in this or any other of his diaries is their an attempt to think critically about the limitations and pressures inherent within the fantasy he created for himself; to consciously address and interrogate, in other words, what

Robert Fothergill has described as the linear confinements of his own "self-portrait."96

But Fodor's Balkan diary is nevertheless sufficiently introspective and revealing in order to at least partially decode it. There are enough expressions of self-doubt, disappointment, and concern, in other words, to provide some interesting clues as to the relative (instability of Fodor's subjective position.

The uncertainty lingering behind some of his geo-botanical pronouncements, for example, provides important insight into the inherent fragility of his subjective position, and thus also certain aspects of his identity. In large part, this uncertainty, and thus instability, emerged because nature itself quite simply refused to play the submissive role that Fodor's fantasy had assigned it. The flora, for example, did not always offer itself passively to Fodor's scientific, colonizing gaze, and on many occasions actually resisted his attempts to thoroughly catalogue and map it. Even on their first day in the field,

Fodor and his colleagues came across a number of plants whose species or genus was unknown not only to them, but also to the authors of the two specialized botanical guides which they had brought along with them.97 At first, this confrontation with the "new" filled Fodor with a real sense of discovery (discovering and naming previously unknown plants and flowers was, after all, one of the main duties, and joys, of a botanist). But the inability to recognize all the plants of a particular place gradually became a source of

96 Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 64. Writing on the psychology of diary keeping, Fothergill suggests that there are two kinds of diarists, arguing: "For some diarists die habit is a deliberate aid to coherent self-integration; others recognize the danger of insensibly trapping themselves in the lineaments of their own self-portraits." 97 Fodor, "Botanikai kiranduldsok, 1917," 27. See also pages 35 and 43. 118 concern, especially as he discovered that the area as a whole failed to correspond to what he had expected to find. When judged against his preconceived model of what this region—or, more accurately, micro-region—should have looked like, the flora could only be described as "poor," "lacking," and ultimately "disappointing."98 Of the plants to be found on Mount Bjelasnica, for example, Fodor wrote that they definitely fell short of his expectations, noting that "the panorama was much more interesting than the flora." Later he would add that "Bjelanisca has really been a big surprise; I was expecting to find a mountain rich in alpine flora, but have hardly come across anything."99 The very next day on Mount Treskanica, Fodor would make a similar observation, writing with a hint of real consternation that "the flora here is quite interesting, not so much for what there is, but for what is missing."100

It is clear from his diary that Fodor did not know what to make of this place, and that he had difficulty determining whether or not it deserved the label "Mediterranean" (it was, after all, a Mediterranean model they were working from). Though the climate certainly suggested it was, the botanical and even geological features of this micro-region often railed against such a definition. Again, on their first day in the field, Fodor took quick stock of his immediate environs and confidently pronounced that "the countryside has no Mediterranean features to speak of."101 Three days later, from the height of

Mount Treskanica, he elaborated a bit on this earlier point, stating: "From here we can

98 Ibid., 24 and 31. Ibid., 31-2. This is not the only place where he seemed equally if not more impressed with the panorama. On June 25, for example, he wrote: "There is a beautiful view to the north. The limestone rock formations are in a truly corroded state, as if the mountains were in ruins.. .There is a beautiful view of Tirocica's large bowl. It is so deep that it has the appearance of an ancient valley. To the north a few small Bosnian villages." Later the same day he added: "The view is quite stunning. All around one can see limestone peaks and dramatic mountain ridges, the lower ones covered in forests, and the higher ones barren." Ibid., 35 and 37. 100 Ibid., 38. 101 Ibid., 24. 119 see the white [coastal] mountains of Montenegro emerging from the fog....The limestone is not nearly as dazzling white here as it is around the Mediterranean. Instead it is grayish, and in places red in color because of the iron."102 Only two days after this, however, Fodor found evidence which would change his opinion, if only briefly.

Traveling a short distance by train into the Neretya Valley, Fodor asserted that "the flora here is completely Mediterranean. Olive trees, figs, and brambles grow rightbesid e the tracks."103 Yet, not a day and a half later, serious doubts would again creep ia Having had time to conduct a more detailed survey of the local flora, Fodor offered a more sobering analysis: "There are few Mediterranean species here. There are no Tamus,

Juniperus Oxycedrus, Laurus, Scolymus, Eryngium maritinum, Avena sterilis, Punica,

Myrtus, or Salvia officinalis." In the absence of such plant specimens, Fodor could only declare the valley "a bit of a disappointment," concluding that "it really isn't a

Mediterranean region at all."104

The fact that Fodor experienced so much difficulty in classifying this micro- region does not come as much of a surprise. As Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell argue in their recent historiographical critique of Mediterranean studies, scholars of all stripes, and especially geographers, have long struggled to define the contours and meaning of the "Mediterranean" region. A number of factors, they suggest, has worked

102 Ibid., 38. 103 Ibid., 43. 104 Ibid., 45. The confusion, and ultimately the anxiety, that Fodor associated with his inability to categorize the region he was studying may seem a bit exaggerated. His sense of unease, however, makes more sense if we take into consideration the principles of botanical geography mat he and the rest of the team were working from. Botanical geographers believed that, by studying the flora of a region, they could determine its geographical character. This knowledge, in turn, could men provide the basis for the subsequent control and exploitation of the landscape in question. For some contemporary insight into this obvious "Foucauldian" relationship between geographical knowledge and political power, see Paul Vidal de la Blache, "Introduction: Meaning and Aim of Human Geography," in Principles of Human Geography, trans. MillicentT. Bengham (London: Constable, 1926), 4-6. 120 against the articulation of a clear and definitive definition. One of the main issues is the problem of what they call "extreme topographical fragmentation." A manifestation of the diverse physical geography of the Mediterranean basin, this fragmentation has given rise to a vast number of intersecting and variably interconnected micro-regions, each of which is loosely characterized by a particular "micro-ecology," which, in itself, is a product of the complex, ever-shifting relationship between people and their environment. These micro-ecologies, argue Horden and Purcell, are "fluid, mutable creations," and thus

"resist mapping."105 Attempts to delimit them in any "fixed" or "timeless" way, they add, only become more difficult "as one moves away from the sea." As Fodor himself had discovered, Mediterranean micro-ecologies either "cease or radically change character" the further inland one goes.106

Much as in the city, then, where his "ethnographic" explorations of the oriental

"Other" were partially though effectively blocked, Fodor's geo-botanical survey of the

Bosnian region was frustrated by what he was prevented from "seeing," and thus fully comprehending. Of course, the considerable knowledge and expertise it required to pronounce this region scientifically "poor" and "disappointing" may have been somewhat comforting for Fodor, and might even have filled him with a certain sense of power, but it

Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, "The Mediterranean and 'the New Thalassology,'" American Historical Review 111/3 (June 2006): 733. 106 Ibid., 735. In his seminal work on tile region, Fernand Braudell himself suggested that every mountaintop is outside the Mediterranean, an observation which Fodor—at least based on his survey of Bjelanica and Treskanica—would likely have agreed with. See Fernand Braudell, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1., SiSn Reynolds, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 26-27. For other works that problematize the definition and conceptualization of the Mediterranean region, see, amongst others, William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Nicholas Purcell, "The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness? On Defining the Mediterranean," Mediterranean Historical Review 18 (December 2003): 9-29; Henk Driessen, "Pre- and Post-Braudelian Conceptions of the Mediterranean Area: The Puzzle of Boundaries," Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 36/1 (1999): 53-63; and Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography on the Margins of Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 121

was little consolation for someone who sought so desperately to unlock not just the

epistemological, but also the metaphysical secrets of the world around him. Though

Fodor did not reflect explicitly here on this admittedly profound problem, there is an

inkling in his Balkan diary of his growing awareness of the unbridgeable gap that existed between the world of experience and his knowledge of it. Armed only with tools of

science, the mystery and grandeur of nature would continue to escape him, and remain at best only partially understood.107

The inherent weakness of Fodor's scientific stance was just one example of how his masculine-imperial fantasy ran into trouble in the Bosnian countryside. There were, of course, others. His sweeping categorizations of Bosnian men as ignorant peasants who were, at best, merely "half-Europeanized" points to yet another instance in which a particular discursive position functioned to simultaneously prop up and tear down an important facet of his identity. Seeing in the "Other" the purported antithesis of himself,

Fodor used these disparaging images of Bosnian men to feed the subjective fantasy of

This failure to fully comprehend was not an isolated problem for Fodor. Indeed, the natural and cultural "mysteries" that he found himself struggling against in the Balkans in the summer of 1917 were indicative of a much broader problem that had plagued him since his late adolescence; a problem which he and so many others like him were wrestling with at the time. As Priya Satia argues in a recent article, many individuals in the early twentieth century had begun to react vociferously to the limitations inherent within Western science, a number of them seeking ways to escape the "unsettling sense of human insignificance and inexorable cosmic entropy" which scientific inquiry seemed to produce. See her article "The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia," The American Historical Review 111/1 (February 2006): 22. For a more contemporary discussion of this perceived problem, see Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929). It is worth noting that Fodor himself had begun searching for an escape fromthi s sense of "insignificance" and "cosmic entropy" as early as 1904 when, as a gymnasium student, he wrote essays on the limitations and dangers of secular science. By the end of his university studies in 1911 he had started to deal with this in much more sophisticated way, sketching the outline for what would later become a "subjective" approach to cultural, historical, and geographical problems. Developed in a number of public lectures, newspaper articles, and at least one scholarly manuscript, this approach would only really come to bear fruit in the interwar period. Fodor's early attempts to overcome the spiritual and metaphysical limitations of Western science, it should be noted, were not driven solely by an epistemological imperative. They were driven by an existential impulse as well. For Fodor and so many others like him, the quest for ontological wholeness and totality could not possibly proceed within a fragmented—and fragmenting—universe wholly devoid of meaning. But more on this in the next chapter. 122 himself as a modem—and modernizing—man. However, as reassuring as it may have been to measure himself against "unrefined, ill-mannered, awkward and only half-

Europeanized" Bosnian men,108 this comparison had the ability to heighten certain anxieties that Fodor harbored, and to emphasize particular short-comings that neither he nor Hungarians as a whole had yet been able to overcome. Though he may have projected a confident, progressive vision of himself against the supposedly backward, and inherently passive bodies of "typically Balkan men," the image that was reflected back to him was often fragmented and disturbing.

Evidence of this asymmetrical dynamic runs through Fodor's diary, manifesting itself in statements and observations which ultimately reveal the tensions and ambiguities that his identity as a civilized Hungarian gentleman could only partially resolve. This is particularly evident in his running criticism of Bosnian resource management. Himself immersed in a long and relatively successful tradition of sustainable land use in Hungary,

Fodor was appalled by the Bosnian mismanagement of, and even barbaric indifference to, the region's natural resources. Lacking the requisite technological skills and the proper scientific foresight, Bosnians were slowly destroying their environment. The management of the region's forests was a particularly poignant example of Bosnian ignorance and neglect. In part, he noted, the degradation of Bosnian forests was the fault of the Bosnian forest industry which, in the Bosna Valley at least, had encouraged the clear-cutting of entire forests, leaving the hillsides completely denuded. But it was also the fault of individual Bosnians themselves who, ignorant of the numerous benefits of a

108 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 45. Even positive judgments of individual Bosnian men could be disparaging. In describing one of the Bosnian team members, he wrote: "Alia, our guide, is a very interesting, typical Bosnian man. He is warm-hearted, obliging [complaisant], and honourable [decent], but he sleeps the entire day." Ibid., 38. wooded slope, "do little to conserve or protect the forest." Together, the effect was

devastating, with deforestation contributing not only to soil erosion and the poor state of

agriculture in the region, but also to the relative unattractiveness of areas surrounding the

towns and cities of Bosnia's river valleys.110

Fodor's rather sophisticated ecological critique of Bosnian resource management

no doubt reaffirmed his sense of cultural and technological superiority as a Hungarian, and in so doing confirmed his status as a progressive, modern, and even European man.111 But, by the same token, the intimate, if obviously primitive, connection between the land and the Bosnian peasants reminded Fodor of what Hungary, as a progressive, modernizing society, stood to lose as a result of its modernization. Fodor may have chastised the Bosnian peasants for their ignorance, but he at the same time romanticized their attachment to, and even oneness with, their natural surroundings. On one occasion, for example, Fodor came across a shepherd who was "shouting and playing a primitive fife as he drove his herd of goats past us." Though he would later describe the man as

"uncivilized," he was nevertheless moved by the song he was singing as he passed,

Ibid., 38. With some surprise he adds that "Bosnians uproot entire tress for their horses in order to feed them." 110 On the morning of June 21, for example, Fodor wrote: "In the Boszna valley there is still little evidence of the end of serfdom. Both sides of the valley are covered in poor brush-wood, while in the valley itself entire Rhinanthus fields have been mowed down." Later that afternoon, having found his way to the banks of the river that ran through Sarajevo, he noted the following: "The city itself lies in a basin surrounded by barren hills... Of the two banks of the Miljacka river, only the right bank is developed. On the other side are filthy hovels scattered here and there, and built up right to the river's edge. The river hardly has any water in it, just dirty, stagnant, stinking pools." Ibid., 13 and 20. Fodor's disparaging remarks concerning the state of the Miljacka river were consistent with his critique of Bosnian forest management. The deforestation of the hills surrounding Sarajevo, and of forests upstream, contributed directly to the low water flow in the river. It would also have put the Miljacka valley, and Sarajevo itself, at a higher risk of flooding. It is obvious from his comments that Fodor had a very good technical understanding of the relationship between sustainable forest management and flood control. It is also obvious that, like so many other conservationists in the modern period, he viewed issues such as forest management and flood control from an explicitly moral or civilizational perspective. 111 This civilizational positioning is explored David Blackbourn in his recent book The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006). See in particular his chapter on National Socialist landscapes. See also Fodor's critique of the Romanians in Szatmar. noting that it was "wild, like something celebrating the riteso f spring." Two days later, Fodor would write of the song of a lone woman, her disembodied voice sounding as if it was part of the very landscape itself. Noting that the morning was particularly "grey and gloomy," Fodor wrote: "We pack up and wait for the weather to let up enough for us to head out... .All of a sudden we hear in the woods the voice of a Turkish girl, sitting alone in a hut, singing.. .Her song sounds curiously enchanting amidst the wild, snow­ capped Bosnian mountains."113

In observations like these, there is a real sense that, like the uncivilized shepherd or the lone "Turkish" girl, Fodor, too, would have liked to be able to lose himself in nature by simply blending into his surroundings. As he would write at the end of the diary that he kept during his second Balkan expedition in the summer of 1918, "nowhere can a man integrate himself as follyint o nature as here." He continued this thought, however, by lamenting the fact that these natural spaces were themselves disappearing, threatened, as it turned out, by the progressive forces of civilization that he had earlier promoted.114 Fodor's concern was not at all limited to the Bosnian countryside. If anything, the problems facing Hungary were even more acute. The application of technologically advanced resource management schemes may have helped Hungary modernize at a faster pace than Bosnia, but this development, though it sought to conserve resources, not only drove people fromth e land with the introduction of modern agricultural practices, but also opened up the nation's natural resources to increased

112 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 29. 113 Ibid., 34. 114 Fodor, "Masodik Balkan kirandulas," n.p. exploitation. 5 The decline in rural populations, coupled with the loss of culturally significant national landscapes, was cause for great concern, for the simple reason that the survival of traditional Hungarian values was seen to be intimately tied to the survival of traditional cultural practices and traditional spaces. At stake, in other words, was the question of Hungarian identity itself.116

The perceived fragility of Hungarian identity was no small matter for Fodor. It was not, he believed, simply enough to be born Hungarian, or to learn how to be

Hungarian. Recognizing the inherent constructedness of national identity, Fodor was well-aware of the continuous effort that was needed to remind people of their

Hungarianness.117 In the absence of such vigilance, an individual could quite simply forget how to be Hungarian, thus facilitating his or her absorption into another ethnic or

This paradoxical relationship between the protection of nature and its simultaneous disappearance, not to mention the relationship between development and the dislocation of "traditional," and hence symbolically important rural populations has been dealt with in some detail by environmental historians, especially those focusing on the history of resource conservation and sustainable development (two interconnected ideas which date back to the mid to late nineteenth century). See for example Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Christopher Bryant and Thomas Johnston, Agriculture in the City's Countryside (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Carroll Pursell, "Conservation, Environmentalism, and the Engineers: The Progressive Era and the Recent Past," in Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, Kendall E. Bailies, ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); and Samuel Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). For a fairly recent study on the technocratic thinking behind resource conservation and sustainable development, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 116 On the connection between landscape and national memory, see Schama, Landscape and Memory; and George White, Nationalism and Territory: Constructing Group Identity in Southeastern Europe (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). For other studies which explore the link between modernization and the creation and preservation of "traditional" natural spaces, see, amongst many others, Tricia Cusack, "A 'Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads': Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape," National Identities 3/3 (2001): 221-238; and Maunu Hayrynen, "The Kaleidoscope View: The Finnish National Landscape Imagery," National Identities 2/1 (2000): 5-19. 117 As early as the late nineteenth century, intellectuals were already aware of the contingency and inherent fragility of nations and national identities. See in particular Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" Ouvres Completes (Paris, 1947-61), vol. 1, 887-907. This was originally given by Renan as a lecture at the Sorbonne in March 1882. For a very useful, annotated English translation, see Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" trans, and annotated by Martin Thorn, in Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha, ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 8-22. 126 national group. And this, in fact, is exactly what Fodor saw while he was in Bosnia.

Though there were men like the hotel manager in Sarajevo who retained their Hungarian identity (or, at least, could still speak Hungarian), there were others who had simply forgotten. In the town of Ostrozac, for example, Fodor was shocked to discover that the station manager, a man named Halasi, was himself Hungarian, but no longer knew how to speak the language. His wife, however, still spoke Hungarian well, but this seems to have been of little solace for Fodor.118 The main problem was that the husband had forgotten, and had become assimilated into Bosnian culture.119

What is particularly fascinating about Fodor's concern regarding Halasi's "de-

Hungarianization" is that it seems to run contrary to his critique of the "half-

Europeanized" Bosnian men that he regularly encountered over the course of the two week expedition. In the first case, Fodor criticized Halasi for straying too far from his roots, and thus becoming detached from his fundamental essence. In the second, he was critical of a group of men for not progressing far enough, and for their inability to fully overcome the essential Balkan qualities that defined them as Bosnian. This apparent double-standard, however, one which criticized some men for being too "essential," and another for not being "essential" enough, was not necessarily indicative of sloppy thinking on Fodor's part, but rather was a reflection of a tension inherent within the formation of national identity itself. Indeed, the adoption of a particular national identity implicitly requires an individual to simultaneously embrace both the universal and the

1,8 Fodor, "Botanikai kirandulasok, 1917," 46-47. As we shall see in later chapters, Fodor's relative indifference to fact that the wife had retained her Hungarianness was indicative of his belief that national identity passed through the male line. 119 Fodor's alarm over the assimilation of the Ostozac station manager shares some important similarities to colonial discourse in general. But there is one important difference. Fodor's chief concern was not mat the station manager had "gone native" and thus had forgotten how to be civilized, but rather mat he had forgotten how to be Hungarian. 127 particular. Hungarians past and present, like so many Europeans who self-identify as nationalists, are asked to include both Europe and the nation, progress and tradition, and the rational and the mythical in their definition of Hungarianness. All too often historians of nationalism in east central Europe have posed these binaries as an either/or choice, ignoring, as Hans Kohn and so many after him have, the fact that very few people, if any, cling exclusively to one pole or the other.120 Most people, instead, tend to fall somewhere in between, and are therefore inevitably torn between their often conflicting allegiances.

As Fodor himself might attest, it was a notoriously difficult balance to strike, not only because of the inherent contradictions that needed to be negotiated and somehow resolved, but also because of the constant scrutiny of others. Indeed, as a number of theorists have argued, identity is inevitably formed within an intersubjective nexus which is both inescapable and invariably unforgiving. In Plague of Fantasies, for example,

2izek addresses the "radically intersubjective character" of the fantasies upon which identities are formed, suggesting that our desire for ontological unity is not simply premised on "what I want," but also on "what others see in me," and "what they want or expect from me."121 At every turn, then, one's sense of self—no matter how stable it may appear to be—is in danger of being undermined by the judgments and expectations of others.

For Fodor, then, the fantasy of a subjective ontological totality which he had cobbled together on the backs of emasculated Bosnian men (amongst others) provided

120 See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1961). 121 Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, 9. Above I have paraphrased the following quotation: "The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I toothers? " 128 merely a temporary respite from the fact that he himself was under constant scrutiny. In the same way that he judged other men, Fodor stood to be judged: by Tuzson (who, as leader of the expedition, scrutinized Fodor's performance); by the army (which had refused him on four separate occasions); and by his wife (who, amongst other things, had criticized him in the past for being "too idealistic").122 As we have already seen in the previous chapter, he even stood in constant judgment over himself. Such continual scrutiny, both from without and within, must have heightened Fodor's "knowledge" or

"awareness" of his own incompleteness. In condemning Bosnian men for their poor performance as men, therefore, he was perhaps also condemning himself.123

In the end, the Balkans resisted as much as invited Fodor's masculine-imperial advances, a fact which seems to have surprised and at times even overwhelmed him.

Filled, perhaps, with the hope that he might be able to distance himself here fromth e people and problems which threatened him back in Hungary, Fodor instead found himself confronted time and again with disconcerting reminders of the fragilityo f his own identity, and his own subjectivity. Far from satisfying his innermost desire for ontological completion, Fodor's Balkan (mis)adventures left him yearning for a truly safe and passive space where he could remedy these problems, and return to the "Julian" fantasy which had so thrilled and comforted him that first night on the Bosnian frontier.

Perhaps ironically, this opportunity would soon open up to Fodor as the nation itself crumbled around him.

Fodor reflects on Vira's critical view of him in a letter written while they were still courting. See FP, letter from Ferenc to Vira, December 25,1910. 123 This sense of the colonizing subject both judging and being judged is dealt with in part in Larry Wolffs very engaging study Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Chapter Three A "Lucky" Break: Scholarship and Opportunity in Interwar Hungary

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Early in the autumn of 1919, Fodor fled the provincial town of Karansebes

(Caransebeis) with his wife and family. Having been stripped of his teaching position by the occupying Romanian authorities, and with his young children suffering from illness and malnutrition, there really was no alternative. Leaving most of their worldly possessions behind, the family first traveled to TorSkszentmiklos, where Fodor left his wife and children in the temporary care of his sister, Etelka. From there, Fodor continued on alone to Budapest, making a daring midnight escape across the Romanian-held "Tisza line." Having recently come under counterrevolutionary control, Budapest, like the rest of the nation, was in need of men like Fodor, or so he hoped. With the chaos and turmoil of defeat came the possibility to rebuild, and Fodor aimed to play an important role in resurrection of the nation.

Making good use of the scholarly and political connections that he had made in the years leading up to Hungary's "total collapse," Fodor was appointed almost immediately upon his arrival in Budapest to the Office for the Preparation for the Peace

Talks (B£keel6k£szito Iroda) attached to the Foreign Ministry. Despite the national tragedy that had rendered the creation of this office a necessity, his appointment—one which provided him with an opportunity to showcase his skills as a geographer—was regarded by Fodor as a definite turning point in his life.1 Though he was separated from

1A letter written to his wife on April 26,1920 suggests that, as tragic as the circumstances may have been, Fodor saw his move to Budapest as a great opportunity. Though he did express concern over the uncertainty and chaos prevailing in Hungary itself, and especially in the occupied territories, he

129 130 his family and suffered alone through his first winter in Budapest in "great privation,"2

Fodor was finally engaged in work of truly national import. "It was here compiling maps for the peace conference," he would later write, "that I began my great [nagy] 'Budapest' work." The exposure he got working under the direction of the politician and geographer Count Pal Teleki at the Foreign Ministry, in fact, was the professional opening he had long been hoping for. His diligent and thorough work did not go unnoticed, and when the office was shut down after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, he was able to build on the reputation he had made for himself, parlaying this into an academic career that would eventually see him appointed in 1923 as a professor of geography at the Agricultural University in Budapest. Despite the tragic circumstances that brought him to Budapest, the social and political upheaval of 1918-

1920 provided Fodor with an opportunity to negotiate and begin creating for himself the sort of identity and way of life that he had long-desired.

In fact, for Fodor and a number of other young conservative-nationalist intellectuals, this tumultuous period represented nothing short of a lucky break. Though, as a number of historians have pointed out, it is no doubt true that many "displaced" professionals like Fodor found themselves marginalized in the post-Trianon period (a fact nevertheless wrote that "I am doing really well, and I feel good," barely concealing his obvious delight over his prospects for the future. See Fodor Family Private Papers (FP), Ferenc to Vira, Budapest, April 26, 1920. This same sentiment was expressed in an earlier letter to Vira in which Fodor wrote that "we owe it to God that, despite the present horrors of this world, we are in a good position as far as our future prospects are concerned." FP, letter from Ferenc to Vira, October 24,1919. In "Emlekezetiil" Fodor briefly describes his separation from his family between September 1919 and late Spring 1920. "I heard nothing fromm y family until November 19 [1919]. It was then that the Romanians retreated from Budapest to behind the Tisza. I was successful in getting to T8r5kszentmikl6s and then later back again. After that I passed the winter in hard work and great privation. My family knew nothing about me, and I nothing about them." See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/4., Ferenc Fodor, "Emtekezetul," (1931), 8. 3 Ibid. This account is consistent with his curriculum vitae written in P6cs in 1940, where he comments on the importance of the work he did preparing for the peace conferences, noting that it was "great work." See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/1, Fodor Ferenc, "6n6ietrajza/Curriculum Vitae" (P6cs, 1940), 2. 131 that is used perhaps erroneously to explain the rise of fascism and right-wing extremism in interwar Hungary),4 it is equally true that others of this class benefited in a number of ways from the opportunities which opened up to them. This sense of opportunism, of course, went well beyond the merely personal. Writing in 1921, Count Kuno

Klebelsburg, then Minister of Religion and Public Education, suggested that, though devastating, Trianon provided an opportunity for conservative nationalists to re-define modernity, and thus to rebuild the nation in their own self-image.5 This idea was widely promoted by Hungary's conservative-nationalist leaders, especially during the period of consolidation under Count Istvan Bethlen, a Transylvanian magnate whose "aristocratic restraint" characterized his decade-long tenure as prime minister from 1921 to 1931.

Echoing Klebelsburg's sentiments, Bethlen stated in 1922 that his government had been granted the opportunity to reclaim for Hungary all that had been lost culturally and morally in the period of decadent liberalism that preceded the Trianon tragedy. Arguing that a renewed Hungary needed to stand on a firm moral foundation, Bethlen declared that "Christian ideals have to be brought back into our public life."6

Arguing that Hungary's newly-ascendant nation-building elite engaged in a profoundly "modern" (as opposed to "backward" or "irrational") response to the dismemberment of the nation in the interwar period, this chapter begins by looking at the role that scholarship, and in particular the so-called synthetic approach to Hungarian history and geography, played in the nation-building efforts of Hungarian conservative

4 See Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890- 1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 69; and Ignac Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), 96. 5 This vision was later laid out in his influential article "Neonacionalizmus." See Count Kun6 Klebelsberg, Neonacionalizmus (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1928), 120-126. 6 Cited in Ignac Romsics, Istvan Bethlen: A Great Conservative Statesman of Hungary, 1874-1946, trans., Mario D. Fenyo (Boulder, CO: Social Scence Monographs, 1995), 192. nationalists during the Horthy period. This conceptual and methodological approach, one which had its roots in Germany in the mid to late nineteenth century, and which found adherents in Hungary prior to World War I, emerged as the quasi-official conservative- nationalist approach to philosophical, historical, and geographical questions in interwar

Hungary. Far from being a reactionary approach to problems of Hungarian memory and identity, the turn towards synthetic scholarship was a fundamentally creative response to

Hungary's confrontation with modernity, one which sought to articulate a quintessentially modern response to the persistent and deeply disconcerting problems of fragmentation which had played themselves out on multiple levels prior to the war, and which were fully exposed by the social and political upheaval of the Trianon period.

As I argue in the second section of this chapter, the shift towards synthetic scholarship in the post-Trianon period opened up a number of opportunities for Fodor professionally, materially, and philosophically. Indeed, as painful and existentially unsettling as the events surrounding Trianon may have been, efforts launched by conservatives and right-wing groups to resurrect the nation after 1920 provided meaningful opportunities for a host of intellectuals and politicians, many of whom, like

Fodor himself, had been struggling since at least the turn of the century not just to redefine the nation both structurally and ideologically, but also to build for themselves and their families a distinctly "modern" identity and way of life. The consolidation of

Horthy's authoritarian regime in the immediate post-Trianon period, in fact, opened up important spaces for the re-imagining of the nation, and beyond this for the renegotiation, and in some cases even reinvention, of the self. 133

As we have already seen in the previous chapters, however, and especially in

Chapter Two, Fodor's on-going quest for stability and meaning would unfortunately meet

with much resistance, especially in the 1930s. Disturbed by the rise of the radical right in

both Hungary and abroad, and finding himself under attack from "jealous colleagues"

attempting to "drive a wedge" between him and his mentor and most important

intellectual supporter, Count Pal Teleki, Fodor was unable to fully shake the sensation

that he was under siege. The chapter concludes, then, by showing yet again how his

interconnected attempts to negotiate a stable sense of nation and self fell flat in the

interwar period.

The Grand Synthesis: Modernity and the Scholarship of National Renewal

One of the first, and certainly most influential, historical studies to emerge in the post-

Trianon period was Gyula Szekfu's Hdrom nemzedek Egy hanyatlo kor tdrtenete (Three

Generations: The History of a Declining Age). Published in 1920, mere months after the

signing of the Treaty of Trianon itself, the study proved to be a foundational text of conservative-nationalist politics and culture in the interwar period. Though often held up by scholars such as Steven Bela Vardy as one of the most profound and articulate expressions of the psychological impact that Trianon had on the contemporary Hungarian mind,7 Szekfu's lengthy reflections on the root causes of the nation's disintegration were

7 See Steven B. Vardy, "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind: Irredentism and Hungary's Path to War" in Hungary in the Age of Total War, 1938-1948, ed., Nandor Dreisziger (New York: Columbia University Press/East European Monographs, 1998), 28. Others see Szekfu as the veritable "pied piper" of the Horthy regime; a man whose passionate, undetached analysis of the reasons for Hungary's dismemberment single-handedly drew Hungarian intellectuals into the counterrevolutionary fold. See, for example, Laszlo Boka, Vdlogatott tanulmdnyok (Budapest: MagvetS, 1966), 1102; and George Barany, Stephen Szechenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 466. Such a view is largely untenable, however. Though, as Epstein notes, Szekfu no doubt "conferred a mantle of respectability" on the cultural-political platform developed by the Horthy 134 less an expression of a man traumatized by Hungary's territorial dismemberment than they were a passionate, even self-reflective, assessment of the long-term historical forces which, in his view, had weakened and compromised the moral, cultural, and political fabric of the nation to the point where it was unable to withstand the multiple disintegrative forces of the Trianon period.8 His book, in fact, gave voice to a widespread assumption held by many like-minded conservative nationalists that the nation had long been in jeopardy.

At fault was the "rootless," "alien" form of liberalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century. Embraced by the so-called "third generation" of liberal politicians and intellectuals (an elite element which presided over Hungary during the deceptive period of peace and prosperity at the fin de siecle, and which remained in power until the end of World War I), this form of liberalism departed significantly from what Szekfu regarded as the more socially conservative and politically conciliatory policies laid out in the early and mid nineteenth century by Hungary's first and, to a lesser extent, second wave of modernizing, nation-building liberals. This third generation regime, Hdrom nemzedek did not so much give rise to the conservative-nationalist critique, but rather was one of the best known representatives of a veritable flood of books and pamphlets dealing with an assessment of Trianon and its antecedents. As Vardy himself points out, "every intellectual produced their own Trianon work," many of which came out more or less simultaneously with Szekfu's Hdrom nemzedek. See Vardy "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind," 28. See also Irene Raab Epstein, Gyula Szekfu: A Study in the Political Basis of Hungarian Historiography (Bloomington, 1974), 77. 8 This notion that Hdrom nemzedek was on some level a very personal, self-reflective work is suggested by Szekfu himself. Writing in the introduction to his seminal post-Trianon work, Szekfu gives voice to the powerlessness he felt prior to Trianon, apologizing even for not doing enough in the years leading up to the nation's dismemberment to reverse the social, political, cultural, and moral decline which, he argued, had led directly to Hungary's downfall in the critical period between 1918 and 1920. This overlapping sense of powerlessness and guilt is reflected in the following passage: "This book is my personal experience. In the midst of those trying events into which the catastrophe of October 1918 [the collapse of Austria-Hungary] had thrust us..., I felt.. .that I would never be able to recover my strength and my will to work until having taken account of the [causes of that] decline that had led us to mis disaster. I simply had to face up to the forces that have dragged my nation out of a stream of healthy evolution. Thus did I come towrit e this book...thus did I redeem my soul." Gyula Szekfu, Hdrom nemzedek Egy hanyatlo kor tdrtenete (Budapest: Elet Irodalmi 6s Nyomdai R.T., 1920), 4. This particular translation is taken from Vardy, who cites it in "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind," 28. 135

was responsible above all else for ushering in a period of spiritually impoverished

modernization and industrialization (a period in which notions of efficiency, productivity,

and progress were promoted at the expense of more "authentic" Hungarian social,

cultural, and moral values). Szekfu was especially critical of the "destructive role" that

Jews had played in the capitalist development of Hungary in the decades leading up to

World War I, disapproving in particular of the liberal government's policy of Jewish

immigration and assimilation.9 By allowing the Jewish element to become "dominant in

commerce, industry, the professions, and art," Hungarian liberals had done much to undermine the important role that the lesser nobility had traditionally played in the nation's public life.10 Critical, as well, of the Liberal party's aggressive policy of magyarization in general (a policy he denounced as "unwise and counterproductive"), and also of the growing call in some opposition circles for increased, and in some cases even full, independence from the Habsburg monarchy, Szekfu characterized this period of Hungarian history as one in which the nation had been cut adrift morally and politically, not so much from tradition, but rather from what he regarded as an earlier, and much healthier, "stream of development."11

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Hungarian liberals at the turn of the century was their inability—indeed, their unwillingness—to live up to the political ideals and moral standards that had been set out in the liberal-conservative vision of Count Istvan

9 Despite his antisemitic views, two of the pre-Trianon historians he admired most-—Henrik Marczali and David Angyal—were not only "liberal" historians, but also of Jewish origin. Much like Miklos Horthy, who as Regent once famously declared that "I will decide who is Jewish," Szekfu "differentiated between 'our own Jewish Magyars,' those whose ancestors lived in Hungary for many generations, and those who were children or grandchildren of immigrants." Epstein, Gyula Szekfu, 90-1, fh.15. 10 As Szekfu argued, the lesser nobility had formerly been ascendant in the intellectual, social, political, and moral leadership of the country. Allowing recently assimilated alien elements like Jews and Germans to usurp the traditional position once held by this indigenous (and thus culturally authentic) "middle class" had weakened the nation irreparably in the decades leading up to the war. 11 Szekfu, Hdrom nemzedek, 4. 136

Sz&henyi (1791-1860) in the 1830s and 1840s. Regarded by many as "the greatest

Hungarian," Szechenyi was one of the leading figures of the first wave of liberal reform in Hungary, one which began in the 1830s with a number of large-scale public works projects linked to otherwise limited social, economic, and political reforms, and which culminated in the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence in 1848-49. Providing a useful counterpoint to popular revolutionary figures like Lajos Kossuth, Szekfu saw

Szechenyi as an especially praiseworthy "modernizer," precisely because he advocated a more restrained and realistic approach to Hungarian development. As Szekfu contended, the decline of the nation was inevitable once Hungary's liberal reformers turned then- backs on Szechenyi's ideas.

Though Hdrom nemzedek is sometimes regarded as a distinct intellectual and political point of departure for Szekfu (a shift that is typically explained either by the shock of Trianon, or by the supposed political opportunism which is said by some to have driven him throughout his career12), this admittedly seminal book cannot accurately be seen as a break politically, intellectually, or ideologically from his earlier work. Hdrom nemzedek instead grew out of an interconnected moral-historical vision that Szekfu had already begun to conceptualize and articulate before the war.13 His iconoclastic study of the eighteenth-century nationalist hero Ferenc R&koczi, for example, anticipated the critical stance on romantic nationalism that he would later express in Hdrom nemzedek.

12 For an admittedly polemic study which links this book to political opportunism, see Laszlo Nemeth, Szekfu Gyula (Budapest: Bolyai Akad&nia, 1940), in particular page 38, where Nemeth argues that Szekffi's work simply "justified those in power." See also Epstein, Gyula SzekfSL Epstein's analysis of Szekffi's work is especially curious in this respect Though she recognizes the intellectual continuity that exists between his pre- and post-Trianon work, she nevertheless reproduces the periodization of his scholarly development set out by those who see him as an opportunist. 13 In fact, as intellectual historian Agnes Varkonyi points out, Szekfu had indicated to a friend in a letter written in 1914 "that he was planning to write a serious study showing that the pre-World War I period was an age of decline." Agnes Varkonyi, Thafy Kdlmdn is tdrtenetfrasa (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1961), 324. Published in 1913, A szdmuzdtt Rakoczi (The Exiled Rakoczi) not only took issue with the so-called &wrwc-oriented scholarship14 which had come to dominate Hungarian historiography at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also was openly critical of

Kalman Thaly, the leading scholar of the national romantic school which promoted this view.15 Whereas Thaly and his "enthusiastic disciples" tended to read the centuries-long conflict with the Habsburgs in terms of "an unceasing struggle between the forces of good and evil," Szekfu strove to achieve a more balanced, less passionate, and ultimately more "realistic" assessment of Hungary's often strained relationship with its powerful western neighbour.16 Focusing primarily on the years Rakoczi spent in exile in France after the unsuccessful rebellion of 1703-11, and building his analysis on a meticulous study of newly-discovered primary documents, Szekfu painted a largely unflattering portrait of an aristocratic man more interested in self-aggrandizement than he was in the fate of his nation; a man who, in failing to take Hungary's compromised geopolitical position into account, pursued an unrealistic, and ultimately dangerous and destructive, revolutionary agenda. Taking aim at scholars like Thaly who saw it as their duty "to guide and train the youth of the nation to approach aristocratic heroes 'with reverence,'"

Szekfu argued against the superficiality of the national-romantic approach, offering in its

14 Taking its name fromth e soldiers who fought in the insurrectionist armies of Imre Th8k8ry and Ferenc Rakoczi, A«n

Szekfu's study was not generally well-received, at least not by members of the opposition, nor by the increasingly nationalistic reading public at large. Though many scholars, even those who disagreed with his interpretation, recognized the scholarly merits of Szekfu's work, the book itself was denounced in parliament as anti-Hungarian, and soon came to be labeled in the nationalist press as treasonous. The scandal and public debate which ensued raged through the first half of 1914, and only subsided in the summer when the parliamentary leader Count Gyula Andrassy issued a statement in which he offered a more or less muted defense of Szekfu's scholarship.18 However, as

Irene Raab Epstein writes, it was "only the outbreak of World War One [that] brought complete relief fromharassmen t to the unfortunate young historian."19 As Szekfu himself would later explain, the storm of controversy that his study of Rakoczi created left him hesitant during the war itself to publish anything which expressed views that openly opposed prevailing political and popular visions of Hungarian history.20

17 Epstein, Gyula Szekfu, 45-6. See also Vardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography, 43. Szekffi's treatment of Rakoczi, it is worth pointing out, reproduces an analytical approach first expressed by the seventeenth-century poet-soldier Count Miklds Zrinyi in his critical examination of the life and political career of the oft-romanticized King Matyas. Written in 1656, Zrinyi's Matyas kirdly eleterQl vald elme~lkedesek (Reflections on the Life of King Matyas) was quite likely studied by Szekfu as a gymnasium student (Zrinyi's work was read by Fodor, for example, who, only two years Szekffi's junior, also attended a Catholic school). Though Zrinyi was himself a political and intellectual forerunner of the rebel kuruc movement, his critical-analytical approach, one which included an important dose of realism, might very well have left a lasting impression on the young Szekfu. 18 Andrassy would go on to become the last foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 19 Epstein, Gyula Szekfu, 48-9. 20 As he would later indicate in the revised introduction to Hdrom nemzedek, this reluctance was in part due to a fear on his part that his own critical views might serve to divide the nation at a time when unity was of paramount importance. Gyula Szekfu, Hdrom nemzedek es ami utdna kOvetkezik (Budapest: Kiralyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934), 5. Beyond this patriotic motivation, however, Szekfu's apparent reluctance was no doubt due in part to the great emotional toll that the Rak6czi scandal took on him personally.

The critical position put forth in A szdmuzott Rdkoczi, however, was not entirely abandoned in his next major work, a study of Hungarian history from the emergence of the state in the ninth century to the Ausgleich or "compromise" with Austria in 1867.

Commissioned by a German publisher, Szekfu's work was first published in Germany as

Der Staat Ungarn (The Hungarian State) in 1917, and was later translated and released in

Hungary as A magyar dllam eletrajza (Biography of the Hungarian State) in 1918.

Patterned consciously on Friedrich Meinecke's Weltbiirgertum undNationalstaat published a decade earlier, Szekfu's work was an attempt to present an integrated

"biographical" account of the evolution of the Hungarian state.23 Treating the history of

Hungary as an organic process, Szekfu was careful to emphasize the interconnected cultural, political, and material factors which gave Hungary its unique shape as a geo- historical entity, all the while stressing its historic place in what he called the "Christian-

German cultural community."24 This last point was of particular importance to Szekfu's

As Epstein notes, the impact that the Rakoczi scandal had on Szekfu personally is conveyed in two letters written in 1914 and 1917 respectively. In a letter to Sandor Takacs, dated August 7,1914, Szekfu expressed his concerns that the general public, having read negative reviews and outright denunciations of himself and his work in the popular press, might come to believe mat he was no more than a political agent working for the ruling Liberal party. Worrying in particular about his reputation (not just as a scholar, but as someone fundamentally opposed to the liberalism of the day) he wrote: "The 70,000 readers of the Pesti Hirlap will be convinced to the end that I wrote the book on the order of...Istvan Tisza [prime minister and leader of the Liberal party]." In a letter written to Arthur Odeschalchi three years latter, Szekfu wrote with some obvious concern that "I wouldn't be surprised if even twenty or thirty years from now I would come across the ghost of the charge of treason." Both letters are cited in Varkonyi, Thaly Kalmdn es tdrtenetirasa, 414. 22 See Gyula Szekffi, Der Staat Ungarn (Stuttgart-Berlin: Deutsche Verlag Anstalt, 1917); and idem., A magyar dllam eletrajza (Budapest: Dick Mano konyvkereskedese, 1918). 23 On Meinecke's historiographical approach, see "Values and Causalities in History," in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, ed., Fritz Stern (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 267-288. On his impact on German political thinking, see Robert A. Pois, Friedrich Meinecke and German Politics of the Twentieth Century (Berekeley: The University of California Press, 1972). 24 As Epstein notes, this is left vaguely defined in his work, but it was definitely influenced by, or at least reflected the thinking of, Naumann's notion of Mitteleuropa. It should be noted here mat Szekffi would "realist," western-oriented conceptualization of Hungarian history and geopolitics.

Contending that the greatest virtue of Hungarian statesmanship lay in the ability to compromise, Szekfu focused much of his study on the state-building achievements of leaders who, instead of striking an independent, revolutionary course for Hungary, undertook the difficult "double task" of preserving Hungarian independence while simultaneously engaging in a productive and cooperative way with German political and cultural institutions.

Such a vision of Hungary's historical development certainly ran counter to the romantic-nationalist kuruc view so popular in Hungary at the time. The goal of

Hungarian politics, he argued, was not the achievement of absolute autonomy

(autonomia), but rather self-determination (dnrendelkezes). As Epstein points out, this idea of self-determination was not what President Woodrow Wilson had in mind when he drafted his infamous Fourteen Points near the end of World War I. Following

Meinecke's usage of this term a decade earlier, Szekfu viewed self-determination not as a right, but rather as the ability of a nation or people "to determine its own destiny, to form a sovereign state without any outside help."26 Echoing a view which had circulated in conservative circles long before the war, Szekfu argued that, beginning with the ambitious state-building project initiated by King Stephen I in the early eleventh century, the Magyars, as the only people in the Danubian basin "possessing political will," had been engaged in a critical, on-going civilizing mission, one which not only saddled them

later rethink this German connection in the 1930s. However, though critical of Nazism and fearful of a Nazi-dominated Central Europe, he by no means abandoned the idea of a Christian community of nations, nor did he abandon the idea of Hungary's history being tied to liberal-conservative vision of modern European civilization. 25 Epstein, Gyula Szekfu, 28-9. 26 Ibid., 32. with the noble burden of building and maintaining a Christian state, but also bestowed upon them the responsibility of bringing the politically undeveloped, non-Magyar nationalities of the historic Kingdom of St. Stephen "into the framework of the Christian-

German cultural community."27

Szekfu's lengthy excursus on Christian Hungary's historic civilizing mission in the Danubian basin, a mission which had to be seen within the context of a much broader engagement with Christian-German ideas and practices, offered a vision of Hungarian history which was obviously critical, if only implicitly, of the romantic-nationalist interpretation promoted by scholars like Thaly in the decade and a half leading up to the outbreak of World War I. At the same time, however, Szekfu's underlying biographical approach, one which emphasized the organic nature of Hungarian history, was also a critical response to, and rethinking of, the older and much more established liberal- positivist school of Hungarian historiography. First appearing in Hungary in the 1830s and 1840s, the positivist approach had become well-established in Hungarian scholarly circles in the 1870s, and went on to dominate historical scholarship until the early 1900s, when other schools of thought, and chief among them the romantic-nationalist school, emerged to challenge the liberal-positivist hold on Hungary's historical imagination.28

Ibid. This notion of Hungary's historic civilizing mission in the Danubian basin was employed by Hungarian irredentists in their efforts to have the Treaty of Trianon revised. See, for example, Otto L^grady, Justice for Hungary! The Cruel Errors of Trianon 3rd revised edition (Budapest, 1931). 28 As Vardy points out, it was the work of G. Pauler in particular which helped to popularize the positivist approach in late nineteenth century Hungary. See Pauler's seminal essays "A positivizmus hatasarol a tertenetirasa," Szdzadok 5 (1871): 527-545, 624-641; and idem., "Comte Agost is a tart&ielem," Szdzadok 7 (1873): 225-241,391-406,462-481. Beyond the national-romantic approach, other schools which emerged at the fin de siecle included the economic history school, the Hungarian civilization or kulturgeschichte school, and the organic sociological school. Not to be confused with the organic approach promoted by Szekfu, this left-wing, bourgeois-radical approach to philosophical, sociological, and historical problems drew inspiration from the ideas of Darwin, Spencer, and to a lesser extent Marx. For a brief description of the rise and fall of the liberal-positivist school of Hungarian historiography, see Vdrdy, Modern Hungarian Historiography, 38-42. On positivism in Europe in general, see W.M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). Though Szekfu recognized the inherent value of the critical, philological method of source criticism that liberal-positivist historians developed and championed, he nevertheless questioned its claims to scientific objectivity, and beyond this also its underlying philosophical belief in "systematic and rational historical evolution."29 As

Szekfu and others argued, the attempt to collect and evaluate historical sources with scientific precision served to numb, rather than enlighten, the nation's historical consciousness, while the assumption that human society evolved in a linear fashion, shedding its religious and mystical trappings as it moved towards a more rational orientation, left no room for the contemplation of overarching spiritual or psycho- ontological questions. Indeed, though rigorous and exact in their use of sources, positivist historians suffered from "a relative inability to synthesize," and thus could offer little in the way of a meaningful historical narrative which spoke to a unifying sense of

Hungarian identity and morality.30 If anything, by supporting a culturally empty and spiritually neutral materialist vision of modernity, liberal-positivist historiography

Vardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography, 38. It is important to stress here that despite the perceived failings of the liberal-positivist approach, Szekfu by no means wished to abandon empiricism and rigorous source criticism altogether. As he would write in a short essay published in 1922, "it is an old truth that...in the historian there dwells something of the skeptic." See Gyula Szekfu, "A magyar bortermelS lelki alkata," in Nip, nemzet, Mam. Vdlogatott tanulmanyok, ed., Vilmos Erds (Budpaest: Osiris Kiado, 2002), 232. 30 Wrdy, Modern Hungarian Historiography, 38. This uneasy feeling that the scientific worldview of the liberal positivists was on some important level existentially empty was perhaps expressed best by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his seminal, if cryptic, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in 1917. One of the foundational texts of twentieth-century analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein's treatise asserted in no uncertain terms that the only meaningful knowledge that we can have of the world is derived empirically and logically, rather than intuitively. But to this assertion he added the often overlooked qualification that, though our knowledge of the world can be meaningful scientifically and logically, it is ultimately incomplete, even arbitrary, and beyond this entirely meaningless from a spiritual or psychological point of view. As he writes in proposition 6.52, "even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." Despite his logical, scientific rigor, Wittgenstein remained sympathetic to a basic human need to create spiritually, morally, and culturally meaningful meta-narratives to smooth over the mysteries, inconsistencies, and fundamental randomness of life itself. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 149. 143 provided an opening for the romantic, and ultimately "irrational," historical imaginings of chauvinist nationalists and their fascistic descendants.

In emphasizing the spiritual and moral poverty of liberal-positivist scholarship,

Szekfii's academic critique overlapped with a broader conservative critique of the Liberal party's modernizing agenda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The liberal-positivist attempt to rationalize the social sciences, in fact, was a reflection of a broader socio-political reorientation in late nineteenth-century Hungary, one which, as in the rest of Europe, saw faith in traditional values gradually replaced by a faith in science.

As Andrew Janos argues, this fin-de-siecle reorientation in Hungary was consistent with developments elsewhere, and especially in Germany and the rest of central Europe, which saw dramatic change as a result of the commercial revolution that swept through this region in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the work and insights of

Karl Mannheim, Karl Polanyi, and others, Janos writes that, as the market became "the predominant instrument" for the management and allocation of resources, the value orientation of society underwent a significant and, to many, deeply troubling and destabilizing transformation. The rationalization of socio-political processes, and with this also of the cultural imagination, not only led to a fundamental "demystification" of the world, but also saw "the personal warmth, particularism, and ascriptive orientations of the traditional Gemeinschaff' replaced "by the impersonal, secularized, and performance-oriented norms of the modern Gesellschqft."*1 Szekfu and other Hungarian

31 Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), xiv. See also Karl Mannheim, Man in Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt and Brace and World, 1958); and Karl Pola^iyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). This notion of the "personal warmth" of traditional society needs to be clarified, however. Though conservatives no doubt believed in the reassuring, nurturing potential of traditional social structures, they also looked to them as a necessary tool for the disciplining of the masses. As Janos Absoth wrote in the so- called Conservative Manifesto of 1876, the liberal institutionalization of the principle of equality conservatives of course reacted negatively to this shift. And yet, at the same time, they

were not totally opposed to the idea of progress in general. Far from it. Like their

"modernizing" hero Count Istvan Szechenyi, conservatives like Szekfu believed that,

given Hungary's historic mission as a civilized—and civilizing—nation on the periphery

of western Europe, progress and development were unavoidable and even necessary and

desirable forces. What they railed against, however, was progress and development that

came at the expense of an integrated, historically-rooted, and morally-informed vision of

the Hungarian nation.

Much like the Christian nationalists who, as Hanebrink shows, sought to

reintroduce a spiritually-informed moral element into Hungarian politics and society as

early as the 1880s, Szekfu sought to add a moral, cultural, and ultimately psychological

dimension to the study of Hungarian history. Though he appreciated the rigorous

empirical methods of liberal positivism, Szekfu was frustrated by the limitations of this

approach, rebelling in particular against its excessive, and ultimately unimaginative,

scientism. Fascinated with the interaction between culture and politics, and keen on

understanding history in psychological as well as factual terms, Szekfu turned to other

"spiritually informed" historiographical and methodological approaches, especially those

developed in Germany throughout the nineteenth century by thinkers like Leopold Ranke

(1795-1886), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915), Erich Marcks

(1861-1938), and Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954). Of all these thinkers, Ranke and

undermined a traditional social hierarchy in Hungary, making "masters defenseless against the insolence of their servants," and subverting in general "the natural order of society." In response to this, conservatives advocated not just the re-entailment of land, but also the restoration of feudal practices such as corporal punishment, something with Abs6th and others believed was necessary in order "to save the poor from the heavy fines and imprisonment that threaten the integrity of family life." Janos Absoth, Magyar conservativ politika (Budapest: Legrady, 1876), cited in Janos, The Politics of Backwardness, 143-44. 145

Dilthey were perhaps the most important to Szekfu's intellectual development; Ranke, because of his desire to understand history in synthetic, universal terms (and also because of his willingness to allow his religious beliefs to influence his approach to, and analysis of, history), and Dilthey, because of his insistence that a combination or "synthesis" of objective and subjective methods could be used to capture and analyze the so-called

"spirit" of a particular age.

Dilthey's synthetic approach to the philosophy and practice of history, an approach which formed the basis of what came to be known as the Geistesgeschichte school in Germany, no doubt had the most important impact on Szekfu's thinking. What perhaps captivated Szekfu most was Dilthey's conceptualization of

Geisteswissenschaften, or the sciences of the mind. Distinguishing this frommer e natural science (a discipline which was limited by its strict adherence to empirical methodology),

Dilthey argued that a science of the mind such as history had the capacity to penetrate the outward, factual manifestations of empirical data; that scholars practicing this approach could themselves "live through" the objects of their studies, and gain access to the more profound emotional and experiential truths that lay hidden within. Historians, Dilthey suggested, could draw on their own intuition and spiritual insight in order to contextualize and understand the external expressions of internal experience. Given that history lacked objective reality, such a psychological engagement with primary source material was not just desirable, it was fundamentally necessary. Without it, there could be no meaningful interpretation of the past.32

On Dilthey's philosophy of, and approach to, history see Epstein, Gyula Szekfu, 55. See also H.P. Rickman, ed., Pattern and Meaning in History: Wilhelm Dilthey: Thoughts on History and Society (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961). 146

Building on the principles introduced by Ranke and Dilthey, Szekfu saw it as his

duty as a historian to better contextualize and synthesize Hungarian history, a scholarly

imperative which he addressed to varying degrees in A szdmuzott Rdkoczi and A magyar

dllam iletrajza. These studies, in fact, were early, if only partially developed and

articulated, expressions of a new approach to Hungarian history. Based largely on the

Geistesgeschichte school in Germany, and known in Hungary as szellemtortenet, the

synthetic approach that Szekfu introduced in his work prior to the end of World War I

was developed more fully in Hdrom nemzedek, and would go on to inform his

scholarship throughout the interwar period. Championed in the 1920s by Horthy's minister of Religion and Public Education, Count Kun6 Klebelsburg, and supported by an emerging generation of young scholars, szellemtortenet had an immediate impact on

Hungarian scholarship and cultural-politics in the post-Trianon period.33 Though the principles of szellemtortenet were not fully articulated until the early 1930s, it was clear from the beginning that the aim of this new synthetic approach to Hungarian history was to examine and illuminate historical manifestations of the "Hungarian soul." By combining subjective intuition with the objective methods taught by the positivists,

Szekfu and his followers sought to effectively "re-live" the past, and in so doing explore and reveal an "eternal Hungarian spirit" which linked not only the material to the spiritual, but also the individual to the collective, and the past to the present and future.

As Klebelsburg's successor Barint Homan wrote in 1932, szellemtortenet "brought

On Klebelsburg's importance to the development and dissemination of szellemtdrtenet, see Vardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography, 50-61. See also Stephen Herzog, "Negotiating Modernity: Cultural Reform in 1920s Hungary" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003). 147

together all factors"—material, ideological, cultural, economic, political, social, moral,

and psychological—"into a synthesis of the whole."34

In part, of course, this dramatic shift in Hungarian scholarship towards the

exploration of the "eternal Hungarian spirit" was a clever discursive strategy, at least in

light of the devastation wrought by the dismemberment of the nation in 1920. With two- thirds of the historic Kingdom of St. Stephen now "lost," it made a great deal of sense to

focus on the idea of Hungary as a culturally and spiritually unified entity, one whose

integrated and eternal soul was capable of transcending the spatial limitations now placed upon it.35 As Vardy and others have suggested, this re-imagining of dismembered

Hungary had important political implications, not just in the international arena, where the presentation of a culturally and historically integrated nation played an important role in official revisionist propaganda, but also at home, where conservative-nationalist politicians employed the discourse of unity and totality not just to comfort and reassure a people humiliated and divided by Trianon, but also to rally political support. As

Klebelsburg himself recognized early on, the synthetic approach developed by scholars like Szekfu reinforced the conceptual foundation of the loosely defined nation-building agenda being promoted by the Horthy regime, and could therefore help to legitimize their conservative-nationalist position as they sought to consolidate their power.

However, as Paul Hanebrink notes, the nationalism promoted by the Horthy regime was not simply a tool of political opportunism. Drawing on Emilio Gentile's

34 See Balint Homan, "A tort&ielem utja", in A magyar tdrttnetiras uj utjai, Balint Homan, ed. (Budapest: A Magyar Szemle Tarsasag, 1932), 43-44. This volume of essays was the first comprehensive work outlining and explaining the principles of szellemtortenet. 35 The same thing happened in the case of partitioned Poland in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. See, for example, Larry Wolffs Inventing Eastern Europe, and Brian Porter's When Nationalism Began to Hate. 148

study of Italian fascism, Hanebrink suggests that the conservative-nationalist agenda, and

by extension also the synthetic histories and geographies which did so much to articulate

this position, was also an expression of a sincere desire on the part of conservative

Hungarian nation-builders to "transform" the nation socially and culturally; to mould the

Hungarian people into what Gentile calls "a moral community animated by a single

faith."36 Such a performative application of conservative-nationalist discourse was no

doubt politically motivated. But it also reflected the deeply held belief that the nation as

a whole needed to be regenerated morally, socially, and culturally in order to prevent yet

another catastrophe on the scale of Trianon. For someone like Szekfu, this belief had

deep, and very real roots. Anguished by the growing sense of alienation and malaise which gripped Hungary, and beyond this the rest of the western world, in the early twentieth century, and having experienced first hand the slings and arrows of a nation divided, Szekfu had a vested interest in, and a profound sense of responsibility towards, the development of a regenerated nation and national self-image.37

As I have already suggested above, the turmoil and upheaval of the Trianon period ultimately provided a political as well as discursive space for the sort of scholarly treatment that Szekfu had in mind. As Szekfu himself wrote in the introduction to Hdrom nemzedek, though he hesitated during the war to publish anything that had the potential to divide the nation, Hungary's total collapse between 1918 and 1920 meant that "the publication of a new historical interpretation could no longer be considered contrary to

36 See Hanebrink, 134. Here he is citing Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keth Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 85. See also George Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975). 37 For an indication of Szekfu's sense of duty towards the nation, see Domokos Kosary, "A t8rte^ietir6," Magyar Szemle XLIV (1943), 235. Here Kosary refers to Szekfu's ideas regarding the relationship between historical scholarship and nation building. the national interest." If anything, given the political-ideological struggles that exploded in Hungary in the wake of the nation's military defeat, Szekfu perhaps hoped that his critical study of Hungary's decline might become the useful rallying point for a new way forward.

It is important to stress here that Szekfu did indeed see the synthetic approach of szellemtortenet as a fundamentally modern response to modern problems. Despite looking to the past for a key to the future, and despite the fact that the synthetic approach supported a regime which Szekfu himself would later describe with some consternation as "neo-baroque," szellemtortenet cannot be dismissed out of hand as politically reactionary thinking,39 nor should it be viewed as an attempt on the part of a conservative nationalists to "turn back the clock" in order to return to "the well-tried values of the old regime."40 What they wanted, instead, was to create an interconnected social, political, moral, and cultural system which, though perhaps patterned on the early nineteenth- century vision of liberal-conservative statesmen and thinkers like Count Istvan

Szechenyi, was fundamentally new and unique; a system which, by avoiding the pitfalls of both liberal positivism and romantic nationalism, would ultimately help Hungarians navigate the ever-changing waters of the modern world in their on-going (and in some ways even progressive) quest for unity and completion on a national as well as personal

38 Szekfu, Hdrom nemzedek (1934), 5. 39 As critics in the communist period tended to claim, szellemtortenet was merely a reactionary intellectual platform erected for the purposes of combating socialism. See, for example, J6zsef Szigeti, A magyar szellemtortenet birdlatdhoz (Budapest: Kossuth K8nyvkiad6, 1964). It is worth noting that, though their ideological point of departure was obviously quite different, the argument put forth by scholars like Szigeti shares much in common with the one made by liberal-democratic critics. Like their socialist counterparts, the latter group has tended to view the work of Szekffi and his colleagues in backward or reactionary terms. What both critiques miss, however, is the fact that the conservative-nationalist vision was equally as critical - if not more so - of romantic nationalism and right-wing extremism as it was of liberal positivism. 40 For this sort of thinking, see William Batkay, "Trianon: Cause or Effect—Hungarian Domestic Politics in the 1920s," 510; and Vardy, "The Impact of Trianon upon the Hungarian Mind," 31. level. In reacting against what Ernst Bloch very aptly described as "the barriers erected

against the 'soul' by the [liberal] capitalist apparatus," conservative-nationalist

intellectuals did not wish to retreat into a strictly traditional or "irrational" mode of

existence, but rather sought a "release" from liberalism's "dehumanizing monotony."41

As Brian Porter and others have suggested, this desire to break free from a

modernizing system erected in the name of liberty and progress must be seen within the

context of modernity, and not somewhere outside it.42 In fact, the conservative- nationalist negotiation of a new direction exhibited a sophisticated awareness of the multiple or alternative modernities that had been in play in Hungary and indeed the rest of Europe and the modern world since at least the late nineteenth century.43 Though

suspicious, on the one hand, of the romantic-nationalist tendency to reject the interconnected moral, political, and cultural values of western civilization, conservative nationalists were also critical, on the other, of the hard and fast normative distinctions made by liberal positivists between such binary pairings as progress and tradition, development and backwardness, rationalism and mysticism, and so on. Though conservative-nationalist thinkers like Szekfu also believed in their own way in the perfectibility of "man" and society, they rejected the liberal-positivist notion that this could only happen within a framework completely devoid of traditional social structures and cultural beliefs. Such an ontologically disenchanted and epistemologically detached

41 Ernst Bloch, Erbschqft dieser Zeit (Frankurt, 1962), 58-9. This particular passage is cited in Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol.2,365. 42 Porter, 12-13. 43 On this notion of multiple or alternative modernities, see S.N. Eisenstadt's very useful essay "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus 129/1 (Winter 2000): 1-29. See also Michael Saler "Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review," The American Historical Review 111/3 (June 2006): 692-716; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C., 2004); and Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 151 worldview, they argued, was not merely insufficient and empty from a moral, cultural, and spiritual point of view, but also had the potential to lead to nihilism, and even violence. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that the self-reflexivity of the liberal- positivist approach led to a belief in nothing, or Hannah Arendt, who would later claim that efforts to overcome the "modern" estrangement from "Being" were at least partially responsible for the intolerance, cruelty, and bloodshed that consumed Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, Hungary's conservative-nationalist thinkers were leery of the spiritual void, and the potential for violence, that lurked behind the liberal promises of reason, progress, and freedom.44

Of course, as the case of Szekfu suggests, proponents of the synthetic approach— whether this applied to the study of history, philosophy, literary criticism, geography, or other social sciences—by no means wanted to abandon the factual, scientific basis of their study. What they did want to avoid, however, was an approach that was completely devoid not just of spiritual and subjective elements, but also of an underlying moral vision of Hungary's past, present, and future. By the same token, however, they were equally critical of those who went too far in the other direction, those who, like the romantic nationalists of the late nineteenth century, and the proto-fascists and fascists who gradually supplanted them, were seen to sacrifice reason and science in the name of mysticism and irrationalism. Their solution, therefore, was to attempt to strike a practical

44 See Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth ofTragedy" and "The Genealogy of Morals", trans. Francis Golffing (New York, 1956), 299; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Book, 2006) (see in particular the preface, "The Gap Between Past and Future"); and Saler, "Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review," 698-99. As Saler points out, this critical or "dialectical" understanding of modernity, one in which "the universal promises" of liberal-positivists are exposed as thinly-veiled expressions of "self-interested ideologies, false consciousness, and bad faith," is reproduced in works such as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, originally published in 1947. 152 and philosophical balance between these opposing epistemological and ontological extremes. This ambiguous and often uneasy balance, one which embraced a host of

"unresolved contradictions and oppositions," was a manifestation of what Michael Saler and others have identified as an "antinomial" approach to modernity, one which questioned and rejected the "either/or" logic of the liberal-positivist approach, while simultaneously recognizing and accepting the "fruitful tension" that can exist "between seemingly irreconcilable forces and ideas."45

This basic antinomial stance—one which was intended to inspire and unite, rather than "delude," the Hungarian people—was echoed by a number of scholars who, like

Szekfu, were anxious to breathe life back into a national body which had been numbed spiritually and intellectually prior to the signing of Trianon in 1920, and which had, at the same time, become especially vulnerable to the advances of the radical right. In his own

"Trianon" book published in 1925, the historian Sandor Petho, for example, wrote of the need to rethink the "rationalist, liberal historical perspective," which, in "condemning the truths of [Hungarian] tradition to the stake," had done much to undermine the nation's historical consciousness.46 Though he cautioned his readers in no uncertain terms against the dangers of an uncritical historical approach which cleaved too closely to the intoxicating realm of myth and legend, he nevertheless warned his audience of the equally dangerous scientific excesses of the spiritually detached rationalist approach.

Saler, "Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review," 699-700. As Saler notes, this "antinomial" rethinking of modernity emerged in historical circles in the 1990s, especially amongst postmodern and postcolonial scholars. See, for example, Saurabh Dube, ed., Enduring Enchantments, special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly 101/4 (October, 2002); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 46 This comes from Petho's foreword to Sandor Peth6 and Ferenc Fodor, Vilagostol Trianonig. A mai magyarorszdg kialakulasanak Wrtinete (Budapest: Enciklop&Iia R.T. Kiadasa, 1925), vii-viii. Fodor contributed a lengthy section on Hungarian geography to this volume. 153

Lamenting the way in which the subjective, and even sacred, "truths" of Hungary's past

(and in particular its distant past) hail been attacked and "violently" dissected "under the cold light of.. .reason," Petho argued that this approach not only "exhausted" the

Hungarian intellect, thus depriving it of the means to reconcile and resolve the many contradictions of Hungarian history, but also created a moral vacuum which the radical right rushed to fill with its irrational, violent, and morally impoverished vision of a resurrected Hungary rebuilt on the values of an ancient, anti-western, pre-Christian past.'

Encouraging historians to abandon whatever faith they had in their own

"infallibility," and to open their eyes to "the relativity of their own conclusions," Peth6 followed Szekfu's lead in charting a new course for Hungarian historians. Suggesting that much could be salvaged fromth e rationalist approach of their liberal predecessors,

Petho wrote (in a quintessentially "antinomial" way):

The modern era respects and judges the worth of the powerful analyses of the nineteenth century, but historiographically speaking, we no longer wade with such a light heart nor with such arrogant indifference amidst the rich streams of tradition. The contemporary historian knows that the great historical truths which lie concealed within a nation's consciousness and its cherished beliefs could never be revealed through the impotent reasoning and empty dialectics of liberal-rationalist thought. Today we are no longer embarrassed if we interrogate seriously the traditional belief in the blood relationship between Huns and Magyars, or if we believe in the ancient Turanian link between ourselves and the Szeklers of Transylvania. The modern historical perspective does not fully reject the important results of the skeptical research of the past century, but neither does it dismiss those national traditions which constitute part of our history.48

Petho and Fodor, Vildgostol Trianonig, vii-viii. Whereas conservative-nationalists looked to the nineteenth century for evidence of Hungary's moral and cultural "derailment," Hungarian proto-fascists (which included some factions of the Turanist movement), and later fascists, viewed Hungary's Christianization under St. Stephen at the turn of the millennium as the point at which Hungary began its centuries-long slide into complete decadence and moral decay. For a very useful discussion of this debate in an Italian context, see Paul Baxa, "A Pagan Landscape: Pope Pius XI, Fascism, and the Struggle over the Roman Cityscape," Journal ofthe Canadian Historical Association Yll\ (2006): 107-124. 48 PethS and Fodor, Vildgostol Trianonig, vii-viii. 154

Though not all conservative-nationalist intellectuals would have been as keen as

Petho to embrace Turanism and the supposed relationship between Huns and Magyars

(especially as these explicitly romantic, eastem-oriented ideas were appropriated and popularized by fascistic groups in the 1930s), all would have agreed with the inherent value of the approach he articulated, and would have applauded his efforts to project and examine the events of recent Hungarian history against the backdrop of the Hungarian millennium. Indeed, like Petho, conservative-nationalist thinkers saw it as their duty to trace the organic, evolutionary connections between past and present, and in so doing provide an integrated, "genealogical" view of the connected life histories of nation, state, and ultimately self.

Between the Personal and Political: Synthetic Geography and the Negotiation of Self

This willingness to dip into the rich subjective streams of Hungarian tradition and historical consciousness as a means of reviving an authentic and unified vision of

Hungary and its people was in no way limited only to historians. Capitalizing on the opportunities that opened up for them in the post-Trianon period, scholars from a number of disciplines worked to integrate their studies into the emergent conservative-nationalist intellectual framework, and in so doing did much to develop and popularize the synthetic approach. Conservative geographers like Fodor, for example, welcomed the opportunity that had been granted to them to flesh out and publicize ideas which had been percolating prior to the war, and which, with the collapse of the old order, could be employed in efforts to build a bridge to the future by healing the wounds of the past. As Fodor would later write, it was amidst the destruction and despair of the Trianon period that he was finally granted the chance to begin a body of work which, though significant to him personally, professionally, and financially,wa s also perceived to be of great import to the cultural, moral, and spiritual renewal of the nation itself.49

Like Szekfu, the theoretical, methodological, and ultimately political seeds of his interwar work were laid well before the dismemberment of the nation in 1920. As already mentioned in Chapter One, Fodor had been introduced at a young age to the defensive, religiously-informed conservative-nationalist position which would later become the basis of both his scholarly work and cultural activism. His book of twenty- one hand-written essays composed over the course of his final two years at the Szatmar

(Satu Mare) gymnasium, for example, captured the underlying anxieties and possible solutions which would later surface to exert so much influence over both his own work in particular, and interwar Hungarian cultural-politics in general.50 Working selectively through the Hungarian literary canon, Fodor's essays pointed to the longstanding cultural disquiet and political tension—or what Bonnie Burstow might call "layers of trauma"— which served as the deeper psychological context of fin-de-siecle conservative thinking.51

Focusing on the works of baroque writers Mikl6s Zrinyi (1620-1664) and Istvan

GyongyOsi (1629-1704); "conservative" nationalist and romantic writers Ferenc

Kazinczy (1759-1831), Sandor Kisfaludy (1772-1844), Mihaly Csokonai Vitez (1773-

1805), Karoly Kisfaludy (1788-1830), Ferenc Kolcsey (1790-1838), Miklos Josika

(1794-1865), Ede Szigligeti (1814-1878), Janos Arany (1817-1882), and Imre Madach

Fodor, "EmleTcezetUI," 8. This account is consistent with his curriculum vitae written in P&s in 1940, where he comments on the importance of the work he began in the Trianon period, noting that it was "great work." Fodor, "Oneletrajza/Curriculum Vitae," 2. 50 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.4/8, Ferenc Fodor, "Olvasmanynaplo," (1905-06). 51 Not surprisingly, none of Fodor's essays dealt with the liberal writers examined by Mario Fenyo in his essay on fin-de-siecle Hungarian writers (see Chapter One). (1823-1864); liberal-revolutionary writers Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) and Sandor Petofi

(1823-1849); and moderate, "second-generation" liberal writers Jdzsef EStv6s (1813-

1871), Ferenc Deak (1803-1876), and Zsigmond Kemeny (1817-1874), Fodor's essays marshaled together a host of voices which spoke to and underlined the concerns of an entire generation of conservative-nationalist intellectuals. Most, if not all, of these writers, in fact, expounded in their own often melancholy way on the internal fragmentation and moral weakness within the nation which had led to Hungary's past tragedies, using this as a platform to issue dire warnings about the dangers facing the nation in the present. For many of these authors, the blame for Hungary's tragic history in the early-modern and modern periods could be laid squarely at the feet of the nation's self-interested, morally degenerate, and politically misguided aristocratic elite.52 In the absence of effective leadership, the nation had become alienated from its cultural and historical roots, a condition which only intensified and became more grave with the de- mystification of, and increasing estrangement from, both God and nature in the modern period. In many cases, it was only the efforts of a core element of patriotic visionaries, men that the seventeenth-century poet-soldier Count Miklos Zrinyi might have called the

See, for example, MMly Csokonai Vitez's mock epic "Dorottya" (1799), in which the upper class is attacked for their cosmopolitan luxury and immorality, and Ferenc KSIcsey's "Zrinyi's Second Song" (1838), a poem which revisits Zrinyi's seventeenth-century critique of a nobility in decline, and predicts the imminent destruction of a once proud nation brought to disaster by the baseness of its sons. See also Sandor Kisfaludy, whose work conveyed warnings of future national catastrophes by revisiting disastrous events in Hungary's past (military defeats like the devastating loss to the Turks at the Battle ofMohics in 1526, for example). The liberal-conservative writer and statesman J6zsef E8tv8s adds a slightly different, anti-revolutionary twist to this general theme in his first novel A karthausi (1839). Set in the France of Louis-Philippe I, the novel is a thinly-veiled critique of the corruption and self-interest of the Hungarian elite, and beyond this is also an indictment of the selfishness which motivates revolutionaries. For Fodor's treatment of Csokonai's "Dorottya," and Kisfaludy's poem "Csobancz," see "Olvasmanynaplo" (Vllth- form essays). For his summary of E6tv6s's A karthausi, see "Olvasmanynaplo" (VHIth-form essays). For very useful overviews of the work of each of these four writers, see Tibor Kianiczay, ed., A History of Hungarian Literature (Budapest: Corvina Kiado, 1982), 146-157,180-186, and 259-262. "loyal and faithful few," which saved the nation fromtota l collapse and ruin. As if to anticipate the synthetic approach that would later be developed and popularized by historians like Szekfu, these writers argued as early as the late eighteenth century that the only way forward was to adopt enlightened and progressive ideas while simultaneously maintaining both spiritual and moral links to the past.

Indeed, this basic antinomial critique which ran through the work of nearly all the writers examined by Fodor undoubtedly laid at least part of the groundwork for the sort of synthetic thinking promoted by conservative-nationalist scholars in the post-Trianon period. The language reformer Ferenc Kazinczy, for example, held mat language should be more than a mere vehicle for the propagation of enlightened ideals, arguing that it was also a fundamental tool for the cultivation of both artistic and emotional sensibilities.

Though he ultimately promoted a neologist, as opposed to traditionalist, approach to language reform, he by no means advocated a complete departure linguistically or stylistically from the past.54 The same essential stance was adopted by Ferenc Kolcsey, a contemporary of Kazinczy who was greatly influenced by his work, especially later in his career. Compelled by the sometimes conflicting imperatives of patriotism and progress,

KSlcsey embraced the principles of reason, all the while clinging to his belief in God and his hope for the divine salvation of Hungary.55 Kolcsey's attempt to strike a balance

See Fodor's essay "Gr6f Zrfnyi Mikl6s - A t8r6k afium ellen valo orvossag," in "Olvasmanynaplo" (Vllth-form essays), n.p.. See also his essay on Karoly Kisfaludy's "Csal6dasok." Much like Kisfaludy's other comedies, this particular poem lampoons the foppish cosmopolitan attitudes of shallow aristocrats and the uneducated attitudes of village nobles while simultaneously expressing sympathy for the handful of morally and culturally grounded modernizers working to transform Hungarian society fromwithin . 54 One of Fodor's essays deals with Kazinczy's autobiographical work Pdlyam emlekezete (Memories of My Career), a book which is not simply a portrait of his own life, but also a reflection on the age in which he lived. See Fodor, "Olvasmanynaplo" (Vll-form essays), "Kazinczy Ferenc: Pah/am emlekezete," n.p. 55 Like all Hungarians at the time, Fodor would have been intimately acquainted with KSlcsey's poem "Hymnus" (Hymn). Written in 1823, it was set to music by Ferenc Erkel in 1844, and later became the Hungarian national anthem. As a gymnasium student, Fodor wrote on KSlcsey's views on language 158 between progress and tradition was expressed later in the nineteenth century by the liberal-conservative writer Zsigmond Kemeny who, though he never fully rejected the liberal concept of progress, was nevertheless skeptical of its grandiose promises.

Recognizing the merits of western forms of development, but concerned that any artificial intervention on the part of the nation's leadership was bound to upset both the balance of society and the integrated development of nation and state, Kemeny advocated, instead, "the slow, organic development of the bourgeoisie and capitalism."

Such a cautious approach, he argued, was the only way of promoting and preserving a strong sense of Hungarian sovereignty and identity in the modern world.56

This realistic vision of Hungarian development was expressed aptly and succinctly by the nineteenth-century poet Janos Arany who, late in his life, wrote:

Much as I crave independence, Still my chains I gladly wear, Lest at last my bold resistance, Make my lot the worse to wear.

Captivated at a young age by romantics like Byron, but resigning himself after the failure of the 1848-49 revolution to a much more restrained and conservative outlook, Arany provided an important paradigm for later synthetic thinkers and political realists like

reform. See the essay entitled "KSlcsey Ferenc—Besz&le a magyar nyelvugyeT)en," in "Olvasmanynaplo" (VH-form essays), n.p. Here he sums up KSlcsey's argument for the use of Hungarian "in every facet of state life." Fodor sides with K6lcsey's claim mat the continued use of Latin in public affairs would have done great damage to the development of Hungarian literature, and by extension also Hungarian identity, and then follows this up by pointing out that KSlcsey never sought to challenge the rights of the Habsburg monarchy. Klaniczay, A History of Hungarian Literature, 263. For an early interwar analysis of Kemeiiy's work, see Ferenc Papp, Bard Kemeny Zsigmond! vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia, 1922 and 1923). Fodor wrote on Kemeiiy's Zordldo (Stormy Times), a novel which dealt critically with the liberal vision of modernity and progress, and warned that, though modernization might indeed bring about the collective material improvement of Hungarian society, this improvement would ultimately dehumanize and alienate the individual. See Fodor, "Olvasmanynaplo" (Vlll-form essays), "Kemeny Zsigmond: Zord Id6," n.p. 57 Janos Arany, "Visszatekintes" (Looking Back), cited in Klaniczay, A History of Hungarian Literature, 234. Fodor. On the one hand, Arany warned that national catastrophe was unavoidable so long as the nation refused to submit to the dictates of common sense and self-discipline.5'

On the other, he advocated an explicitly cautious approach to cultural development, one which, like Kazinczy and Kolcsey before him, sought to mitigate the potentially destructive impact of progress by protecting, and even reviving, an historically-rooted sense of national consciousness. Such a strategy, of course, required a delicate touch if the desired balance was to be achieved. Though he lashed out against the positivist's skeptical treatment of Hungarian myths and heroic narratives, he nevertheless embraced rationalism as a safeguard against the reactionary potential of romanticism. Only in this way, he believed, would it be possible to heal a deeply fragmented and increasingly alienated nation.59

The intricacies of this position were by no means lost on the young Fodor. In his opening essay "Naiv eposzunk" (Our Naive Epics), Fodor carefully summarized Arany's views on the importance of achieving a useful balance between detached reasoning and traditional belief. Noting Arany's assertions that "the nai've, traditional stories of the people (nep) carry within them an inner creative structure of some value," and that "the

See for example his epic poem "Buda halala" (The Death of Buda), written in 1863 and treated by Fodor in "Olvasmanynaplo" (VHIth-form essays), "Arany Janos: Buda haldla," n.p. 59 As one critic has written, Arany's work "was not Romantic [that is, poetry which spoke to the existential refuge offered by an irrational conception of freedom]...nor can it be compared to the disillusioned, self- analytic poetry of the Positivist period. It lies somewhere between the two, perhaps a little closer to the latter." It is worth noting, also, that Arany was an admirer and supporter of Imre Madach's important mid- nineteenth-century play "Az ember trag&liaja" (The Tragedy of Man), a work which vacillates between skepticism and hope in its critical assessment of the possibility for human progress. Attempting to strike an antinomial balance between romanticism and positivism, the play was attacked by critics on both the left and the right. Even at the turn of the century Madach's work was criticized by thinkers like the Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs, who argued that Madach "had no faith that human reason could guide history in the direction of progress," and right-wing figures like Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka, who argued that "he had no faith that divine providence could direct history into the harbour of salvation." Arany quite rightly recognized that Madach was, in his own way, attempting to reconcile these two contradictory positions. As one commentator put it, "in his rejection of liberal teleology Madach did not discard the will to progress." Klaniczay, A History of Hungarian Literature, 239 and 276. For Fodor's treatment of Madach's play, see Fodor, "Olvasmaiiynaplo" (VIH-form essays), "Madach Imre: Az ember trag&iiaj'a," n.p. spiritual sensibilities of the nation are contained within the stones Hungarians tell about themselves," Fodor echoed the poet's criticism of generations of scholars and writers who, in their pursuit of "truth," paid little heed to the subjective insights provided in the oral traditions of the nation. "In the place of epics," Fodor wrote, "they adopted history; in the place of art, they embraced a series of facts." This was not to say, of course, that critical scholarship had nothing to offer in and of itself. Admitting that disciplines like history had much to contribute in the way of context and analytic rigor,Fodo r repeated

Arany's caution that, "though our naive epics are rich in material, we do not want to abandon reason altogether." Hungarian literature and historical consciousness had much to gain fromth e songs and stories of the people, Fodor concluded, but only if they were approached "with a critical eye."60

Fodor's early, school-boy attempts to strike an antinomial balance was evident in his prewar geographical work as well, and in particular in his on-going study of the interconnected geo-botanical features of the Szorenyseg region (the region in which

Karansebes was located). Beginning his study in 1912, Fodor sought from the outset to integrate his own experiences into what he would soon begin to call a geographical

"biography" of the region. Conscious of the importance of historical context, and drawing heavily on his own very personal—and often times even spiritual—observations of the flora, fauna, and geo-morphological features of the region, Fodor attempted to integrate overtly subjective elements into his otherwise rational, scientific examination of the land, ultimately hoping to create a study which would "bring the region to life."61

Fodor, "Olvasmanynaplo" (VH-form essays), "Arany Janos: naiv eposzunk," n.p. 61 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.46/3, "Dr. Fodor Ferenc: Karansebes 6s a Szorenyseg tajfbldrajza tSredek," [fragment] (n.d. 1920?), 1. 161

Such a study was not without important political implications. Well aware of the fact that both Serbians and Romanians laid claim to the region, Fodor's integrated study was an attempt, at least in part, to illustrate that the Szdrenyseg was not just a unified organic totality, but more importantly also a unique geo-historical space, one which, owing to the particular interaction of human and material forces, was possessed of a uniquely Hungarian character. On one important level, then, Fodor's study was motivated by a perceived need to defend the region against the territorial claims of

Hungary's external enemies (a need which became very real after 1920). But this was by no means the only impetus behind his work. Concerned, also, about the perceived decadence and spiritual poverty of the Hungarian people, Fodor's work was offered as a vehicle for the interconnected moral, cultural, and spiritual renewal of the nation (or, at the very least, of the inhabitants of the SzSrenyseg itself). Convinced that decades of positivist teachings and materialist pursuits had alienated individuals from their historic and geographic roots (and ultimately from each other and even themselves), Fodor truly believed that a study such as his—one which established and illuminated the integral connections between spirit and matter—could provide the basis for the regeneration of both nation and self.62

Awarded the Hungarian Geographical Society's Teleki prize in 1919, and later published as a book in 1930, A Szorenyseg tdjrajza (The Szorenyseg Landscape) was just one of many "synthetic" works on political, economic, human, and historical geography

62As he had argued in 1912 in his role as the secretary of the Karansebes Szabad Lyceum, and as he would continue to claim throughout his life, it was the duty of the nation to nurture, rather than simply educate, its people, and in particular its youth. See FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, "A videki Szabad Lyceumok," (1917), n.p. As he would later declare in a speech given in 1943, only through "nurturing" would it be possible "to cultivate spiritual perfection" in bom the individual and the collective, and beyond this to achieve the ultimate goal: "the formation of a more noble spirit." See "A pecsi sziilok iskolajanak megnyitasa: Dr. Fodor Ferenc foigazgato, dr. Gyuris Gizella es Kiihn Szaniszlo fejtettek ki az iskola ceeljat," Dunantul (Fenruary2,1943). 162

that Fodor produced in the interwar period. His output, in fact, was nothing short of

remarkable. Between 1920 and 1939, Fodor published a total of twenty-four books64 and

seventy-four scholarly articles, to which he added roughly sixty "popular" essays,65

numerous book reviews, and close to eighty newspaper articles. Moreover, in addition to

his university teaching and continued involvement in cultural organizations, Fodor also

gave over one hundred public lectures and radio addresses, and served as the editor of a

number of publications, the most important of which was, to Fodor at least, his editorship

ofFiatal Magyarsdg (Young Hungary), a journal dedicated to promoting the ideals of the

Hungarian scouting movement. In each of these projects, Fodor articulated, promoted,

and, to a lesser extent, further developed the synthetic approach that he had adopted as a

young scholar in his formative years leading up to Trianon.

Of Fodor's more "scholarly" nation-building work, we can discern three main

types. The first was focused on the nation itself as an integrated racial, historical, and

territorial unit. Falling under the category of what he called "szulldfbld- 6s honismeret"

(which can be loosely translated as "knowledge of our native land"), this broad synthetic

Given his synthetic approach, it comes as no surprise that he saw each of these four approaches to Hungarian geography in an integrated way. Explaining his interest in historical geography, for example, Fodor wrote: "Since modern geography, and especially human geography, understands the present in terms of past developmental stages, it was only natural that I should be interested in historical geography as well. My work in this field deals especially with the geography of Hungary's borderlands, as well as with the historical sources of our economic geography." See Fodor, "Oneletrajza/Curriculum Vitae," (Pecs, 1940), 4. 64 These publications ranged in both length and focus, not to mention "purpose." Most of the monographs that Fodor published in the interwar period were, in fact, textbooks. Others were obviously polemical in nature, especially those like Magyar nep, Magyar /did, Magyar sors published in 1925. But at least a few of Fodor's interwar works had scholarly merit, at least in light of the prevailing intellectual currents of the day. Of these A Szorenyseg tdjrajza (1930), Egypalocfalu eletrajza (1930), and Magyar fold, Magyar ilet (1937), along with his preliminary work on the Jaszsag region published and presented throughout the 1930s, must be seen as the most important. But more on these works below. For a comprehensive list of Fodor's output (scholarly and otherwise), see MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc&ete" (1962), 51-59. 65 Of these "popular" essays, close to forty were scouting-related. The vast majority of these were published fa Fiatal Magayrsag between 1931 and 1936. 163 approach to Hungarian geography sought to illuminate the connection between "the nation" (nemzet) and "its country" (haza), and beyond this the connection between

"matter" and "spirit."66 Writing of Hungarian geography as if the dismemberment of the nation had not occurred, Fodor stressed that historic, pre-Trianon Hungary was a product of a "symbiotic" relationship between the land and its people, one in which the creative spirit of the Hungarian race "penetrated" the landscape, and in which the land, in turn,

"shaped the character of the people."67 Writing in a short, English-language irredentist pamphlet entitled Hungarian the Land, Hungarian the Race that "the Turanian Magyar element was the first in the [Danube] basin-system...to exploit its economic possibilities, and to form a state," Fodor argued that what connected the Magyar "race" to the land was its active, synthesizing principle. Such a relationship, he concluded, not only transformed and civilized the region, but also transformed the Hungarians themselves. Having been converted from "nomadic shepherds" to "diligent tillers of the soil," the original

"warlike" conquerors of the Carpathian Basin had been "turned into a peaceful people" whose cultural, political, and ultimately moral superiority had long had a positive, stabilizing influence on Central Europe.68

The second type of scholarship that Fodor engaged in during the interwar period followed directly in the path of his "biographical" study of the SzSrenyseg region. In the wake of his successful publication of A Szorenyseg tdjrajza in 1930, Fodor began field work for a similar study of the Jaszsag, a plains region south-east of Budapest that was bisected by the Tisza river. Supported by Teleki, Fodor pursued his project throughout

66 Ferenc Fodor, Magyar fold, Magyar elet (Budapest: A Szent Istvan Tarsulat Kiadasa, 1937), 1 -2. 67 Ferenc Fodor, A sziilofbld- es honismeret konvye (Knowledge of Our Native Land) (Budapest: Kiralyi Magyar Egyetem Nyomda, 1927), 17. 68 Ferenc Fodor, Hungarian the Land, Hungarian the Race (Budapest: V. Hornyanszky, n.d.), 3. the 1930s, spending at least a part of each summer in the field studying the intimate relationship between the people and the land.69 Looking in particular at the agricultural foundations of the region, Fodor's study sought to help chart the future development of the region, one which would see the region develop in a truly Hungarian way.70

Closely related to his regional studies of the Jaszsag and the SzSrenyseg was

Fodor's falukutatds, or "village research." Focused as it was on particular villages, Fodor argued that this third avenue of research represented a much more "immediate," and certainly intimate, application of his synthetic approach to geography.71 His first real attempt at "village research," a sub-field of modern Hungarian geography that he claimed to have pioneered,72 was inspired by his 1928 "discovery" of Nagyvisny6, a "typical peasant hamlet" nestled in the Biikk mountains in north-eastern Hungary. Having come across the village "quite by chance" during a summer scouting trip, Fodor was immediately taken by its apparently timeless and authentic qualities. Claiming that the inhabitants had "absolutely pure Hungarian names," and that they exhibited what he deemed to be "an ancient warrior's consciousness," Fodor felt mat the village would be a perfect "specimen" to study further.73 As he would later write in the introduction to Egy palocfalu eletrajza (Biography of a North-Eastern Hungarian Village) published in 1930,

"I suspected that I would be able to study here the life processes of an ancient Hungarian

Conducted under the auspices of the kozgazdasagtudomanyi kar f&ldrajzi intezt, Fodor's research in Jaszsag also had enthusiastic support from local officials. See MVMDGy H-20/7 28-97.48 "A Jaszsag monografiajanak megfrasaval levelezes" letter fromth e Jasz-Nagykun-Szolnok alispan to the chief administrative officer of Jaszpati and Jaszber^ny, the mayor of Jaszber&ry, and the director of the Szolnok archives, July 18,1931. 70 Fodor presented his research on the Jaszsag to the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1933, and to the Szent Istvan Akad&nia (IV. osztaJy) on April 8,1938. See Fodor, "Oneletrajza," 4. 71 In his curriculum vitae written in 1940, Fodor described his "village research" {falukutatds) work as a "practical application" of his broader "national" (honismeret) work. See Ibid. 7iIbid. 73 Ferenc Fodor, Egy palocfalu iletrajza (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1930), 1. 165 peasant settlement (telepiites). In this I was in no way disappointed."74 Echoing themes already explored and developed in his earlier national and regional studies, Fodor argued mat "the life of the landscape and the village are one." Pointing to the complex historical, geographical, economic, and ultimately spiritual interconnectedness between the people and their village and its immediate surroundings, Fodor concluded that

Nagyvisnyo provided a perfect example of "Hungarianess" as the on-going product of a

"living synthesis."75

For Fodor, this exploration of the authentic, and ultimately productive, roots of

Hungarian identity and subjectivity was of vital importance to the present health and future development of the nation. In fact, Fodor saw it as his moral duty as a scholar to engage in research which would help to heighten the nation's geographical and historical consciousness, and in so doing prepare the Hungarian people for the inevitable struggles which lay ahead. Convinced that the pursuit of Hungarian geography was "a moral obligation," Fodor dedicated his interwar scholarship to the production of a spiritually regenerated citizenry whose love for the land and attachment to each other would provide an integrated front against the nation's many enemies. Writing in Magyar nep, Magyar fold, Magyar sors (Hungarian Nation, Hungarian Land, Hungarian Destiny), Fodor claimed that "the fate of every nation lies in the hands of its men," adding that, "at the unlucky end of our most recent war, we cannot succumb to despair, but rather must be

75 Ibid. This conviction that typical Hungarian villages represented a "living synthesis" between the Hungarian land and its people was also explored in a presentation that Fodor gave to the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1931. Entitled "Az ezredeves falu" (The millennial village), this presentation dealt with his birth-village of Tenke (which had been lost to Romania in 1920), and would later become the basis for Az elnemsodort falu published in 1942. This work was in part a response to Dezso Szabo's populist (and very popular) novel Az elsodortfalu, published just after WWI. 166 prepared to grab hold of the weapons and tools at our disposal, and make ready for a battle against those who oppress us."76

In order to prepare for "the future war," one in which the Hungarian people would strive to "re-conquer" the Carpathian Basin, Fodor argued that it would first be necessary to rejuvenate the core of the nation itself. Taking stock of the decadent and degenerative conditions which had rendered Hungary so weak and unprepared in the pre-Trianon period, Fodor wrote of the need to "rouse the demoralized Hungarian spirit," and "to forge a renewed cultural and emotional totality."77 In order to break free from the

"unreasonable state of siege" imposed on them by the Treaty of Trianon, Hungarians had to first regenerate themselves, and their land. The nation, Fodor argued, had to take advantage of the "silent war" (csOndes Mboru) which gripped the region in the interwar period, using this opportunity to strengthen what had been left to them after their unfortunate dismemberment. In the struggle yet to come, Fodor cautioned, "the worker's tools and the farmer's plough, and with them the scientist's laboratory and his books, will have as much of a role to play as actual military weapons."78 Stressing the need "to embrace work," Fodor wrote of the opportunity that had been handed to Hungarians in the interwar period to strengthen the interconnected spiritual and economic integrity of their dismembered country. It was only on the basis of a morally and materially regenerated nation, he concluded, that the "re-conquest" of Hungary's lost territories would be possible.79

76 Ferenc Fodor, Magyar n&p, Magyar fold, Magyar sors (Budapest: Kiralyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1925), 4. 77 Ibid., 5. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. Fodor's call for Hungarians to "embrace work" is reminiscent of the "organic work" that conservative Polish nationalists embraced in partitioned Poland in the decades leading up to World War I. On this, see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, in particular chapter two. The underlying principles and goals of the synthetic approach were clearly outlined by Fodor in an hour-long speech delivered on national radio on March 25,1930.

Speaking in his capacity as a leading figure in the Hungarian boy scout movement, Fodor began his address by underscoring the continued fragility of modern Hungarian identity, admitting that, despite a concerted, decade-long effort to raise the level of national consciousness throughout the country, the work of conservative nationalists remained incomplete, and that they had come only "halfway" towards their desired goal of creating a "new world" for Hungary and Hungarians.80 Stressing the important relationship between memory and identity, Fodor pointed to the work that lay before them, and emphasized the need to "breathe life" back into a deeply fragmented nation in order to make it whole again.81

Likening his radio address to a virtual campfire, one which linked the individual listeners to the warmth and energy of the national whole, Fodor spoke optimistically of the eventual creation of a "new generation" of Hungarians, a generation which, while moving forward, would neither forget nor forsake their historic, and even God-given, connections to the land and its history. Asking his listeners "to believe in us," Fodor assured Hungarians that this new generation would work to create a more "sympathetic" and "brotherly" society. It was a comforting vision, one that would allow for individuality and national progress while simultaneously reinforcing the timeless, spiritual bonds of the nation itself.

Reporting on canoe- and hiking-trips that he had led in the summer of 1929 to the

"lonely" mountains of north-east Hungary, and to the "desolate, wide-open expanses" of

MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.6/6, Ferenc Fodor "Oregcserk&sz utakon," 1,7. Ibid., 3. the Hungarian Hortobagy, Fodor stated that the goal of these taps to the very "heart" of the nation was twofold. In the first place, participants were expected to learn and grow spiritually from their experience. Escaping the city, scouts were directed not only to reconnect with nature, but also to "scout out, study, and absorb" a more authentic way of

Hungarian life. Echoing the principles of Geisteswissenschaften developed by Dilthey in the nineteenth century, and popularized in post-Trianon Hungary by intellectuals like

Szekfu, Fodor noted how scouts sought to "live through" the objects of their study in order to gain access to the more profound emotional and experiential truths that lay hidden within.

But beyond merely learning, scouts were also expected to teach; to translate the otherwise raw, unselfconscious nationalism of the land and its people into explicitly nationalist terms. There were two intended audiences for this teaching. The first, of course, dwelled in the cities, and was comprised primarily of Hungarian youths who had been "corrupted by the Jewish spirit of modern capitalism," and further infected "by the diseased and degenerate air of cafes and ballrooms."82 The second audience, in turn, consisted of the very people the boy scouts had sought out to learn from in the first place, namely the peasants, shepherds, fishermen, and villagers who themselves were said to live in an authentic Hungarian way. These people, in fact, were so authentic that they had no concept of what it meant to be Hungarian in social, political, or even cultural terms. As Fodor suggested, though it was perhaps admirable that these authentic

Hungarians were in no need of "laws and state structures" to feel somehow connected to

82 Ibid., 1. As Robert Nemes suggests, the ballrooms and dance floors of Budapest had served as a focal point of nationalist struggle in Hungary since the late eighteenth century. See Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest(DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 93-101. See also idem., "The Politics of the Dance Floor: Civil Society and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Hungary," Slavic Review 60/4 (winter 2001): 802-823. the Hungarian land, they were certainly in need of outside guidance to understand the moral and political implications of their Hungarianness. A conservative-nationalist vision of what it meant to be Hungarian, therefore, had to be instilled in the people in the same way as it had to be imposed on the land (by way of maps and geographical discourse, for instance).83

Such a nation-building project, he assured his listeners, promised to be both liberating and empowering for those who engaged in it. Speaking of a thirteen-day canoe trip down the Tisza River, Fodor explained in no uncertain terms of how a civilizing voyage to the nation's core could have a cleansing effect on the soul, and how it could lift the individual out of the misery and decay which seemed to plague the modern world.

Lamenting the fact that degenerate "European curiosities" had begun to litter all but the most remote of Hungarian villages, Fodor noted how, as they began their voyage downriver, they soon began to see "a more beautiful past behind the sad present." "We put our boats into the Tisza," he declared, "and here our scouting spirits lifted a bit. It was as if this world—the river, and the wretched Hortobagy region—was waiting for a new Istvan Sz&henyi! It was as if the river belonged to no one.. .as if we had been sent by the original conquerors into the empty puszta to scout out the land, and to prepare the way for the building of a powerful nation."84

Though obviously a reflection of the nation-building sentiment that permeated

Hungarian political discourse in the interwar period, Fodor's academic and cultural work

83 It is worth noting here that there is evidence in Fodor's that the peasants resisted his colonial-nationalist advances (much in the same way that the land and the people of the Balkans had in the summer of 1917). Having sought out those who "for all intents and purposes do not know which nation (riepstg) they belong to," Fodor found that these authentic Hungarians were not only reluctant to teach, but also to learn. Tight- lipped and distant, the peasants appeared to distrust their boy scout visitors, saying very little, and showing little understanding of Fodor's need to both understand and teach them. They may, indeed, have been sitting around the same campfire, but in reality they were worlds apart. 84 Fodor "6regcserk&z utakon," 7. was also a product of a much deeper need to negotiate modernity itself. The language of

"conquest" that informed the radio address noted above, in fact, spoke to an underlying

desire to control, and perhaps even overcome, what Baudelaire in his classic formulation

identified as "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent" nature of the modern world.85

Outlining a way forward for the nation, Fodor's synthetic, geographical vision also

provided him with a personal road map, one which would help him negotiate the

uncertainty and misery of the present while simultaneously offering him a vehicle for the

intellectual cleansing of his own often-troubled spirit. Much like Plato's Republic,

which can be read both as a political treatise on the ideal state and as an allegory for the

perfection of the human soul,87 it appears as if Fodor's synthetic geographies also

functioned as a symbolic framework for the working out of his own psycho-ontological

engagement with modernity. To borrow one of Steven Aschheim's observations from his

study of the life and work of the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershon Scholem,

nationalist thinking is in many ways the embodiment of a fundamental existential

impulse, or "imperative," one which is premised on a perceived link between "personal transformation" and "the creation of an authentic cultural... totality."88

Cited in Philip Schlesinger, "Europeanness: A New Cultural Battlefield?' 316. 86 As Fodor declared on numerous occasions, the geographer needed to first feel the spirit within himself, and to perceive the balance in nature that he could reproduce in himself. This was, he admitted, an on­ going inner struggle, one which he could only do his "best" at maintaining. For Fodor, the synthetic approach itself, and the scholarship mat he produced, was a way of negotiating modernity, and of trying to achieve the inner peace and ultimately spiritual balance and moral clarity that he sought. 87 "The just man," wrote Plato, "will not differ at all fromth e just city...but will be like it" Plato, Republic, 435b. 88 Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 11. The existential, or psycho-ontological, dimension behind nationalism and nationalist scholarship mat Ascheim suggests goes beyond what Katherine Verderey and other scholars have identified as the "subjective feeling of national belonging" mat the creation and dissemination of nationalist ideologies affords. See Katherine Verderey, "Introduction," in National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe, ed. Katherine Verderey and Ivo Banac (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1995), xv. 171

Beyond the overlapping political and philosophical implications of Fodor's post-

Trianon scholarship, however, there was at least one more obvious factor which motivated him in his production of conservative-nationalist geographies between the wars. Driven as much by personal ambition as he was by both his devotion to the nation

and his quest to resolve the philosophical tensions deriving from modernity, Fodor

engaged in scholarly production as a means of building a better life for himself and for his family. Though I don't doubt for a moment either his academic or his psycho- ontological "sincerity," it would nevertheless be shortsighted to ignore the fact that his dogged pursuit of Hungarian geography was at the same time informed by an overriding

imperative "to make something of himself." Driven from an early age by a desire to

overcome the poverty and "nomadic" wanderings of his youth and early adulthood, Fodor had long sought out the meaning and sense of stability that he believed a typical, middle- class life would bring him.

At first, Fodor's path to bourgeois self-stabilization was tough going. Like so many others struggling to get back on their feet in the wake of the war and the nation's subsequent dismemberment, in the immediate post-Trianon period Fodor and his family lived in great privation and uncertainty, with what little income he made as a university professor being used to replace the "material goods" they were forced to abandon when they fled Romanian-occupied Karansebes in the autumn of 1919.89 But by the mid-

19208, as "confidence returned to the nation," Fodor's situation began to improve.

Having made somewhat of a name for himself as an up-and-coming geographer working under the auspices of Teleki, and well-aware of both the public and political appetite for nationalist scholarship, Fodor began approaching publishers in search of a market for his

89 Fodor, "Emtekezetiil," 10. 172

writing. His big break, at least from a financial point of view, came in 1925, when his

book Magyar nep, Magyar fold, Magyar sors was published by the Royal Hungarian

University Press (Kiralyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda) in Budapest. Encouraged by the

relative success of this passionate book, and impressed by his writing ability, an editor

approached Fodor about the possibility of his writing a series of geography textbooks and

teacher's manuals for the Hungarian school system. Though his relationship with this

particular press would last only five years, Fodor nevertheless managed to publish a total

of seven geography textbooks and two teacher's guides with them. Moreover, in addition

to Magyar nep, Magyar fold, Magyar sors, Fodor also wrote and published A sziildfold-

es honismeret konyve (Knowledge of Our Native Land) in 1927, a 383-page treatise that

outlined, and underscored, the importance of Hungarian "knowledge" of their "native

land."

Fodor's arrangement with the Royal Hungarian University Press proved to be a

profitable one, especially between 1927 and 1930, when nine of the eleven books he

wrote for this press were published. According to an itemized listing of his income for the years 1925-1940, the initial payments and additional royalties he received for these works accounted for roughly a third of his total annual income for the years 1927, 1928,

1929, and 1930.90 This "extra" income provided Fodor with the opportunity he had long been waiting for: to build a family house of his own.91 As luck would have it, the prevailing economic situation in Hungary actually aided him in attaining his dream, even as the nation itself, and indeed the rest of Europe, suffered through the early years of the

90 MVMDGy H-20/1 27-97 1/6, "Osszes keresetiink 1925-1940" (Out Total Income, 1925-1940). Recognizing his own good fortune, he would write in the summer of 1931 that "my work was a blessing." See Fodor, "Emlelcezetul," 10. 173

Great Depression. An acute housing shortage in Budapest prompted the government to offer favorable terms on loans for anyone willing to build a house with extra rooms to rent Fodor, of course, jumped at this opportunity. Paying cash for a lot on Abel Jeno street in Buda in 1929, Fodor began construction on his house in March, 1931. With the

Depression creating conditions in which materials were cheap and labor readily available,

Fodor was able to complete construction on the house by the end of the summer. By the early fall, the family had settled in, with Fodor splitting much of his time in his new home between his study and his backyard garden.92

Fodor's construction project raised a number of eyebrows, not least of which amongst some of his closest colleagues.93 Noting much later in his life that the building of his house in the summer of 1931 marked the beginning of a personal "whispering campaign" against him which would persist into the communist period, Fodor speculated that the murmurings of disapproval which began to circulate in the early 1930s stemmed not just fromjealousy , but also from a perception that he had sought to profit while the nation suffered. Judging from a fourteen-page autobiographical essay entitled

"Emlelcezetul" (Recollections) that he wrote in July 1931—and which he bricked up behind the cornerstone of the house when it was laid at the end of August!—Fodor felt a need to defend himself against these subtle, but nevertheless "malicious," personal attacks. Claiming that "like every other righteous son of the nation.. .1 work for the resurrection of dismembered Hungary," Fodor denied possible allegations that he had

92 Fodor, "Emlelcezetul," 10-12. As if to agree with the optimistic view that every cloud has a silver lining, Fodor wrote: "God has brought us through very sad times, and with his help I have been able to build a house for my family. It has been ten years since the signing of Trianon. We have been inundated by a complete economic collapse. The unemployment is incredible. But it is precisely because of this that the building of the house was as cheap as it was." See Fodor, "Emlekezetfll," 12. 93 It is rumored that his friend and mentor Count Pal Teleki criticized Fodor for building a house that was much too large for a man of his social position. I was unable, however, to find any hard evidence to corroborate this story. 174 pursued nationalist scholarship for personal gain.94 "For me," he wrote, "the main point of my work has always been to place myself at the service of the nation."95

In fact, for Fodor, the house itself was very much a physical manifestation of his intellectual work, and by extension also a meaningful symbol of his dedication to the

Hungarian nation. "Every square centimeter of this ground," he wrote, "every brick [of this house] is the product of my intellectual work [szellemi munkam]."96 Suggesting that he was guided by a clarity of vision in his efforts "to raise the house out of the Hungarian soil," and noting that it had been his intention from the beginning to build the house

"with my own hands, and through my own strength," Fodor stressed the moral, and even racial, "purity" of the very structure itself. Though he admitted that he had been forced to contract out some of the work during the building of the house, he was careful to note that this work went solely to "Christian tradesmen."97 "As God is my witness," he felt compelled to add, "there is nothing in the building of this house mat was dishonorably acquired."98

Indeed, according to Fodor, his domicile had been erected with the most honorable of intentions in mind. Beyond building the house to provide an immediate space for the protection and nurturing of his family, Fodor claimed that he had also been motivated by the desire to create something concrete and meaningful for future generations of his descendants. The house, in fact, was to serve as a veritable repository of memory, an embodiment not only of his productive Hungarian spirit, but also of his

94 Fodor, "Emlekezettil," 12. 95 Ibid., 10. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 7. The inference here is that no work went to Jewish tradesmen, and that no building material was bought from Jewish merchants. 98 Ibid., 11. own identity and family history. As Fodor wrote in the introduction to "Emldkezetul (a document which contained a full seven pages on the history of the family from the seventeenth century to the present), the house was to serve as an indication of "where the family had come from," and, in a hopeful turn of essentialist logic, of "where they were going." Stressing again that it was "for them" that the house was built, Fodor expressed his wish that it might never fall into "foreign hands." If it did, he pleaded with whoever might find his autobiographical time capsule to seek out his descendants, and, at the very least, to pass his short memorial essay on to them.9

But all of this was very much for the future. In the meantime, the house was intended to provide Fodor and his family with a safe and comfortable space in which they could retreat from the hardships and uncertainties of the outside world. As he wrote in

"Emlekezetul": "May God Bless.. .this nation, and this modest house. May it provide shelter in which one can find peace and contentment. Let it be home above all else to everlasting tranquility and calmness."100

From Fragments, the Whole?

Despite his hopes, Fodor's dream home provided at best only partial shelter from the world around him. For one, Fodor's house, and the apparent scholarly success upon which it was built, failed to protect him from the inherently competitive nature of the male-dominated public sphere, and may even have provoked some of the tensions between himself and his colleagues which plagued him throughout his career. Though his scholarly endeavors and cultural work pulled him ever closer into the community of

"ibid., l. 100 Ibid., 13. scholarly, nation-building men that he had long desired to be a part of, Fodor was unable to counter the perception held by some that he was undeserving of the personal and professional life that he had built for himself. As he admitted in "Emlelcezetul," people around him appeared to constantly question his abilities, no matter how hard he worked to get where he was. It was because of his "social position," he wrote, "that I continue to be judged from all sides."101 His scholarly output, not to mention his obvious desire to work his way up the social ladder, was under continuous scrutiny, or so he felt.

Whatever doubts he may have had about this, however, were only confirmed in 1936 when he was challenged to a duel by a "socially superior" colleague over an obscure matter of honor.102 Though the duel was never fought, the challenge itself served as a clear reminder of his inability to fully overcome his socially constructed identity as a poor tailor's son from the Hungarian periphery.

Running parallel with this persistent sense of personal inadequacy was Fodor's enduring anxiety over Hungary's place in an increasingly volatile world. Though he looked desperately for signs that Hungary's position in central European affairs would one day improve, Fodor resigned himself to the fact that the nation's future was unsure and "gloomy." The ambiguous and ultimately indeterminate nature of Hungary's fate was captured clearly in "Emlelcezetul." On the one hand, Fodor struck a rather positive note. Despite the ever-present despair that seemed to grip the nation, Fodor claimed that he could already see "the dawning of a bright new future for the nation." "Important" figures like Lord Rothermere in England, he noted, were actively promoting Hungary's

101 Ibid., 10. 102 The details of this duel are sketchy, in large part because Fodor and his family have themselves remained silent on it. The only record I found of the unfought duel comes fromver y formal letters exchanged between the "seconds" involved in this affair. 177 calls for the revision of Trianon. Closer to home, Mussolini had expressed "confidence" in Hungary's political and territorial future in the Carpathian Basin. Socialism, in turn, appeared to be on the decline in Hungary, which was a sign that the nation as a whole

"had not lost hold of its faith entirely." Voicing his support, moreover, for the present regime, Fodor claimed: "As a nation, we believe in Miklos Horthy's heroism, and in his government. We believe in prime minister Istvan Bethlen's talents, and in Albert

Apponyi's infinite wisdom. We also believe in the youth of our nation, who are in search of a new path to the future."103

Yet, despite this optimism, Fodor couldn't help but question it all. "The

Hungarian world is still very dark, and sad," he argued, adding that, "we have few true leaders, and of those we do have, it is still not sure if they are truly prophets, or just false prophets."104 Underscoring the insecurity of Hungary's present situation, Fodor wrote:

"It is still not certain whether or not we will be swallowed up by bolshevism, the eastern peril. It is still not certain, moreover, the extent to which our nation has been undermined by the sickness that continues to grip this land, and by the impoverished spirit of the masses which erupts from time to time like a miserable pus."105 Hungarian men, he complained, continued to display little honor and integrity in their work, a fact which left

Hungary exposed and vulnerable to its enemies, both foreign and domestic. Deferring in the end to forces beyond his control, Fodor concluded that "Hungary shares in a broader

Fodor, "EmleTcezetiil," 12. Apponyi was then acting as Hungary's representative to the League of Nations. European, and indeed global, misery.. ..No one knows what the future will bring; utter

destruction [vegromlas], or resurrection [feltamadas]?"106

The multiple, overlapping sources of Fodor's lingering sense of despair are

clearly reflected in a letter written to his wife in the summer of 1934. Having stayed

behind in Budapest with their son Zoli while she and their daughter "Baba" were

vacationing at Lake Balaton, Fodor wrote to let her know how he was faring in her

absence. Reassuring Vira that he was doing his best to retreat temporarily from his

stressful life as an oft-embattled public intellectual, Fodor wrote:

There's not much new here. We spend the entire day at home, and go nowhere. Yesterday, however, we went to the movies, because Zoli really wanted to go. By day I either work in the garden or at my writing desk, or else read a little. It is a rather boring way to entertain myself, but at least I can relax. And yet, I still can't seem to relax entirely, something seems always to be unsettling to me, though I can't myself put a finger on it. If I could perhaps manage to rent out the apartment, maybe that would settle me down a bit. Lots of people have been by to see it, but no one has taken it so far.. ..Somehow, I suppose, it will all resolve itself. I often try to convince myself that it is not worth worrying about everything, but to no avail. I cannot help but worry, since my desire is that everything is good for you all.. ..The constant concern before me is to provide all of life's necessities for our family. I can only trust that God will continue to help us, as He has done in the past.107

Fodor's seemingly endless list of problems and anxieties, however, may have been too lengthy for even God to fix. Having noted his concern over the apartment, for example, Fodor continued by going on at length about the sad state of his beloved roses, lamenting the fact that they were suffering from an unidentified—and thus uncontrollable—blight which had infected not only his garden, but also gardens throughout the neighborhood. Concern over the health of his roses then gave way to

Ibid., 13. FP, letter from Ferenc to Vira, Budapest, July 27,1934. Fodor's concern over Vira's health (something which dominated much of their existing correspondence, and which appears to have been an on-going source of tension between them). Remarking on her "virtual silence" about the precarious state of her mental and physical well-being, Fodor reminded her to relax as much as possible, pleading with her as he did so to keep him informed as to how "successful" she had been at "re-composing herself."

Almost as an afterthought, Fodor concluded the letter with a brief, but anxious, reference to the political situation in Austria, commenting on the recent assassination of the country's right-wing authoritarian leader Engelbert Dollfuss by Nazi agents. Noting how the Hungarian newspapers had failed to report fully on the immense upheaval, Fodor wrote:

I'm sure you've heard about the Austrian situation. The affair has brought us all into a state of complete anxiety, and we listened to the worrying news on the radio until midnight... .Here there has been nothing but pure war rumors, and nobody really knows what is going to come out of mis affair.108

The unresolved nature of Fodor's letter provides, I think, some important insight into the circular, and ultimately destabilizing, dynamic of identity formation in which

Fodor appears to have been trapped. Having retreated into the familiar middle-class spaces of house and garden, Fodor sought solace in his overlapping performances of the middle-class father and the scholarly male, only to find that these constitutive elements of his conservative-nationalist sense of self proved insufficient in his on-going quest for inner peace and fulfillment. The obvious sense of emotional disquiet that he experienced because of this, moreover, was only amplified by his concern over his garden, his wife, and the political unrest in neighboring Austria. Though his faith in God may have

108 FP, letter from Ferenc to Vira, Budapest, July 27, 1934. 180 provided him with the faint hope that he might, one day, break the vicious cycle in which he was caught, his own admission that the source of his anxiety was in itself not fully identifiable or comprehensible suggests a simultaneous realization that there was, perhaps, no clear way out. Indeed, despite the personal, political, and professional opportunities that the post-Trianon period may have afforded him, Fodor appears to have been incapable of fully overcoming the forces of dissolution which continued to haunt him.

And yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, Fodor refused to abandon the elusive pursuit of stability and completion which had driven him throughout his adult life. As

Hungary was plunged into yet another war, and as his personal disappointments reached new heights, Fodor increasingly sought refuge in constructions of nation and self which had proved in the past to be incapable of protecting him frombot h the destabilizing forces of modernity, and the unsettling events of history. Unwilling, and perhaps unable, to break free fromth e inertia which seems to have held him prisoner, Fodor retreated ever deeper into fantasies which themselves may have been the greatest source of his enduring anxiety. Chapter Four On The Brink of Being Forgotten: Marginalization, War, and the Retreat into Memory, 1940-1945

"Several times I have found it necessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties, and leave everything behind in order to begin life anew elsewhere; I have been a pilgrim along more roads than I care to remember. From saying good-bye so often my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others, which, lacking a geography to sink into, have taken hold in my memory. But be careful! Minotaurs lie in wait in the labyrinths of memory." Isabel Allende, My Invented Country (2003)

Ferenc Fodor spent bis entire adult life in search of "roots," and thus also "self."

From his early years as a gymnasium student in Szatmar (or Satu Mare, the ethnically- mixed eastern Hungarian city where he came of age), to the height of his academic career in Budapest in the interwar period, Fodor was driven by an on-going search for social, cultural, political and psycho-ontological grounding, and for the interconnected sense of stability and meaning that this idealized state of being promised.

On one level, Fodor had been largely successful in this endeavour during the interwar period. With a personal ambition matched only by an unwavering sense of duty to his family and the Hungarian nation, Fodor had employed his considerable talents as a writer and educator to build an academic career which by the early 1930s appeared solid and secure. In ten short years, Fodor had managed to "rescue" himself and his family from an impoverished, and, from his point of view, insignificant life on the periphery by making a name for himself at the nation's centre. With a house of his own to call home and raise his family in, and with a growing reputation in academic, social, and political circles, Fodor had, on the surface at least, finally "made it."

As I have already suggested, however, this interconnected sense of security and accomplishment was tentative at best. In fact, even at the apparent height of his

181 182 academic and material success in the early 1930s, Fodor's achievements, and beyond this the very core of his identity as a conservative-nationalist intellectual, were under constant threat. Indeed, the closer he came to finally achieving the sense of unity, harmony, and completion that he so desired, the more problematic, and even unachievable, such goals seemed to become. Whether stemming from an unidentified source within himself, or emerging out of sources external to him, deterritorializing forces of all sorts rose up to undermine his quintessentially modern quest for rootedness and meaning.

Fodor's response to these overlapping crises was to reinvest hi—indeed, retreat into—the very constructions of nation and self that were themselves under siege. The more the world fell apart around him, in fact, the more he thought and acted according to the conservative-nationalist paradigm which he had devoted his adult life to constructing, disseminating, and ultimately enacting in and for himself. This apparent inertia, one which bypassed creative alternatives in favour of familiar discourses and performative behaviour, constituted a two-fold strategy of self re-formation. On the discursive level,

Fodor continued to address problems of fragmentation and dissolution in the present by revisiting fantasies of a past totality while simultaneously holding out hope for the possibility of rehabilitation and reassembly in the future. On the performative level, his apparent withdrawal into well-established practices and scholarly pursuits served not only as a source of great comfort, but also as a visible, and thus very public, means of reaffirming his identity as a conservative-nationalist intellectual.

This multifaceted process of psycho-ontological stabilization, one which saw

Fodor retreat ever deeper into interconnected constructions and performances of nation and self, reached new heights between 1940 and 1945, a period of personal and national 183 crisis which only served to heighten Fodor's ever-present anxiety over existential questions both present and future. Beginning in January 1940 with his transfer to the provincial city of P6cs to act as school district superintendent (an appointment which lasted until 1943), and ending with the Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944-45, the war years were a time of great uncertainty and sadness for himself, his family, and the nation. It was, however, also a period of remarkable scholarly and autobiographical production; a period of emotional and psychological strain which nevertheless saw Fodor redouble his discursive and performative efforts to negotiate and maintain what historian

Thomas Ort has called an "ironclad" identity and sense of self.1 The immediacy of various crises during the war years, coupled with poignant examples of the fragility of the nation as an imagined construct, underlined for Fodor the importance of his intersecting personal and national projects. Products of a very real existential anguish, these interconnected projects aimed at articulating and, more importantly, preserving the overlapping memories of an integral nation and integrated self.

In keeping with his output during the interwar period, Fodor wrote a great deal between 1940 and 1945; work which included both published and unpublished geographical studies, as well as a number of incomplete, but by no means inconsequential, autobiographical fragments. Indeed, beyond publishing two full-length studies on regional Hungarian geography and compiling a lengthy manuscript on the

"geo-psychological" foundations of Hungarian identity, Fodor began work on no less than four intimately related autobiographical projects aimed at documenting various aspects of his life history. Taken together, these projects provide valuable insight into

1 See Thomas Ort, "Men Without Qualities: Karel Capek and His Generation, 1911-1938" (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2005). Fodor's attempt to seek solace and meaning in the interconnected discourses of nation and self.

This chapter approaches this remarkable body of wartime work in a more or less chronological fashion. Starting with his scholarly and autobiographical production in

Pecs between 1940 and 1943, the first section examines how his ever-growing melancholy and introspective frame of mind during the early years of the war found expression in a number of different projects. Drawing on letters written by Fodor to his family during this very difficult period, this section draws attention to the more immediate, every-day sources of his evolving anguish and unease, and further traces his attempts to alleviate his angst and misery by retreating into his writing.

The chapter continues by showing how these interconnected projects aimed at the simultaneous remembering of nation and self reached new levels as the war intensified.

The second section looks primarily at a lengthy, unpublished scholarly manuscript written by Fodor during the Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944-45, while the third section focuses on a series of scrapbooks that Fodor began assembling sometime between the summer of 1941 and the end of the war. In much the same way as his unpublished geographical study sought to articulate the "geo-psychological" foundation of an integrated nation, Fodor's scrapbooks sought to render the various episodes and aspects of his life into a coherent, organic whole. Comprised of photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and other documents, the scrapbooks represented an attempt on Fodor's part to construct a detailed, though highly selective, narrative of his life, one in which he presented himself as a devoted conservative-nationalist scholar faithful to God, his family, and, most importantly, his country. 185

Uprooted: Memory and the Melancholy ofMarginatization

It was sometime in the middle of October 1939 that Fodor learned through a third party that Balint Homati, the Minister of Culture and Education, wanted to appoint him as school district superintendent in Pecs, a city roughly two hundred kilometres south of

Budapest in the heart of Hungary's Swabian, or ethnic German, region. As Fodor would later write, concern over the agitation being stirred up by the German population in the

Pecs area had reached such a point that the government required a "strong-handed, thoroughly trustworthy Hungarian personality" to "shoulder the burden of Hungarian cultural politics" in the region.2 The fact that his superiors turned to him was, on one level at least, a source of pride for Fodor. Yet, given that he would have to move to Pecs and give up his university professorship in Budapest, this appointment was less of an honour than it was an imposition, and a deep disappointment. Though he attempted to play up the importance of his work from a national point of view, Fodor no doubt regarded the transfer as a demotion of sorts, an unmistakable step backwards in his career.3 However, pressured to accept the position by his long-time mentor Count Pal

Teleki (who at the time was serving as prime minister), Fodor resigned himself to his fate. Indeed, it was not as if he really had any choice in the matter. In the end he quite simply felt duty-bound to accept the appointment.

Fodor arrived to assume his duties in Pecs on January 3,1940. The very next day he wrote his first letter home to Vira, who had remained in Budapest with their pregnant daughter. Despite the feelings of marginalization he undoubtedly harboured, and the

2 See Vira's account in MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete" (1962), 24; and Fodor's account in MTAKK Ms 10.73M./1-2, Ferenc Fodor, "A magyar 1& fSldrajza," 1. 3 The move to P6cs certainly must have evoked memories of his move to Karansebes in 1911. Reflecting in December 1944 on his transfer to P6cs four years earlier, Fodor referred to the region as a "Hungarian hinterland." See Fodor, "A magyar 1& fSldrajza," 1. 186 upheaval and uncertainty that his new position had created for himself and his family, the tone of Fodor's letter was remarkably upbeat, and even showed signs of an initial willingness on his part to accept and reconcile himself to his fate.

Beginning with a description of his one-room apartment in the dormitory of a local technical school, Fodor declared that, though the apartment was admittedly small, and "slightly dismal," it would certainly do under the circumstances. "Besides," he added, "most of my time will be spent in the office anyway. I have already begun my work, and though I have a great deal of difficult issues to deal with, I am sure that all will go well." Noting that "the office staff is thoroughly well-disposed and eager," he was confident that he would be able to carry out his official duties efficiently and successfully. Such a state of affairs, he implied, augured well for the future, especially if he found it necessary to remain in Pecs indefinitely. Though he asked his wife not to worry, and was careful to reassure her that, "with God's help, I will soon find myself back in Budapest," he was quick to add "if not, then this is a really beautiful, relaxing, and quiet place for us to live. My district is truly beautiful, and it would certainly be possible to spend here what remains of our lives."4

In spite of his initial optimism, however, Fodor was neither able, nor evidently even willing, to completely ignore or conceal the profound sense of alienation, loneliness, and despair that he felt here on what he perceived to be the margins of the nation.

Already in his second letter home, dated January 6, 1940, Fodor began to give voice to his rapidly emerging melancholy. Noting that his "empty, dismal room" was less

4 FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, January 4,1940. In a letter written two days later, he reiterates these thoughts, noting that "apart fromth e solitude, P£cs is a nice city." Besides, they wouldn't be entirely isolated from their social circle, "these last couple of days," he writes, "I have met a number of old friendsher e in P6cs. If God decides that we must spend a longer time here, we won't be entirely alone." See FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, January 6,1940. 187

favourable and more depressing—even oppressive—than he had originally indicated, he

confessed to Vira that he was truly lonely, especially at night. Missing the comforts of

home, and desperate to create a more warm and inviting space to retreat into at the end of the day, he admitted that he "couldn't help buying an electric kettle, a tea cup, and a

spoon," immediately justifying the expenditure by explaining that "at least now with my tea the world won't seem such a desolate and uninviting place." Not much later in the

letter, however, he indicated that a small gesture like this was hardly enough to alleviate his misery. Lamenting his newfound solitary existence, he wrote: "Sometimes, as I leave the office, I can scarcely believe that I am not going home, but instead have to come back to such an empty room. But it does no good to complain, since this is something I'll just have to bear."5

No matter how hard Fodor tried to resign himself to his new life, his desperate attempts at stoic acceptance were hardly consistent. Wavering almost manically between emotional and psychological extremes, Fodor returned time and again to the sense of emptiness and sorrow which permeated every aspect of his daily life in Pecs. Though he would often remind Vira of the need to be strong—of the need "to endure" and persevere6—he was never able to fully suppress his own misery. An excerpt from a letter

5 FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, January 6,1940. 6 Fodor never missed a chance, it seems, to remind Vira of the importance of these modern, middle-class virtues of inner fortitude and perseverance in the face of crisis and personal hardship. In a letter dated January 7,1940, for example, he reminded Vira that "there is so much we are forced to endure, and now this too. Perhaps it will not last so long." Later, on January 26 of the same year, he would write: "It pains me [nagyon faj a lelkem] that, given my situation, I can only send a letter to you. It is absolutely uncertain when I will get my rail pass. I would have loved so much to be at home with you now, since I worry about you a great deal. Apart from this, it is going to be so difficult to be alone here this Sunday. But I don't even want to talk about things that simply have to be endured. It's easier to bear such hardships without complaining." One of the most poignant expressions of Fodor's belief in the importance of these virtues came in a letter written in anticipation of the fifth(?) anniversary of the death of their son. Having outlined his plans to say a requiem for Zoli at the chapel in Pecs, Fodor advised his wife: "Just try and stay composed and don't cry very much, since crying won't help him [Zoli], only prayers will...Crying won't help us [either]. It would be better if we remain strong, especially since it is possible that out children 188 written on January 28, 1940 illustrates the melancholic depths to which he was so prone to sinking:

Dear Vira, My entire day was so difficult for me. It pains me so deeply that I am not able to go home. The work days pass somehow, but the weekends are so incredibly difficult to bear. Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, I was completely out of sorts [nyugtalan], though the uneasiness passed somehow. But today has been really hard. I was at mass this morning, and then spent half an hour walking with two professors in the falling snow. At noon I went to visit the bishop, but by the afternoon I hardly knew what to do with myself. In the evening I went to the movies, so that I wouldn't be so terribly alone. I saw Zihaly's(?) film. It was wonderful, and you should go see it as soon as possible. And now, after a sad supper, I am writing to you. But I don't want to complain. Why should I make both our situations worse?7

As in so many other letters, the misery he expressed to his wife bordered openly on self-pity. Though he was by no means unsympathetic to the emotional toll that his move to Pecs had already taken on his family, and especially Vira, Fodor was not averse to asking for sympathy from others, even from those who themselves were suffering because of him. Was he not, after all, the one who was alone, separated from everything he had worked so hard to achieve; from everything and everyone he held so dear and meaningful? As he wrote in one letter:

I worry about you all so much, especially you Mother [he is referring here to Vira]. You were so anxious when I left, and I am concerned that you won't be able to calm down, and relax. But believe me when I say that this situation is more difficult for me than for you, since you at least are at home.8

Admittedly, the dramatic sense of loneliness and homesickness that Fodor conveyed in this and other letters may have constituted a conscious effort on his part to allay, or at

[their daughter, son-in-law, and grandson] will be in need of our strength. We must also think of them." In the conclusion of the letter he added, for emphasis: "I ask of you one more time, dear, to be strong." 7 FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, January 28,1940. 8 FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, January 6,1940. 189

least deflect, his wife's apparent sadness, anxiety, and disappointment by casting himself

as a victim of circumstance suffering even greater hardships than her own. But, based on

his letters, there can be no doubt that the sadness, desperation, and pain that he felt was

very real, and was only amplified by a feeling of exile that his transfer to this provincial

city most certainly represented.

Despite the constant reminders to himself and to his wife that he and his family

would have to be brave, and trust that, through the grace of God and his own hard work,

he would soon be able to return to Budapest, Fodor could not shake the overwhelming

feeling that he had been overlooked and marginalized by his social and political allies in

Budapest, nor could he assuage his associated fears that he stood to be forgotten, not only

by the nation and his erstwhile friends and colleagues in the capital, but also by his

family. A letter written to Vira only five days after his arrival in Pecs offers some

important insight into Fodor's state of mind, and into his almost compulsive desire to be

remembered. Modifying the first few lines of a poem written in 1844 by the Hungarian

poet Sandor Petofi, Fodor ended his letter with the following:

Do you think of me, now and then? Do you speak after supper, In intimate and warm conversation, About what your father is doing now?9

Fodor's referencing of Petofi's poem speaks volumes about the pervasiveness of his own

feelings of isolation and marginalization in Pexs. Though there was of course no danger

9 FP, Ferenc to Vira, P

of being forgotten entirely by his immediate family, there was a sense—one no doubt borne of self-pity more than anything else—that he was being neglected even by those closest to him. As he would write in one letter: "I had thought there would have been at least a short letter in the package you just sent, but there was nothing. I really would have liked to know what's going on at home. Please write and reassure me as soon as you can."10

In the midst of all the hardship and misery, however, Fodor held out hope that his

"exile" in Pecs would be short-lived. Clinging to the belief that he was far too valuable as a pedagogue and scholar to be used indefinitely in such a peripheral social, cultural, and political capacity, he comforted himself with thoughts of returning to Budapest to resume his scholarly, nation-building work. Fodor's optimism peaked in the summer of

1940 when he learned that the chair of Human Geography at the University of Budapest had recently become vacant. On May 27th, Fodor discussed the possibility of being appointed to the position with B&lint Homan. Homan, according to Fodor's account of the meeting, responded positively, assuring Fodor that "I'll appoint you if you apply."11

Teleki was also supportive of Fodor's decision to apply, and like Homan apparently reassured him that he would get the job if he applied.12

Buoyed by the reassurances of both men, Fodor immediately began preparing his application, ever conscious in the six-page autobiographical essay that was to serve as his

10 FP, Ferenc to the family, Pecs, January 21,1941. This perception was repeated, often subtly, in a number of his letters. Feeling left out of the loop, Fodor would often plead with his wife for more information about her and the family. On January 26,1940, for example, Fodor wrote: "You haven't written about yourself, or you condition. Please write so that I will stop worrying about you so much." Only two days later, he added: "This week is certainly going to be difficult for me, since I have been away from you now two weeks. I feel so terribly alone! I worry about you too, since I didn't know what was wrong with you when I left. You were sick, and you haven't written anything about it since then." 11 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/2 , Fodor Ferenc, "Sletem esemenyei (1887-1959)," (n.d. 1959?), 34. 12 See Ibid., 35. curriculum vitae of casting himself as a patriotic Hungarian scholar whose life's work

had been dedicated to furthering the cultural, moral, and spiritual development of the

nation. Though Fodor admitted to his wife in a letter dated May 31,1940 that the

application process itself entailed "a great deal of work," he was quite obviously

energized, and even relieved, by the prospect of returning home to such a prestigious

teaching position. Acknowledging the loneliness that they had both been feeling, Fodor

wrote: "perhaps the difficult situation won't last much longer. I myself truly believe that

I will be able to move back to Budapest sooner than you think." He concluded the letter

with the same sense of optimism, asking her "not to worry," adding that "you'll see that

everything will be fine, that there won't be any problem. You just need to hold out a bit

longer."13

On January 2, 1941, however, Fodor received the shocking news that his

application had failed. Homan had broken his promise, appointing one of Fodor's former

students, Tibor Mendol, to the position instead.14 The rejection was a bitter pill to

swallow, especially since Fodor had been assured by both Homan and Teleki that the

appointment would be his. The feeling that he had been betrayed only served to heighten his sense of estrangement from everything he had achieved prior to the war in his personal and professional life. Years later, Fodor would write: 'The year began with the terrible disappointment that the chair had been given to someone else, despite Homan's

13 FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, May 31,1940. This optimism was echoed in a letter written twelve days earlier, perhaps in response to news that the chair had become vacant In it he asks Vira not to worry, that God will help them in these dark times, concluding that "I believe that we will pass through these times peacefully." FP, Ferenc to Vira, Pecs, May 19,1940. 14 Ironically, Fodor had made a point in his curriculum vitae of singling out MendSl as one of his more successful former students. Two other former students he singled out were Bela Bulla and Laszlo Kadar. See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/1, Fodor Ferenc, "Oneletrajza/Curriculum Vitae," (Pecs, 1940), 5(?). and Teleki's assurances. Now the prospects of returning to Budapest seemed dismal

indeed."15

Beyond heightening his own interconnected sense of rnarginalization and

melancholy, the failure to be appointed to the position in Budapest only amplified the

tension that already existed between Fodor and his wife. Vira, in fact, had been

pressuring Fodor to move the two of them permanently to Pecs.16 Reluctant to give up

his beloved house and his hopes of working again in Budapest, Fodor had resisted,

reassuring his wife time and again that everything would work itself out. The

announcement of Mendol's appointment at the beginning of 1941 only brought this

question to a finer point. Fodor, at least for the time being, was willing to wait it out, and

resisted his wife's pleas for a more permanent solution to their difficult situation.

Acknowledging the stress that their separation was causing both of them, he begged her

to be patient, and to remain strong. "Those who are unable to wait things out stand to be

overwhelmed," he wrote to his family only weeks after receiving the disappointing news,

"and will fall to pieces from the pressures of life itself. I write this for Mother, hoping

she will take this to heart as I have. Do not fear, my darling, everything will soon return to normal. I just ask you to hold out for a little longer." "We must be patient," he

concluded, "because if we are not, only grief and misery will come from it."17

Like their rapidly dwindling optimism, however, patience seemed to be in short

supply, with the tension between them only growing in intensity. On February 5, 1941,

Fodor, it seems, could stand it no longer. In part blaming her, and in part the situation itself, Fodor wrote:

15 "Eletem esemenyei," 35. 16 Ibid., 35 17 FP, Ferenc to his family, Pecs, January 21,1941. Dear Vira! I have not been able to calm down since returning here [to Pecs]. Your anxiety is constantly on my mind. We cannot go on like this any longer! Somehow we must compose ourselves, and wait for better times.... Believe me, my dear, when I say that my thoughts are only of home, and that I won't be able to relax until I see that you are able to endure things a bit easier. If I come home on Saturday, I am sure that I will return again to Pecs with a much relieved spirit. It is because of this that I miss home so much. I can't bear this tension much longer.

Despite his assertions that he could not bear much more, Fodor remained in his

position in Pecs until February 1943, when he was finally successful in getting himself

transferred back to Budapest to act as the school district superintendent for the Pest

region.18 In the meantime, however, time passed slowly, and the sadness and

accompanying anxiety and sense of helplessness generated by his separation fromVir a

and the rest of his family only intensified. His one saving grace was the solace that he

found in his work, and in his writing. An excerpt from a letter written in January 1941

shows how important his scholarly and pedagogical work was, if at the very least as a mechanical process which would help him pass the time. Writing to his entire family,

Fodor revealed that:

It was incredibly painful for me not to be able to come home on Sunday. I'm so worried because of the sickness that is going around. I worry especially about little Jozsika [Fodor's infant grandson], so much so that one night I even dreamed about him. A terrifying bull had climbed onto the balcony, and thrusting his head through the window, began to eat Jozsika, and didn't stop until I threw a bucket of water at it. So please just take good care of him, so that nothing bad happens to my darling grandson.

18 For a chronology of the events leading up tohi s transfer from Pecs to Budapest, see "Eletem esemenyei, 38. Despite feeling in December, 1942, that "any hope of returning to Budapest...seems hopeless," he began exploring the possibility of being reassigned to the Pest region in early January, 1943. On January 16, he heard from Kalman Kosa that his petition looked favourable, and then, on January 22, was told"th e good news" by Vira herself that he would soon be transferred. I am lucky, though, that I have so much work right now. With so much to do, not much time is left to me to fret about you all. It's just at night that I am particularly apprehensive and restless, and sleep poorly because of it. I have been left practically alone in the office these days, since Masszi is out inspecting schools, Lahmann is laid up with an illness, and Paraszkai is off in the country. There is so much work to do, and it is always more difficult when I am left alone to deal with it. I owe it to the Grace of God that I am healthy now and can bear the work. I was so sad here on Sunday, and really missed home. Szaniszlo Kuhn was kind enough to invite me to lunch, and then again to dinner, so as to make my lonely existence here more bearable. The rest of the day I worked. Athenaeum [a Budapest publishing house] has accepted my Bihar book19 for publication, and I certainly have a lot of work still to do on it in order to get it ready for printing. I am really happy, though, that this will be published, since it is one of my favourite works. Now if I could just get my book on Jaszsag published someday. Someday it will all come together, I just need to bide my time.20

The renewed interest shown by a publisher in Budapest in a monograph originally written in the early 1930s certainly helped him "bide his time," and this for a number of reasons. On a very immediate level, the offer to publish Az elnemsodort falu (his so- called "Bihar book," which translates roughly into "The Not-Forsaken Village") provided him with a meaningful distraction fromth e day to day grind of his official duties as a school district superintendent, and from his otherwise lonely existence in Pecs. More than this, however, it offered Fodor a modicum of salvation by giving him back a shred of his dignity. Though marginalized geographically and professionally, he was nevertheless being given a chance to remain academically relevant. This relevancy, of course, was not just fundamental to his scholarly, nation-building sense of self, but also fuelled his admittedly much-diminished hopes that he might be asked to return one day to

Budapest. With a new book in print, there was hope that he would not be overlooked for

He is referring here to Az elnemsodort falu, a manuscript written in the early 1930s, but not published until 1942. 20 FP, Ferenc to his family, P£cs, January 21,1941. 195

long, and that he might even be approached with offers to publish more (his book on

Hungary's Jaszsag region, for example). The extra income generated from the sale of this and other books, moreover, was also welcomed, and ultimately helped to stabilize the

family's financial situation in otherwise uncertain economic times.

Fodor's enthusiastic re-engagement in nationalist geography was also significant

—even symbolic—from a personal, and fundamentally psycho-ontological point of view.

Focused as it was on the place and region of his birth, Az elnemsodort falu served as a meaningful discursive forum within which he could explore and establish his national, familial, and personal roots. With both the nation and self in crisis, and with his own identity in question, the narrative offered at least a temporary respite from deeply existential concerns.

The significance of this introspective, and explicitly personal scholarly project, in fact, was underscored by a parallel autobiographical project which, though it had been initiated just prior to World War I, was revisited by Fodor with renewed vigour only days after the announcement that he would not be awarded the chair of Human Geography in

Budapest.22 Motivated by his continued marginalization, by his age, and by the ever­ growing fear that he, like his home town and indeed the nation itself, ran the risk of being forgotten by history, Fodor immersed himself in the writing of what he called his

r "ElettOrtenet" (Life History), a project which began by rooting the history of his family in the history of nation, and then continued by grounding his own life story within that of

21 For the financial significance, see "Eletem esemenyei." 22 This is a project that he began in the 1910s while in Karansebes, and to which he returned in 1930. Part of this research got written into the document "Emlekezetul" (1931), which was men quite literally built into his new house in Budapest. his ancestors. Though Fodor did not mention this ambitious project in any of his surviving correspondence, it is obvious fromth e handwritten text of this unpublished document that it was profoundly meaningful and important to him, not only because it offered an escape from the miseries of the present, but also because it partially fulfilled his sense of duty to the future. Begun in Pecs on January 8,1941, and written in the form of journal entries, Fodor's "ElettQrtenet" provides an intimate portrait of an introspective man writing for the benefit of both himself and his descendants. The sentimental language of Fodor's opening entry is worth quoting here at length:

January 8, 1941 God has destined that, of this mortal human existence, I should live already more than half a century. But now the sun is setting on my life. And just as the setting sun looks back from its celestial orbit onto an illuminated landscape, so too does a man in the sunset of his life look more to the past than to the future. So it is that I now look much to the past [sokat nezek a multba]. Not just during the quieter moments of the day, but even more so at night, in my dreams. It is remarkable how much I remember. The further back I look, the more I see, and the more clearly I see it. My childhood lives vividly within my soul, and I happily look back upon those days. I see myself, as a child, starting out from the very bottom onto the path of life. And I sense the miraculous guiding hand of God, who to this moment leads me forward. Perhaps now he has led me to a point where I am able to see and reflect on the path that He in His infinite wisdom has chosen for me.24

Made clearer by the passage of time, Fodor's own memories amounted to nothing less than a revelation, at least to him. It was as if in his "old age" God Himself had

In a recent study of autobiography as a historical source and practice, Jeremy Popkin alludes to the importance of the genealogical aspect to the construction of autobiographical narratives. Summarizing a view put forward by Paul Ricoeur in the third volume of his massive study Time and Narration, Popkin writes: "The succession of generations is the mechanism by which human beings achieve their first consciousness of the passage of time. As they become aware of their place in their family, children learn that they are part of a group that existed before they were born and that they will help continue into the future. Older family members pass memories along to newer generations, thus creating a first level of historical [and in Fodor's case also national] consciousness." See Jeremy Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 40. 24 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/3, Ferenc Fodor, "Elettertenet," (Peas and Budapest,1941-1950), 1. 197 granted him privileged insight into his own past; as if he had been elevated to the heights of what the American philosopher Thomas Nagel has called "the view from Nowhere;"25 that one, objective, detached point from which Fodor could observe and understand his own life as an organic totality—a totality which was meaningful not only for himself, but for others. Underlining the significance of this insight, Fodor continued: "I would do well to look back upon and examine the path my life has taken. This I can do for my own sake, and also for the sake of those who might in the future want to use what I write to remember me."26 Acknowledging the link between memory and identity, and anticipating his descendants' search for an historically and genealogically rooted sense of self, he added:

I know so well how much it pains sometimes mat the past has cloaked in obscurity the lives, fortunes, and struggles of my ancestors. In the absence of memory, I know very little about them [and thus about myself). I hardly know where they come from, and where I come from. It is my wish that those who come after me know more. Perhaps my descendants, two or three generations from now, will gladly want to read about who their predecessors were. Maybe they will want to know where they came from. Thus, besides for myself, it is for them that I write, and remember, so long as I am still able to do so."27

Given that he believed his ancestors were "in all probability the direct descendants of the original conquerors of the Carpathian Basin" in the ninth century

A.D., there was certainly much to remember.28 Fodor, however, was confident at this stage of his life that he was up to the task of tracing his family's roots back to the very founding of the nation, and was obviously not deterred by the fact that Belfenyer, the village he identified as the family's ancient "nest" (f£szek), did not appear in written

See Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Fodor, "ElettSrtenet," 2. Ibid., 4. Emphasis in the original. records until the thirteenth century, or that the Fodor family name did not appear in the records of the Tenke-B61fenyer region until the sixteenth century. Drawing on nearly three decades of genealogical, historical, ethnographical, and geographical research,

Fodor worked hard to construct a coherent—though certainly highly imaginative— narrative of his family's "long" history in this eastern region of the former Kingdom of

Hungary.

Fodor's lineage, as imagined as it may have been, was a proud and important one, and helped legitimate his own racially-charged pronouncements that he was descendant from a truly authentic Hungarian family. Though he was unable to provide definitive proof, Fodor seemed quite comfortable in his assertion that his ancestors were

"exclusively Hungarian," in spite of his later qualification that, "at most, there may be some Pecheneg blood in our family."29 Given that these early allies of the Magyars not only assimilated but also served as fiercely loyal defenders of the nation's eastern periphery, this claim of partial Pecheneg descent was less a problem than it was a source of nationalistic and even racial pride. By denying Jewish, Gypsy, Saxon, or Romanian

"contamination" of the Fodor bloodline, and by further implying the presence of his ancestors in Pecheneg villages important to the defence of the realm, Fodor was able to reinforce his own self-image as a racially and spiritually pure Hungarian patriot devoted to preserving the integrity of the nation.

The interrelated notions of racial purity and patriotic defence of the nation were two main narrative themes that not only ran through his "Elettort6net," but, as we shall see, ultimately got written into later geographical works. A third important theme that he introduced and speculated at length upon was his family's noble heritage. Noting the existence of records fromth e late medieval period which listed a number of Fodor families as landed gentry, Fodor surmised that it was only as a result of the Turkish occupation that they lost this status, and were forced to become serfs of the bishop of

Varad. Though the Fodor name was one of the most common in the region, Fodor was nevertheless confident that he himself was descendant of one of these pre-invasion gentry families.30

Like his racial and patriotic credentials, this "proof of noble descent was fundamental to his conservative-nationalist identity. As elsewhere in Europe, an aristocratic ethos had been key to the social, cultural, and political development of the conservative-nationalist movement in Hungary, so much so that the period of Admiral

Miklos Horthy's regency between the wars came to be described as "neo-Baroque."

Fodor himself had been deeply influenced by this traditionalist ethos, and perhaps even longed to be included in the ranks of the true nobility. His lifelong obsession with

Hungarian aristocrats like Teleki, and upper-class Englishmen like Sir Baden Powell and

Lord Rothemere, reflected this long-held desire, while his constant return in this and other autobiographical projects to aristocratic themes spoke to his need to reinforce, and perhaps even re-establish, meaningful links to the nobility. Such links had become increasingly important to Fodor since the mid-1930s, as other conservative-nationalist scholars began to question his socio-political legitimacy alongside his scholarly integrity, and even attempted to "drive a wedge" between himself and Teleki.32 Though his claim to noble roots in this handwritten life narrative may not have been very effective in

30 Ibid., 10. 31 Hie term "neo-baroque" was first used by Gyula Szekfii in Hdrom nemzedek is ami utana kovetkezik (Budapest: KiraMyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934). See in particular the chapter entitled "Ne6barokk- tarsadalom" (Neo-Baroque Society), pp. 407-21. 32 Vira Fenczik Fodorn6, "Fodor Ferenc elete," 27. combating his adversaries in the present, it would, he undoubtedly hoped, provide a

useful basis for later generations in their attempts not only to establish a conservative-

nationalist identity for themselves, but also to rehabilitate him in light of past

"injustices."

Like Az elnemsodort falu, Fodor's "Elettortenet" was profoundly significant from

a personal, familial, and even political point of view, and thus consumed a great deal of

his free time during 1941. The parallel significance of these interconnected projects

became increasingly clear as the year wore on. Overwhelmed by the feeling that his

entire world was gradually falling apart, and with his anxiety over personal, familial, and

national matters only growing worse, Fodor retreated as much as was possible into the

solace of meaningful scholarly and autobiographical work. Much of his anxiety hinged

on the intensification of the war. Though the conservative-nationalist stalwart Count Pal

Teleki was still prime minister, at least at the beginning of the year, there were a number

of radical right-wing voices clamouring for a more aggressive alliance with Hitler. By the spring of 1941, in fact, war with Yugoslavia seemed imminent, especially after the

instalment of an anti-German, anti-Hungarian government in Belgrade on March 27.

Only two days later, at a Fiatal Magyarsag (Young Hungarian) meeting, an "incredibly pessimistic and depressed" Teleki gave a two-hour informal discussion, one at which

Fodor was present, and which no doubt underscored Hungary's delicate geopolitical position while highlighting the dangers of entering the war as an overt ally of Nazi

Germany.33 Less than a week later, Teleki himself was dead, having taken his own life in response, it was said, to Hungary's planned involvement in the invasion of Yugoslavia.

Fodor, "Eletem esemenyei," 35. 201

Teleki's suicide had a profound impact on Fodor.34 Though there was every indication that they had begun to drift apart in the late 1930s, and though he had failed to ensure Fodor's professorial appointment earlier in the year, Fodor nevertheless continued to look to Teleki for guidance, support, and inspiration, not just academic and professional, but also moral and spiritual. A key figure in Fodor's rise through the scholarly ranks in the interwar period, and long a cornerstone of Fodor's identity, Teleki meant a great deal to him on a number of different levels. His death, therefore, left a gapping hole in Fodor's sense of self, from both a practical and symbolic point of view.

With Teleki gone, Fodor undoubtedly found himself more isolated, and more vulnerable.

The symbolism of Teleki's death, at least from Fodor's perspective, was underlined by a series of events which followed rapidly in the wake of his passing. As if a sombre portent of things to come, Teleki's suicide seemed to usher in a changed reality, both for Hungary and for Fodor himself. Though admittedly understated in his later recounting of this period of national crisis and personal sorrow, there can be no doubt that, in Fodor's mind, one tragedy was linked to the other. Fodor's brief description of the memorial mass held on April 5 in Teleki's honour, for example, overlapped with his memory of the first appearance of German troops in Budapest on that very same day, while his recounting of the actual funeral two days later foregrounded the wailing of air raid sirens which interrupted the service. Even his son-in-law's mobilization for the anticipated war with Yugoslavia found its way into the narrative, coinciding as it did so with the funeral held on April 7.35

34 Fodor heard about Teleki's death on April 3ri, and later described it as "incredibly crushing and overwhelming [rendkivul lesujt]." See Ibid., 35. 35 See Ibid., 35-6. 202

The anxiety associated with Hungary's brief war against Yugoslavia in April

1941 was revisited by Fodor and his family only months later when Hungary joined the

Germans on June 27 in their war against the Soviet Union. Hungarian cities had now become a target of Russian air raids, something which worried Fodor to no end, especially once bombs began to fall on Budapest. His son-in-law's deployment on the

Russian front was also a source of perpetual concern and unease, as was the growing agitation amongst right-wing ethnic Germans within his school district. Rising tension within the country, in fact, only made more work for Fodor, to the extent that he would later write that "my official duties in Pecs became unbelievably exhausting."36

By January 1942 Fodor's workload had become unbearable, so much so that he was forced to scale back work on a number of personal projects, both scholarly and autobiographical. Though he would continue to give public lectures on topics ranging from political geography, to modern pedagogy, to the life of Teleki, and would even manage to publish his book on Jaszsag in the spring of 1943, he had practically no time to develop new projects, at least not in any meaningful or productive way. He was even forced to temporarily abandon work on his "FJettSrtenet." Feeling the need five years later to explain to his future readers why he had stopped work on the project, Fodor wrote: "My writing ended in January 1942. There were very serious reasons for this. In

1942, my work as school district superintendent in Pecs increased drastically, mostly because of the school difficulties caused by the Germans. I hardly had time to think let alone write."37

36 Ibid., 36. 37 "ElettSrtenet," entry dated October 9,1947. Between January 1941 and January 1942, Fodor wrote a total of 29 pages, the bulk of them dealing with the history of his family and his childhood. Between 1947 203

The fundamental importance of both his scholarly and autobiographical work was not lost on Fodor, however, not even after his return to Budapest in 1943. Though prohibited from writing on account of his official duties, there is evidence to suggest that he continued to collect material for national and personal projects alike, endeavours which took on new meaning in light of the continued escalation of the war, and, ultimately, Hungary's defeat at the hands of the Soviets in 1945.38 Indeed, as we shall see, Fodor's retreat into his work, and thus also into memory, only intensified as the world around him teetered on the brink of total collapse.

Remembering the Nation: The Consolation of Geography in a City Under Siege

Fodor's "exile" in Pecs effectively came to an end on January 22,1943, when he heard

"the good news" from Vira that he would soon be appointed the new school district superintendent for the Pest region.39 It was, by all accounts, a rather sudden development. Fodor, after all, had only begun to re-explore the possibility of being reassigned to Budapest on January 5, and though he had heard word from Kalman Kosa on January 16 that "things were looking favourable with respect to his possible transfer," he was understandably reluctant to begin packing his bags. On this occasion, however, he would not be disappointed, and within a matter of weeks he was installed in his new office.40

and 1950, he would add another 84 pages, bringing the total number to 113. In the end, Fodor did not complete the project. His life narrative, in fact, only goes up toth e mid-1920s. 38 In "A magyar tet fSldrajza," he notes on the page listing his sources that he compiled some information, or, at least, the biography, in 1942. There is also evidence to suggest that he was collecting documents and photos for his scrapbooks during this period as well. 39 "Eletem esem&ryei," 38. 40 Ibid. It was, obviously, a "great relief for Fodor to return to the capital, to be

reunited with his family and friends, and to have an opportunity to get his career back on

track. A series of honours and successes in the first half of 1943, in fact, gave the

impression of a triumphant return. Fodor's triumphs came in quick succession. On

February 15, Fodor officially took up his position as school district superintendent for the

Pest region. The reports in the newspapers of his new appointment were enthusiastic.42

Three days later, he was elected head of the youth branch of the Hungarian Red Cross, a

position of some national import which drew public attention to a "lifetime" of nation-

building work.43 Only two-and-a-half weeks after this, Fodor's book on Jaszsag was

published to favourable reviews. Later, in May, it was announced that A Jaszsag

eletrajza (A Biography of Jaszsag) had won the Serban prize from the Hungarian

Academy of Science.44 Though this was neither Fodor's first nor last prize fromth e

Academy, it was no doubt the sweetest.

Yet, no matter what respite his reassignment to Budapest and subsequent triumphs may have offered, his introspective ruminations over the deeply interconnected future of both nation and self did not lift. Indeed, a host of hostile and overtly destructive forces, both internal and external, threatened to overwhelm the nation, and him with it. On the home front,th e political ascendancy of radical right-wing factions during the war contributed to rising tensions throughout the country, and even in Budapest itself, a city

41 Ibid., 40. Summarizing the year 1943, Fodor wrote: "I finally, at long last, found a position back in Budapest. It was a great relief [nagy megnyugv&s]." 42 See FP, scrapbooks (newspaper article collection, 1940-44). 43 See FP, scrapbooks. 44 "Eletem esem&ryei," 39. 205

which Fodor found to be as socially and politically volatile as Pecs.45 "The growing

inhumanity of the war," he would write in December 1944, only served to amplify "the

social hell" that had come to define life in the capital and surrounding region, creating

conditions which "time and again prevented me from expanding on the scope of my pre­ war work."46 As it had been in Pecs, Fodor's pedagogical work in Budapest brought him

face to face with the internal fragmentation of the nation, and even suggested that the

conservative nation-building programs that he had been involved with during the interwar period had not been effective enough to prevent against accelerated moral, cultural, and political decay. Whether in P£cs or in Budapest, Fodor witnessed the internal weaknesses of the nation firsthand, having seen it manifested amongst students, teachers, and parents, not to mention amongst society at large. Recognizing the need to reinforce, nurture, and even create a "correct" sense of Hungarianness in the youth of the nation,

Fodor redoubled his pedagogical efforts over the course of the war, no matter the resistance he was facing. As he stated bluntly in a public address given in P£cs in

February 1943, "a new world is emerging, and so we must prepare our children for this world."47 Failure to do so, he argued, would result not only in increased political fragmentation, but also further spiritual degeneration, and beyond this the complete moral collapse of the nation.

Fodor's concern over Hungary's internal stability—whether this was understood in social, cultural, political, or existential terms—was only exacerbated by the growing

45 Of his experiences in P£cs, he wrote: "It was there, in the incandescent ground of the nationalities, that I lived Hungarian political geography, not in theory, but in the course of every day events." Fodor, "A magyar 16t foidrajza" 1. 46 Ibid. 47 FP, scrapbooks, "A pecsi szul6k iskolajanak megnyitasa: Dr. Foror Ferenc f6igazat6, dr. Gyuris Gizella es Kiihn Szaniszl6 fejtettek ki az iskola celjat," Dunant&l, (February 2,1943). realization that Germany, and Hungary with it, was on the verge of losing the war. Like many Hungarians, Fodor worried as news of German and Hungarian military disasters poured in fromth e Russian front, and could only guess at what might become of a nation

squeezed between the advancing Soviets bent on total victory, and the retreating remnants of a once-mighty German army ordered to fight to the bitter end.48

Hungary itself became a battleground in 1944, with the fighting reaching the outskirts of Budapest by late autumn of the same year. Though defeat seemed inevitable,

Hitler nevertheless ordered his forces to make a final stand in Budapest against the Red

Army, thus sealing the fate of the city, and with it the nation.49 Barricaded alongside

German and Hungarian troops within Hitler's so-called "Festung Budapest," the people of the Hungarian capital found themselves caught in the middle of a prolonged siege whose duration and ferocity were surpassed only by the sieges of Leningrad and

Stalingrad earlier in the war. Beginning with the successful encirclement of the city in early November 1944, the Siege of Budapest began in earnest on December 25, and did not lift until April 1945 when the Soviets finally managed to crush the last pockets of

-SO German resistance.

For the people of Budapest, life during this colossal struggle for their city was a living nightmare. Deprived of food, fuel, and other basic necessities, and forced into

48 See "Eletem esem&ryei." 49 As Fodor writes in his unpublished diary of the Siege of Budapest, Hungary had virtually escaped Allied bombs until April 1944, when Germany occupied a recalcitrant Hungary in response to the Horthy government's attempts to negotiate a separate peace with the allies, and their simultaneous reluctance to fully implement the Final Solution, especially in Budapest. See MVMDGy H-20/1 1/7, Fodor Ferenc, "Buda ostromanak naploja, 1944-45," 1. 50 For secondary accounts of the Siege, see Peter Gosztonyi, Legiveszely Budapest (Air-raid Alert, Budapest) (Budapest: Nepszava Kiado, 1989); and idem., A magyar honve'dseg a mdsodik vUdghdboruban (The Hungarian Army in the Second World War) (Budapest: M6ra Konyvkiado, 1992); and GySrgy Mat6, Budapest Szabad (Budapest is Free) (Budapest: Eur6pa K6nyvkiad6,1980). See also Krisztian Ungvary, Battle for Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II, trans. Ladislaus L6b (London: LB. Tauris, 2003). 207 cramped cellars and other hiding places, the trapped citizens of Budapest were subjected to months of constant bombardment and, as the noose tightened around the city, ferocious street fighting.

Yet, as the city quite literally burned and disintegrated around them, life for the citizens of Budapest, such as it was, went on. Amidst the confusion of bombs and "the infernal screams of the machines of war,"51 people struggled not only to survive, but also to maintain a sense of normalcy in otherwise trying, chaotic, and dangerous times. For

Fodor, the need to remain grounded was particularly acute. It is in this light that Fodor devoted considerable time during the siege to his writing. Huddled in the cellar which served as a bomb shelter for his family, Fodor poured over the notes he had brought with him for safe keeping, papers which were "streaked with soot" and "stained" with his

"own blood."52 Between December 25,1944 and the end of January 1945, Fodor completed the first draft of "A magyar let foldrajza" (The Geography of Hungarian

Being53), a monumental, 500-page study which, because of its ambitious scope and

"ground-breaking" methodological approach, was considered by Fodor to be perhaps his most important work. Consumed by the fear that the war could quite possibly break the

Hungarian people altogether, Fodor dedicated himself to reasserting, and thus preserving, the life and legacy of the thousand-year-old Kingdom of St. Stephen. Sifting through the ashes of war and the dust of a crumbling nation, Fodor sought to recover the fundamental

51 Fodor, "A magyar let foidrajza," 4. 52 Ibid., 2. 53 The Hungarian noun "let" can be translated into English as either "being" or "existence." I have chosen the former translation, as I mink it captures more accurately the deeply ontological—and even Heideggerean—aspects of mis work. essence of the country and its people, and to remind his fellow countrymen and women what it meant to be "Hungarian."

In many ways, "A magyar let foldrajza" was very much a continuation of his earlier scholarship. As in his interwar work, Fodor was committed to the memory of a unified, pre-Trianon national body, an organic whole which had sustained and nurtured the Hungarian people for an entire millennium. Similar to the "biographical" approach that he had pioneered in his Szorenys6g work, and which he had adhered to in his published geographies up to the publication of Az elnemsordort falu and A Jdszsdg iletrajza earlier in the war, Fodor once again was sure to carefully outline the geographical features of greater Hungary which gave the nation its life and unique character. He emphasized, also, Hungary's conservative, Christian heritage, and stressed the nation's pivotal historical role as a bastion of morality and civilization in Central

Europe. In short, Fodor revisited and attempted to revive a conservative vision of the nation, one which had been attacked and seriously undermined by the ambitious geopolitical ideas of the radical-right, and was in danger of being buried and entirely forgotten by history itself.

Despite this undeniable continuity, however, Fodor's wartime creation was beset by a sense of urgency and even desperation which was absent from his earlier popular and scholarly writing, something which thus set it apart fromth e considerable body of work which preceded it. Cloaked in rather ominous overtones, there was a real sense in

"A magyar let foldrajza" that all was quite possibly lost. Hungary, of course, had been threatened in the past, but never had the nation been so close, at least in the modern era, to being torn apart completely by a combination of internal and external forces. With the 209 conservative-nationalists in decline, the fascist Arrow Cross party in power, and the communists waiting anxiously in the wings, Fodor gave voice to a widespread fear that existing internal tensions would divide and ultimately destroy the nation by war's end.

The fact that the Soviet Army was close to capturing Budapest only served to heighten

Fodor's anxiety, and certainly cast doubt on the question of a continued Hungarian existence. Whereas throughout the interwar period conservative Hungarian nationalists like Fodor were able to address the problem of Hungarian existence by playing on the prevailing sense of injustice engendered by the Treaty of Trianon, as well as the hope that the terms of the much-despised treaty would eventually be revised, there was a blatant and obviously painful realization in this work that, having sided with the Nazis in an ideological struggle that was then being waged to the death on the streets of Budapest,

Hungary could expect no quarter from its adversaries.

Spectres of the possible death of the nation, in fact, not to mention a continued preoccupation with his own mortality and personal legacy, haunted him as he submerged himself in his scholarly work during the lengthy siege of the city. In the foreword to "A magyar let fbldrajza," Fodor openly expressed his fears over the precariousness of

Hungary's continued existence. Though he perhaps played up the drama of the situation in order to underline the long-term political, ideological, and psychological importance of his work, there can be no doubt that Fodor was deeply affected by the geopolitical gravity of the deadly struggle being waged around him. Hinting, perhaps, at the apparent hopelessness, and even absurdity, of Hungary's situation, he wrote:

.. .in these the darkest nights of an already lengthy Hungarian tragedy, fundamental questions of Hungarian existence (and non­ existence) have been brought before us, questions of what it means to be Hungarian. What and who are the Hungarian people today? Will there be, can there be, a Hungarian people to talk about after our complete internal collapse, during these days of partisan politics, when every political belief has crumbled into dust? Now the question is not simply about politics, but about Hungarian existence. It is about where, when, how, and to what extent the Hungarian people are rooted in the Hungarian soil, and about whether or not we will be uprooted by the apocalyptic storm that is now raging around the world. Do the Hungarian people even belong to this land, and the land to the Hungarian peopled4

It was for Fodor a simple but fundamental question, one which had plagued

Hungarians for generations. "This book," he stated, "was born after a long period of spiritual and intellectual gestation; and after much Hungarian pain and suffering."55

Though "conceived in a painful way,"56 Fodor nevertheless felt that he could provide answers which would help to pacify the heightened anxiety surrounding questions concerning the existence of the nation both past and future. By identifying the geographical, historical, and ultimately psychological roots of Hungarian "being," and by tracing their persistence and evolution over time, he hoped to lay out a road map for a future that was consciously, and meaningfully, linked to the past.

Noting that "the nation is undeniably rooted in the soil of the homeland," Fodor began his study by outlining the geographical features of the Carpathian Basin which provided historic Hungary not only with the material foundation for a thousand years of historical development, but also with its "natural" frontiers, borders which had been violated on different occasions throughout history, and most recently by the terms imposed by the Treaty of Trianon. These geographical features served as a physical backdrop against which Hungarian history was shaped, while simultaneously providing the material resources through which a unique Hungarian identity was fashioned. As in

Fodor, "A magyar let ftjldrajza," 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2. 211

his earlier scholarship, however, Fodor was careful to avoid the trap of geographical

fatalism, noting that, over the course of history, the Hungarian people had had as much of

an influence on the land as the land did on the people. This synthetic, and inherently

reciprocal, relationship was what tied the land, people, and nation together. Evolving

over time, it was what unified Hungary as a distinct and unmistakably organic totality.

In order to capture this complex, ever-evolving dynamic, Fodor proceeded by

carefully layering his study chronologically, dividing the history of the nation into

distinct, though intimately connected, periods. Much like a geologist or archaeologist

analyzing a geological formation or archaeological site one strata at a time, Fodor traced the historical and geographical development of the nation, showing not only how

successive periods in Hungarian history gave the nation a distinctive cultural and territorial shape, but also how an ethnic Hungarian demographic core evolved over time, and managed to retain a unique and thoroughly Magyar identity in the face of multiple challenges and existential crises.

There is, of course, nothing particularly novel about arranging a geo-historical study chronologically. Fodor, however, does it in such a deliberate way that it makes the reader take notice. A product, no doubt, of his heighten state of existential angst, Fodor's study sought to eradicate both the historical and geographical sources of territorial, cultural, and moral fragmentation that had plagued Hungary in the past by concealing them under layers of text and images which emphasized continuity rather than rupture.

To draw on the insights and language of the French postmodern theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the layers or strata of Fodor's study were very much "paranoid" constructions; desperate attempts to code, or rather "over-code," his data in such a way as 212 to render it unassailable from every possible perspective. Noting the importance of organic totalities (or, rather, the illusion of such totalities) to modern thinking, Deleuze and Guattari characterize the type of layering or stratification used by modernists like

Fodor as desperate and ultimately futile attempts to render fragments into meaningful wholes. On the end goal of this territorializing project, they write that layers, or strata,

"consist of giving form to matter, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy....Strata are acts of capture, they are like 'black holes' or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach."57

This desire to give form to matter by "imprisoning intensities" and "locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy" is reflected not only in the narrative structure of Fodor's study, but also in his vision of the work as a totality in and of itself. Realizing after the war that he would probably not see the manuscript published in his lifetime, Fodor left instructions concerning its future publication. In a note written in 1949 and attached to the first page of the manuscript, Fodor wrote that "in the event that this manuscript might be published, it would not be possible to shorten the text, since it is an organic whole [mert szerves egesz]."58 Ostensibly perfect and complete in its geo-historical account of the roots and evolution of Hungarian "being," the omission of even one word would destabilize the text itself, and thus compromise the cultural, moral, and ultimately spiritual teachings contained within.

The roughly sixty hand-drawn maps included with the final draft of "A magyar let foldrajza" also speak to Fodor's attempt to render a symbolic image of Hungary as a complete and organic whole. Though he conceded in his publication instructions that

57 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans., Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 40. 58 Fodor, "A magyar \€t fbldrajza," n.p. "less important maps.. .can be omitted," he no doubt recognized the invaluable role that maps, supplemented by no less than 30 graphs, would play in his efforts to depict the totality of Hungary as a territorial, ethnic, and cultural unit59 Much like the interconnected strata of the text itself, the maps and graphs intersected with one another, each one adding a new and slightly different layer to the next, again in an obvious attempt to "imprison" and render meaningful otherwise unconnected, and even arbitrary, data and natural phenomena.

Perhaps even more than the text itself, the maps clearly reflected his totalizing ambitions. One set of nine maps is particularly noteworthy in this respect.60 Arranged together on one page, these maps depict the historical development of Hungary between

1038 and 1946. Cast against the outline of Hungary's "historic" pre-Trianon borders,

Fodor traces the evolution of the nation's unified, though constantly shifting, geo-body, using solid black (Deleuze and Guattari's black holes?) to shade in the areas of the map controlled by the Magyars at critical stages of their history.61 Starting in 1038, the year that marked the end of the reign of Saint Stephen (Hungary's first Christian king who converted and unified an otherwise fragmented alignment of pagan Hungarians), Fodor shows how, though the nation both expanded and atrophied over time, it finally came to fully occupy and control its natural and historical frontiers by the turn of the twentieth century, only to lose this again in 1920. Key to these maps, however, is not so much the shape or size of the Hungarian geo-body, but rather its continuity over time. Though the nation had been threatened at various points in its history, and in particular in the

59 Ibid. Having conceded that some lesser maps may be left out of the published version, Fodor added: "Which ones, only an expert can decide, if I myself don't live to see the day my work can be published." 60 Ibid., map 61. 61 This notion of the nation's "geo-body" comes fromThongcha i WinichakuFs ground-breaking study Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). seventeenth century (as a result of the Ottoman occupation) and in the twentieth century

(as a result of Trianon), a fundamental core had survived, one which guaranteed the continued survival of the nation and its people.

Much like the scholarly and autobiographical projects that he engaged in while in

Pecs, then, Fodor's retreat into "A magyar let fSldrajza" during the Siege of Budapest offered at least a semblance of comfort by providing him with a task that not only distracted him at least temporarily from the horrors of the Soviet onslaught, but also partially satisfied his need for discursive reassurances over the historical and ontological foundations of the nation, and beyond this the fundamental connection between nation and self. Out of the devastation of war, a devastation which was at once material, intellectual, ideological, social, and political, arose the desire—indeed the need—to rebuild not only a shattered nation, but a shattered self as well.

It was in light of this that Fodor suggested that what he was offering was not simply geography in the conventional sense, but rather geo-psychology (geopszichika).62

Though Fodor himself found it difficult to fully articulate the connection between geography and psychology, he was hopeful that a clearer understanding of the synthetic, and thus reciprocal, relationship between the land and its people would help foster a stronger sense of Hungarianness, one which would be resilient enough to survive national defeat, and even a prolonged and hostile Soviet occupation.

Though not at all confident about how his attempt at geo-psychology would be read and judged by the scholarly community, Fodor was nevertheless hopeful that it would provide at least a ray of hope for those Hungarians who, like him, were intent on

Ibid., 5. 215

rescuing the nation, and ultimately themselves and their descendants, fromtota l oblivion.

As he intimated in the foreword to his study:

I do not know whether what I offer here is science, and I am even less certain that, if it is a separate science, there will be a distinct place for it. Will it even be accepted by the rigorous scientific community? But I'm not even interested in all of this. It's not scientists who I address, but rather people like me. Maybe we see things in a different way, maybe it will help us through the darkest hours.63

Fodor's geographical work offered him much in the way of spiritual, moral, and

intellectual consolation. Recent events had uprooted the nation, disconnecting it from a

clear sense of its past, and raising questions as to what it meant to be Hungarian. "A magyar let fbldrajza" was thus intended to address such anxious questions, helping to reconnect the "people to the land, and the land to the people." Beyond this, it helped him reconnect, if only imaginatively, to a much broader, integrated community of like-spirited people, and to the geographical, historical, psychological, and, in the end, moral sources of his own self.

This sense of solace or consolation was indeed an important motivating factor behind his work. There were, however, other deeply interconnected factors at play.

Perhaps most obvious was the political, and even opportunistic, dimension which compelled him to write. Referring in the foreword to the radicalization of Hungarian foreign policy, and with it Hungarian political geography, since the late 1930s, Fodor was careful to distance his work as much as possible from the right-wing, imperialistic model which had dominated Hungarian geographical thinking during the war, and which found

Ibid., 2. This sentiment is repeated later in the foreword, on page 5. He writes: "It is quite possible that the road I am embarking upon has never been followed before. But perhaps it will later, by someone who will be able to travel farther man I have been able to." To this he adds: "It is possible that I have written something that will not receive academic recognition, and that it will be seen merely as a journalistic assessment of the relationship between the Hungarian land and the Hungarian nation." its ultimate expression after October 1944 in the expansionist fantasies of the Hungarian

Arrow Cross party.64 Though Fodor insisted that his study transcended mere politics,

there can be no doubt that he sought to cleanse himself politically and ideologically; to

wash his hands of any involvement he may have had, either directly or indirectly, in

cultivating and disseminating geographical knowledge which could in any way be

construed as being excessively right-wing or fascistic. For Fodor, as for many other

conservative-nationalist Hungarian intellectuals, the events of 1944-45 prompted a widespread reassessment of the "misguided" decisions, policies, and even mindset which had driven Hungary into the arms of the German fascists.65 Hungarians, he argued, had

shamelessly allowed themselves to be seduced by the "lies" of Nazi propaganda, and would quite likely pay a high price for this tragic mistake. Geographers themselves, he added, were ultimately culpable of misappropriating and distorting scientific "truths" in the pursuit of overly-ambitious, and ultimately disastrous, imperialist goals.66 They had naively welcomed the grand promises of German geopolitics, "a dictatorial pseudo- science" which came to have a profound influence on Hungarian thinking over the course of the war. By 1945 the so-called "geopolitical truths" upon which this pseudo-science was based "lay in the dust, and beside it a humiliated (porig al&zva) Hungarian people as well."67

On the expansion fantasies of the Arrow Cross, see Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 272-73. 65 Fodor, of course, was not the only Hungarian intellectual to experience this desperate sense of urgency, and his soul-searching, introspective analysis of Hungary's postwar condition shared much in common with the responses, both public and private, of many other Hungarian intellectuals. See, for example, Mi a magyar? (What is Hungarian?), a collection of essays printed shortly after the war in which some of Hungary's leading interwar scholars critically assess the nation's past and its future in a much-changed Europe. 66 Fodor, "A magyar let fSldrajza," 2. 67 Ibid., 2. 217

Anticipating the possibility that he would soon be called to account for his

apparent public support of this radical right-wingshif t in Hungarian geography during the

war, Fodor argued pre-emptively that he had been effectively "forced" to accede to the

changes as early as 1939, in particular after the diehard conservative Teleki resigned his

chair in geography to return to politics only months before the outbreak of war. Fodor

was still lecturing at the Agricultural University in Budapest at the time, and was thus

affected by the curriculum changes that followed in the wake of Teleki's departure from the faculty. As he wrote in the foreword to "A magyar let foldrajza" he had little choice

in the matter, at least so long as he wanted to keep hopes for his career alive. Writing of the unfortunate shift, Fodor noted:

"When Pal Teleki again took up the position of prime minister in the early spring of 1939, my duties at the Faculty of Economics at the Agricultural University in Budapest, along with everyone else's, came to include lectures on political geography. The basic principles [of the faculty] became at that time those of political geography."68

Given the negative impact that this misguided political and geographical thinking had had on the development of Hungarian foreign policy during the war, Fodor sought to expose and address how and where Hungarian geographers had gone wrong. For Fodor, the answer was quite simple. Hungarian intellectuals had allowed themselves to be enchanted and misled by a geographical vision contaminated by a "foreign, German, imperialistic spirit," one which "concealed itself behind a scientific disguise, prostituting science to justify and achieve its true goals."69 The solution to this problem, however, was not to abandon political geography itself as a mode of thinking, or as a conceptual tool for the rebuilding of the nation in the postwar period. One of the main aims behind

68 Ibid., 1. 218

"A magyar let fbldrajza," in fact, was to rethink the bastardized, and ultimately destructive, form of political geography that had paved the way for the imperialistically- motivated models of geopolitics which had held sway during the war, and to replace it with a more genuine, and distinctly positive and constructive, expression of political geography.

As Fodor was careful to point out, political geography, and even geopolitics, was not necessarily a negative or inherently aggressive form of geographical thinking, at least not from his perspective. Though in German hands the original application of geography to politics by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897 was "dangerously formulated" and had led to a racially motivated form of imperialism, there were other inherently positive conceptualizations of this idea. Pointing to the work of the great Swedish legal historian

Rudolf Kjellen, and in particular to his book DerStaat als Lebensform published in 1917,

Fodor stressed the difference between Kjellen's "healthy" understanding of the nation- state as a living, and ever-evolving organism, and the German tendency to employ such a concept in order to legitimate the expansionist quest for Lebensrawn. Whereas supporters of Great German imperialism such as Karl Haushofer and the Austrian geographer Robert Sieger relied on the tenets of political geography and geopolitics to

"ferret out geographic possibilities in the setting of political and economic goals," Fodor insisted on a return to Kjellen's teachings as a means of deepening the Hungarian understanding of the "complicated" synthetic relationship between state and society, and between the land and its people.70 Arguing against the expansion of Hungary beyond its

70 See Rudolf Kjellen, Der Staat als Lebensform (Leipzig, 1917). What Fodor does not address here is the fact that, as Ratzel's student, Kjellen built upon his teacher's "organic state theory," and in so doing would coin the term "geopolitics." In his praise for Kjelten, Fodor also ignores the role of Kjelten's ideas in the development of German geopolitik. For a study of geopolitics written at about the same time as Fodor's "natural," pre-Trianon frontiers,Fodo r called for a revitalized approach to Hungarian geography, one which stressed the rediscovery of the nation's ancient and authentic roots instead of calling for the realization of its so-called "imperial destiny" within the

Danubian Basin.71

This re-conceptualization and purification of political geography was fundamental not only to the development of his notion of "geo-psychology," but also to the re- articulation, and even reconstruction, of an authentic Hungarian identity. Such a project, he insisted, required a purely Hungarian approach to geographical, and by extension geopolitical, problems. Another of the main aims behind his study, therefore, was to write a "purely Hungarian political geography," one which was "independent from," and thus no longer tainted by, "German spirit and method."72 Having been contaminated by an aggressive, and ultimately deluded geopolitical paradigm very much influenced by the

German concept of Lebensraum, the entire discipline of political geography in Hungary needed to be purified and completely rethought, especially in light of recent national disasters.

Such a rethinking, Fodor suggested, would ultimately provide a necessary blue print for the moral and cultural rebuilding of the nation after the war. Indeed, beyond the psycho-ontological and political functions of his treatise on the geographical roots of

"The Geography of Hungarian Being," see Johannes Mattern, Geopolitik: Doctrine of National Self- Sufficiency and Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942). For a study on Karl Haushofer, see Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1984). It is worth pointing out that the Austrian geographer Robert Sieger, here criticized by Fodor, had originally been a practitioner of human geography, the very same geographical sub-discipline that Fodor sought a chair in at the beginning of the war. 71 Fodor, "A magyar 1& feldrajza," 5. Of course, Fodor conveniently overlooks the fact that the reestablishment of the Hungarian nation within its pre-Trianon boundaries would, as in the pre-Trianon period itself, require cultural, political, and economic policies of an inherently colonial and imperialistic sort. 72 Ibid. He adds: "Since the object [of this study] is Hungarian, the goal and methods used must also be strictly Hungarian." 220

Hungarian "being," Fodor saw his work primarily as a didactic tool, one which, in light of the nation's impending military defeat, would be essential to the re-imagining and rehabilitation of Hungary in either the near or distant future. Hoping to have a voice in the eventual rebuilding of Hungary, Fodor came to regard "A magyar 16t fSldrajza" as a veritable time capsule to be "opened" and utilized when the time was ripe for a return to the conservative-nationalist vision of the nation.

Fodor's experiences during the war years had certainly heightened his awareness of the importance of memory to the continued survival of the nation. Having been on the front lines of cultural-political struggles in both Pecs and Budapest, Fodor saw first-hand the fundamental vulnerability of the discourses and symbols which served as the basis of nationalist memory. Of course, this was something he had always been aware of, and which had motivated him in much of his interwar work. The immediacy of this sense of vulnerability, however, coupled with the possibility that the nation stood to be occupied perhaps indefinitely by a politically and ideologically hostile "other," was something he could not very well ignore.

Perhaps more than anything else, a three-day trip to the newly-liberated city of

Szatmar in July 1941 underscored for Fodor the fragility of Hungarian memory and, by extension, Hungarian identity. The short visit, in fact, was deeply unsettling. Though he was undoubtedly relieved that his home town had been returned to Hungary after twenty years of Romanian "occupation," and was pleased to have had the opportunity to rekindle memories from his youth, Fodor could not shake the unnerving feeling that much had changed, and that the very Hungarianness of the city and its environs had suffered untold damage in less than a generation. Fodor, like so many others, had long lamented the fact 221 that he could not return "home" so long as this eastern region of the former Kingdom of

Hungary lay under the "oppressive yoke of Romanian rule."73 But returning in 1941,

Fodor realized that the situation was much more serious than he ever could have imagined. With the chance to finally go back, Fodor discovered, to his horror, that

"home" itself was very much in the process of disappearing. Two decades of Romanian efforts to suppress Hungarian history and culture, and to claim the region as "their own," had certainly taken its toll.74

Reflecting a full decade later on his brief trip to Szatmar, and on his own deeply- felt need to write a biography of his "home town," Fodor wrote of the Romanian attempts to re-map and re-code the landscape simply by changing the names of streets, buildings, rivers, and hills.75 With an unmistakable splash of bravado, Fodor rejected these

Romanian efforts as inherently superficial, maintaining that, though these foreign occupiers could change place names on paper, they would never be able to write these names successfully and permanently "into the ground." 'There was no way," he wrote,

"that the Hungarian spirit of the city would be transformed into a Romanian one."76 But

Fodor was less sure of himself than he would lead us to believe. His confident pronouncement that Romanian efforts to re-imagine the city would never succeed, in fact, was betrayed by a concern over the state of the city's archives. Having travelled to

Szatmar in part to collect material for what he would later describe as a historical and geographical "biography" of his home city, Fodor was appalled to find boxes of

73 In 1931, for example, Fodor noted with much frustration that, because of the occupation, he would not be able to return to Szatmar to attend a school reunion. See Fodor, "Emlelsezetul," 4. 74 For an excellent discussion of Romanian cultural politics during the interwar period see Irina Livzeanu Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 75 MTAKK Ms 10.740/1-76, Ferenc Fodor, "Szatmar Mdje, SzatmSr ne>e, Szatmar 0ete" (1954), 251-252. 76 Ibid. irreplaceable maps and documents "moldering away on dusty shelves" in archives that

Hungarians might never again have access to. This state of affairs obviously troubled

Fodor. Indeed, without archival sources, without these national narratives and symbolic representations of the land, there was no enduring memory; no Hungarian past, and no

Hungarian future.

Of course, Fodor realized that it was not enough to merely save and preserve these documents, since objective evidence in and of itself was not sufficient to guarantee the continued existence of the Hungarian idea. What was needed was an active agent, a creative, autonomous subject whose ties to the land granted him privileged access to the meaning of space and place; one who could draw important cultural, moral, and spiritual links between otherwise inert objects and historical "facts." Whereas an alien occupier had attempted to bleed the region of its Hungarianness, an authentic Hungarian like himself, one who truly felt the land and its history, would be able to breathe life back into it, and re-saturate it with meaning. In no way guaranteed by nature or the so-called objective forces of history, the nation existed only in so far as it was remembered and imagined through narratives and images; only in so far as the stories laying dormant within archival documents and topographical landmarks were brought to life.

Implicit in this was an awareness not just of the fragility of nation, but also of its inherent constructedness, and even arbitrariness. Grounded in the realization that national existence was heavily dependent on subjective factors, and that memory more than objective factors formed the basis of identity formation, Fodor's work searched for unity and cohesion in Hungary's geographical and historical past, projecting this vision of totality into the future as a state of being to be re-attained by Hungarians. To borrow

77 Ibid., 1. 223 from Zygmunt Baumann, the geo-historical, geo-psychological narratives and analyses that Fodor produced at the end of the war were intended to function as Utopian "beacons" in the "long march" towards the remembering/re-membering of the nation spatially, spiritually, and symbolically.78

Such a state was something that Fodor and so many of his contemporaries hoped for and worked towards. But it was a future-oriented and highly constructivist project, and thus was the source of considerable anxiety. Inherent within this Utopian vision, in fact, was not only the unnerving realization that Hungary might very well collapse under the weight of its own inner contradictions long before the re-building of the nation was completed, but also that the end-goal itself was by no means perfect or perfectible; that the nation was ultimately just a construct, a metanarrative entity whose existence stood to be undermined by what Jean Baudrillard has called "the violence of interpretation and of history."79 This realization was certainly evident in "A magyar let foldrajza" a treatise in which, for the first time, Fodor expressed an open fear that Hungary might not be able to survive under a foreign occupier bent on erasing Hungarian memory and identity through the social, cultural, political, and spatial re-mapping of the nation. In spite of the odds stacked against it, Fodor nevertheless held out hope for a time in the perhaps distant future when Hungarians would come to revisit and rediscover their roots as a means of re-building the nation. Far from giving up, Fodor reinvested himself in a modernist project through which he could continue to shape the future, albeit this time from beyond the grave.

Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations ofPostmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1992), ix. 79 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Fraser, trans. (Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 160. Memory and the Archiving of Self: Fodor's Life in Scrapbooks

In addition to the immediate existential comfort that Fodor's attempt at so-called "geo-

psychology" offered, and the obvious political and didactic dimensions that were

contained within, Fodor's geographical treatise on the question of Hungarian "being"

overlapped with a deeply-rooted need to tell his own life story as well. Indeed, the

situation facing Hungary and its people in the winter of 1944-45 served to fan the flames

of the autobiographical imperative which had gripped him in such a profound way in

P£cs in the opening years of the war. It was, after all, not just the memory of the nation

that he was concerned about, but also his own memory, and his own legacy.

Traces of this desire to remember himself alongside the nation are perhaps most

evident in the foreword to his study. Linked to his overtly political, and ultimately

opportunistic, efforts to distance himself from the German-inspired geopolitics discussed

above, Fodor offered autobiographical tidbits which were intended to establish his

conservative-nationalist credentials, and to remember himself "accurately" to future

generations of readers. Situating "A magyar let foldrajza" within the context of his own

life history, Fodor conveyed an image of himself as a deeply patriotic man who had

sacrificed so much for the cultural and moral defence of the nation. It was almost as if he

saw himself as being indispensable to the conservative-nationalist cause, especially

during the war. Fodor wrote stoically, for example, of his acceptance of the job in Pecs, noting that, "as the Hungarian sky began to cloud over from the west," it was the prime minister Teleki who requested him personally to accept the position as school district 225

superintendent in "one of the country's most sensitive areas."80 It was not, he continued,

the first time he had been asked to take on such an important task. "During the First

World War," he added, "I also shouldered the burden of Hungarian cultural politics in

Transylvania [he is referring here to his work in Kar&nsebes]," an historic region which,

despite his and other's tireless efforts, was nevertheless torn from the nation as a result of

the Treaty of Trianon.81 This loss, he suggested, only served to heighten his commitment to nation-building work. Reaffirming his patriotic character and tireless work-ethic,

Fodor continued by emphasizing the importance of this and other nation-building projects he engaged in between the wars. Noting, for example, the "important role" that he played

in the nurturing of the nation's youth in the interwar period, he stated: "For a quarter of a century, I laboured as a boy scout leader to mould more humane people (emberebb ember), and to develop a more authentic Hungarian life (magyarabb Magyar elet) on

Hungarian soil."82

These themes of self-sacrifice and patriotic devotion to the nation and its people

(and especially its youth) run through the foreword to "A magyar let foldrajza," a work which, though it was intended as a geo-psychological guide for the re-building of the nation, was not devoid of autobiographical significance. By remembering the nation he was, by extension, also remembering himself.83

Though central to the expression and preservation of his own sense of self,

Fodor's scholarly work alone was by no means sufficient to satisfy the autobiographical

80 Fodor, "A magyar let fSldrajza," 1. This account differs from the one given in "The Events of My Life" noted above. There Fodor claims that it was the Minister of Education Homan who appointed him. Teleki merely encouraged him to accept 81 Ibid. 82Ibod. 83 On the idea of the relationship between the memory of an object, and the memory of oneself, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). This idea will be developed more fully in the next chapter. impulse which had become so acute during the war years. Even the life history that he had begun writing in January 1941 was insufficient, especially in light of his experiences in Szatmar in the summer of that same year. Recognizing the fragility of narratives unsupported by factual evidence, Fodor began collecting and organizing documents, letters, photographs, and other keepsakes to support, and even illustrate, the life narrative that he was so desperate to write, and ultimately bequeath to the future. His own identity and reputation had often come under attack during his lifetime, and he certainly feared what would happen after his death, an event which he felt was close at hand. If his narrative of self was to have any staying power, therefore, it would need to be as airtight and ironclad as possible.84

This need to provide an objective grounding for his life story manifested itself most obviously in a series of twenty-one scrapbooks that he began assembling sometime between the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in 1945. Though the bulk of the project appears to have been completed after the war, and perhaps even during the communist period, the project itself was, at least at the outset, an obvious response to the profound sense of existential destabilization, and at times hopelessness, that Fodor felt during the war.85 Though devoid of excessive descriptions, the documents and

There is a strong sense in Fodor's autobiographical work, in fact, that he was well aware of the long­ standing scepticism in certain scholarly circles over the veracity and objectivity of autobiography as an historical source. It was as if he sought to address what Jeremy Popkin describes as "the anxiety that comes fromth e fact that the autobiographical author is caught in the process of defining his or her own narrative identity without being sure that readers will accept the result." See Jeremy Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 47. The first two chapters of this book deal in great detail with the relationship between history and autobiography, and the problem of objectivity and veracity in autobiographical sources. 85 In the absence of any supporting documentation, Fodor's scrapbooks are difficult to date. Only the first and last books can be dated with any degree of certainty. The first book contains photographs of Szatmar taken in the summer of 1941, and therefore could not have been assembled any earlier than July of that year. A caption under one of these photos, furthermore, indicates that the picture is of "Deak Square, which is now called Horthy Square." Since the square in question was re-named after Admiral Mikl6s Horthy, the regent of Hungary in the interwar period who was still in power when Szatmar was reclaimed photographs that he included in his scrapbooks were nevertheless carefully organized so as to tell a particular story, one which would supplement, and help solidify, other purely textual narratives of self. Employing strategies and techniques not unlike the layering and over-coding used in "A magyar let foldrajza," the documents and images in Fodor's scrapbooks overlapped and intersected with each other to create an integrated network of meaning; a discursive and symbolic nexus intended to establish a cohesive narrative of the self by dispelling the forces of fragmentation and dissolution which had plagued him throughout his life. Organized into a meaningful, organic totality, Fodor no doubt hoped that these scrapbooks would contribute to the "accurate" telling, and re-telling, of his life story.

Looking at the scrapbooks themselves, this careful organization of autobiographical artefacts that I suggest above is not necessarily evident at first glance.

In part this is due to the present state of the scrapbooks, both individually and as a whole.

Though an obvious effort has been made by the family, and in particular by Fodor's granddaughters, to preserve the scrapbooks, certain documents and photos are nevertheless missing from individual books, while others float loosely within the collection, with no indication of where their original position may have been. Some artefacts have been purposely removed by the family, and in some cases have even been

by Hungary early in WWII, it is very likely that the book was put together before the city fell to the Russians on October 26,1944, or at the very least before it was officially returned again to the Romanians in May 1946. The last book, numbered "twenty-one," contains documents dated between March 1955 and September 1959, the year his health deteriorated to a point mat he could no longer do things on his own. 1959, then, marks the end of the project. There is at least one other clue which helps determine the progression of this ambitious autobiographical undertaking. In book eight, Fodor includes a photograph of Vira and their son Zoli, taken in May 1927 on the occasion of his confirmation. There are two ragged holes in the top half of the picture. Written across the bottom of the photo is the following: "This picture, which once hung on our wall, was hit by a bomb fragment during the siege [of Budapest] in 1945." We can surmise, therefore, that at the very least this and all subsequent scrapbooks were put together sometime after the siege of Budapest. given to other historians and collectors. Entire books, in turn, are either missing, or no longer in the family's possession. This was, admittedly, a problem for me, at least at first. The discovery of five of the eight missing scrapbooks at an antiquarian's shop in

Budapest near the end of my research, however, provided enough of the missing pieces to read and explore this collection as an integrated whole.

Organized more or less chronologically and thematically, the scrapbooks trace

Fodor's development through time, from his birth in Tenke in 1887, to his old age in

Budapest in the late 1950s. Focusing either on a particular period of his life, or on a particular aspect of his nation-building work (his boy scout activities, for example, or his pedagogical work in Pecs and Budapest during the war), the scrapbooks rely on carefully crafted montages and strategically positioned documents and photographs to construct a

"factually-based" narrative of Fodor's personal history. Much like the totalizing narrative of the nation constructed in "A magyar let fSldrajza"—one which gave voice to a "timeless" Magyar identity evolving teleologically over time—the life story that emerges from this process of strategic positioning and careful layering is one of a creative, moral, and fundamentally autonomous subject linked organically and meaningfully to his own past, and to his own familial and geographical roots.86

There is, in fact, a real sense that Fodor sought to resolve in his scrapbooks a quintessentially modern problem identified by Ricoeur, namely die paradox of how an individual, like the nation or any group, can be seen as the same even as it changes over time. Narration, argues Ricoeur, plays an important role in this attempted resolution. As he writes: "Without the aid of narration, the problem of personal identity is...an antimony without resolution." Of course, unlike Fodor, Ricoeur is too much of a postmodernist to hold out hope for resolution, and rejects the possibility that the negotiation of identity could ever lead to a stable result. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narration, 3:355 and 3:356-58. Commenting on this, Jeremy Popkin adds: "[One] distinctive characteristic [that] Ricoeur attributes to autobiography is its lack of closure. Autobiographical narratives necessarily lack a real beginning or ending, and they are therefore always subject to revision and reinterpretation." Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography, 47. 229

As Hay den White has argued, autobiography itself is "the product of a particular emplotment imposed on the facts of an individual's life."87 Paul Ricoeur takes this idea a bit further, arguing that emplotment is what establishes the transition from the mere recounting of a life story to its explanation.88 The first of his twenty-one scrapbooks provides an excellent illustration of this idea of "emplotment" suggested by White and developed by Ricouer. Though the organization of the photos and documents is not chronologically consistent, the self-conscious narrative that Fodor attempted to construct is certainly evident. Answering questions of where he was from,and , more importantly, of what he had become in the years leading up to the beginning of the Second World

War, Fodor intended this first scrapbook to serve as an introduction to, or overview of, his life, at least up to the eve of his "exile" in Pecs. Having established in the opening few pages his "authentic" village roots, Fodor then showed how he shaped this raw material into a fully-developed, productive, and ultimately moral masculine self.

Highlighting scholarly successes both as a gymnasium and university student, Fodor traced the trajectory of his academic career to the end of the 1930s. His inclusion at the end of this first scrapbook of congratulatory letters written by officials at the Ministry of

Religion and Education in 1938 and 1939 suggest a continuity between his early training, and his later work for the nation. As it would be in each of the following scrapbooks, the focus here was very much on himself, rather than his family. The family, in fact, when it was represented, merely served as a passive backdrop against which his own identity as a scholarly Christian male was fashioned.

Ibid., 35. Cited in Ibid., 39. 230

Of course, Fodor could not help but include images which no doubt reminded him

of the more distressing and unpleasant events of his life. Photos of his mother's grave,

for example, and of his son Zoli who died suddenly and tragically in 1936 at the age of twenty, documented what had been lost to him over the course of his life, while images

and documents pertaining to his miserable and often depressing years in Karansebes must have dredged up remembrances that were at the very least bitter-sweet. And yet, despite the painful, and even negative memories, that Fodor included in this and other

scrapbooks—memories which pointed to the fragility of his identity, and to failures and disappointments both major and minor—the project as a whole tended to gloss over his lifelong struggle against melancholy, dissolution, and disappointment. Focusing instead on his personal achievements, and especially on his academic successes, Fodor's scrapbooks projected an idealized image of a unified and triumphant self. Much like his synthetic geographies, and in particular "A magyar let foldrajza," his scrapbooks functioned as a fetish of sorts, an object of obvious symbolic import through which he could resolve his lingering sense of ontological incompletion and existential anxiety.

Though intended primarily for his descendants, the scrapbooks also offered Fodor a sense of solace and meaning during otherwise difficult and uncertain times.

The Uncertain Path Forward

For Fodor, however, as for so many Hungarians, the misery and uncertainty which characterized the war years only intensified after the end of the Siege of Budapest in the spring of 1945. On the heels of war followed not only the Soviet occupation of the city, but also nearly five years of continued political infighting, rampant inflation, and social 231 instability. With his life turned upside down by the events of recent years, and with the communists working to undermine the fragile democracy that had been established in

Hungary at the end of the war, Fodor shuddered to think of the new challenges that life in a much-changed world would bring.

Not surprisingly, Fodor's first concern was survival, both for himself and his family. Having been removed from his job as Pest district school superintendent when the Arrow Cross came to power in October 1944, Fodor was offered this same position again on February 16,1945, only two days after the siege had ended. Having not worked in four months, he gladly accepted. His continued role as a public official, however, was put in question again soon after. In June 1945, Fodor was called before a political screening committee to account for his actions during the war. The process itself would be delayed on numerous occasions, and would not be resolved until late August. Writing about the first day of his hearing before the committee, Fodor noted simply that "they have nothing against me. No one is denouncing me. It is precisely for this reason that the question of my possible rehabilitation is being postponed, so that they can come up with some sort of charge against me."89 By the middle of August, after having sat through a total of five hearings, Fodor began to fear the possible outcome of his ordeal.

Reflecting on his sixth appearance on August 18, he wrote: "The political screening committee questioned me more today. The matter is not looking good at all." Less than two weeks later, he was called before the committee one last time. Though, "in a decision that bordered on the miraculous," Fodor was eventually let off with a censure of his interwar and wartime activities, the hearing itself was more unpleasant than usual.

Fodor "filetem esem&iyei," 46. 232

"Again they called witnesses," he wrote, adding that the whole affair "was pure torture."90

The uncertainty that surrounded these hearings took a heavy toll on Fodor's nerves and health, and was only exacerbated by the financial crisis and continued political instability facing the nation. Writing in "Eletem esemenyei" (The Events of My

Life), a lengthy, type-written chronological account of the major events of his life, Fodor traced the ever-worsening political and economic situation, noting time and again the intense suffering that this was causing him and so many others. With the communists determined to seize power, and with inflation spiralling out of control, the situation was desperate and distressing, to say the least. Reflecting in December 1945 on the continued political oppression in Hungary, as well as on the absurdity of the fact that his monthly salary of 139,000 peng6s couldn't even buy a kilogram of chicken, he wrote simply:

"Today our money is devalued by a quarter. The situation is hopeless. The political situation could not be worse."91

This feeling of ever-increasing desperation runs through his account of these immediate postwar years. Though he was occasionally overcome with brief feelings of hope for the future, in general, his outlook was very bleak.92 Contemplating his situation at the end of 1947, he wrote:

The year has been one of the most difficult and serious of the postwar years. In addition to the cataclysmic drought which has

5,0 ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 On November 4,1945, for example, Fodor noted the considerable majority won by the Small Landholders Party in the national elections, writing that "we can again believe in the future." This sense of hope was short lived, but did return on occasion. On July 5,1946, for instance, Fodor wrote of one of his last work-related trips as a school district superintendent Travelling to the small city of Esztergom north of Budapest, Fodor stayed overnight with some Benedictine monks. Reflecting on their way of life, he wrote: "It was there, amidst the great privation [in which they live their lives], that I realized mat mere was hope for the human spirit, that somehow we would recover." See Ibid., 46 and 48. ravaged the countryside, the sky has clouded over entirely politically. There has been unbearable political terror, devastating economic misery, and widespread hopelessness. The fact that we are now completely surrounded by communism hardly gives us hope that our fate [as a nation] might be changed. Though I have managed to remain somewhat optimistic, I have withdrawn from everything. With the exception of the Saint Istvan Academy and the occasional meeting of the Geographical Society, I no longer take part in anything. It is no longer advisable these days to draw attention to oneself. The international situation has been quite clearly drawn. The world now stands divided into two halves, with both sides staring at each other with clenched fists. The communists are gaining ground in every country (even in the West)... .It looks as if there will never be peace in Europe. Once again, the only one we can believe in is God.

In light of the hardship, misery, and growing sense of uncertainty that had enveloped the nation, and indeed the rest of Europe, Fodor retreated ever deeper into the various projects he had begun during the war. Once again, the sense of urgency he felt seemed only more intense. Picking up in 1947 where he had left off with his

"ElettSrtenet" in January 1942, for example, Fodor wrote: "In these stark and very serious times, I have begun again to carry on with my work, so that I can finish up my notes as much as possible. Seeing that I am now sixty-one, I must use what time remaining to me wisely."94

This feeling of urgency was reflected in his nationalist scholarship as well. The work Fodor had begun in "A magyar let foldrajza," in fact, was never far from his mind throughout this period. With the intention of eventually publishing his manuscript, he set himself the task of assembling the required maps and making the necessary revisions.

93 Ibid., 51. He repeats these sentiments at the end of 1949, writing: "The year was very grave. The world is now completely split in two. The economic situation has declined incredibly; prices rise, but my pension remains the same. We have become resigned to everything. We have started to become despondent. Our wants have completely disappeared. [...] Our only joy comes from raising the [grand]children." See Ibid., 53. 94 Fodor, "ElettSrtenet," 30. Fodor also actively publicized his project in open lectures given at the Szent Istvan

Academy,95 but by 1949, the year the communists finally managed to consolidate power

in Hungary, it had become obvious to him that it would not be published anytime in the

near future, and perhaps not even during his lifetime. This realization only underscored

for Fodor the perceived importance of his work. In the note written in 1949 and attached

to the unpublished manuscript, Fodor wrote: May the Good Lord champion my work, which I have laboured over for many years, and may He grant that I should see it published as well. Should He call me to Him before this happens, may He grant that it be published posthumously for the sake of my children, and for future generations.96

Like his scrapbooks and the narrative of his life history, Fodor strove to have this nationalist geography preserved for the future. Taken together, this body of overlapping

scholarly and autobiographical work, and the memories they embodied, were Fodor's gift to the future; an offering from the past so that future generations could properly mourn,

and then rebuild.97 These manuscripts, and the care that he took to have them preserved, marked, I think, a conscious effort on his part to illuminate the roots of Hungarian

95 For an example of these lectures, see MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.71/6, Ferenc Fodor, "A magyar let fSldrajza," lecture given at the Szent Istvan Akademia, February 20,1948. In addition to this lecture given in 1948, Fodor gave at least four other lectures at the Academy, one of them even coming after the Academy had been "nationalized" by the communists early in the summer of 1950. These lectures included "A Magyar oshazak taji hatasa a nemzet fejlddesere" (February 11,1950), "A magyar honfoglalas foldrajzi vizsgalata" (October 21,1950), "A fSldrajzi energiak szerepe Budapest felj6des6ben" (March 31, 1950), and "A magyar fbldrajztudomany a XVIII szazadban" (November 17,1950). See Fodor, "filetem esemenyei," 52-54. Fodor, "A magyar I6t ffcldrajza," n.p. 97 This idea of memory as a gift to future generations so that they could mourn is taken fromSusa n Crane, "Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory," American Historical Review (December 1997), 1372. Crane writes: ". ..whenever we think about history, we are thinking in terms of commemoration, or, in Mark Strand's words, the 'gift' sent into the world so that the future might mourn. This 'present' (the gift of/from the now) to the coming generations encapsulates a historical consciousness mat attempts to transmit memory and identity as corporate, corporeal entities. That the future might mourn is the projection of nostalgia; it is also the supposition of historical thinking, which charges itself with the preservation of what would otherwise be lost both mentally and materially." 235 identity so that future generations could grow as unmistakable offshoots of an integral nation, and integrated self. Chapter Five The Remapping of Nation and Self: Geographies of Survival and Resistance under Communism, 1948-1960

"Meanwhile, my isolation deepened.... Though more and more isolated, I did not give in to lethargy. I turned increasingly to my pen and to books, finding within myself an escape from the difficulties and misunderstanding that beset me." Milovan Djilas, Conversations With Stalin (1962)

In late December 1948, Fodor looked back upon his experiences of the past year.

With the communists engaged in a concerted effort to consolidate their power in Hungary and the rest of east central Europe, and with his personal situation growing ever worse, he reflected on the fate that had befallen him, his family, and the nation at large, writing in his autobiographical record "Eletem esemenyei" (The Events of My Life) that:

The year has been incredibly seyere for us. Beyond my pension of 988 forints per month, there is nothing, no work, left for me. We barely have enough to pay for our food. At the beginning of the year I was able to give some radio lectures, but the radio was soon taken over by the communists for propagandistic purposes, and they immediately put an end to this. In the fall they shut down the University of Economics (a Kdzgazdasagi Egyetem), and so my teaching there also came to an end. We truly suffered great privation. Slowly even our clothing started to fall to pieces. Everybody has taken refuge in themselves....Outside of the family we hardly associate with anyone anymore. In the summer my work in the garden helped distract me from my anxiety and constant brooding, but the winter has been incredibly difficult. We do everything alone as a family. The political infighting continues— everyone is fighting everyone. It is impossible to speak safely with people anymore. At Christmas, they arrested the Primate.1 For me, the most serious financial loss of the year came in the spring when they nationalized trie Catholic schools. With this the possibility of publishing my primary school atlas also disappeared. The atlas was the last financial refuge left to me for my old age... God be with us in the coming year. It promises to be truly grave,2

He is here referring to the arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty by the communists. 2 MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/2 Ferenc Fodor "FJetem esemenyei (1887-1959)," (n.d. 1959?), 52.

236 237

This year-end summary, one that he wrote for nearly every year of his adult life, was very typical of the summaries written between the end of the war and 1959 (the year he stopped writing entries in "Eletem esemenyei"). Much as it had been in the short period leading up to the consolidation of communism in 1948-49, each year that passed seemed to be worse than the year that preceded it. At the end of 1951, for example,

Fodor wrote simply that "the year was one of the saddest and to this point most difficult of our lives. It is truly a dismal situation, with misery and hopelessness everywhere."3

The following year was perceived to be even worse. On February 19,1952, Fodor learned that his house was going to be nationalized. Only three days later he was informed that his modest pension had also been suspended (Fodor, however, petitioned the government about this, and was successful in getting it reinstated in March of the same year). The loss of his house was a particularly devastating blow. Though he and his family were allowed to remain as tenants, they were forced to give up ownership to the state, and were now obliged to pay rent. Both humiliating and deeply maddening, the nationalization of his house only increased the financial burden being shouldered by a family who, in Fodor's eyes at least, was already stretched to the limit. Writing in

December 1952, Fodor lamented his current situation, one which was intimately tied to the waning fortunes of the nation:

1952 was a very dismal year for us. They [the communists] took our house, and my pension too, though the latter God returned to us. We almost gave up entirely. Even after getting my pension back, life was difficult. I had to find work, and was forced to take on menial tasks. We could hardly believe that there might be darker years ahead. What more could they take from us? They have pillaged us, the Hungarians, body and soul. We ourselves are generally well; we are together, and are neither starving nor

3 Ibid., 55. 238

freezing. But the cross is incredibly heavy to bear, the individual cross as well as the Hungarian cross.4

Even during the so-called post-Stalinist "thaw" between 1953 and 1955, a period in which new opportunities opened up for him professionally, Fodor remained discouraged about his own situation, and about the lingering tyranny which continued to weigh heavily upon the collective spirit of the Hungarian people. Skeptical of the changes that had been implemented in the middle of 1953, Fodor wrote that "the essence

[of the regime] has not changed. The misery and extreme poverty has not lifted; the proletarian dictatorship remains firmly in place."5 Though Hungarians could be grateful that the political oppression had abated somewhat, and that the midnight house searches and violent re-settling of people had stopped, he nevertheless concluded that the period of the "thaw" remained one of the most miserable and hopeless in his life.6

This overwhelming sense that socialist Hungary was caught in a perpetual cycle of economic hardship, political oppression, and existential hopelessness was only amplified for Fodor by the profound sense of social and political marginalization that he felt during this period. Much more serious than the marginalization he felt in Pecs at the beginning of World War II, the repressive, and often extremely dangerous, political climate in Hungary under communism atomized Hungarian society in a very visible and disturbing way, throwing up barriers which isolated him from former colleagues, and even friends.7 Old, sick, and left to fend for himself, Fodor felt vulnerable and alone.

4 Ibid., 55. 3 Ibid., 56. Writing of the changes themselves when they were announced on July 4,1953, Fodor mocked the new government's claim that "everything will be wonderful and good," suggesting mat "no one believes that anything will come of this." 6 See Ibid., 56 and 58. 7 As early as January 1949, Fodor recognized the gravity of the changed reality in Hungary. Having decided to write a biography of his friend and colleague Pal Teleki, Fodor approached old colleagues and acquaintances for assistance, but to little avail. "No one," he wrote in frustration, "wants to help me. I seek Though this sense of isolation would be diminished somewhat by the sense of unity and

connection to other Hungarians that he briefly felt during the Revolution and its

immediate aftermath in the late autumn of 1956, Fodor generally saw himself—or at least

portrayed himself—as an outsider, cut off from other conservative-nationalists by a

culture of fear and distrust, and from sources of income and truly meaningful intellectual

work by an oppressive and ideologically "foreign" regime. Like so many of those around

him, then, he too "took refuge" in himself, adopting as he did so a complex strategy of

survival and resistance which, as we shall see, played itself out both publicly and

privately.

One way in which Fodor responded to the difficult and disturbing circumstances

that befell him after 1949 was to withdraw even deeper into the interconnected national

and autobiographical work that he had begun during the war and had continued into the

immediate postwar era. Realizing, of course, that this work would have to be done in

private, and that it would quite likely remain "underground" for a generation or more,

Fodor nevertheless devoted as much of his time and energy to these projects as he could.

Indeed, the idea that such work would probably never be published in his lifetime did not

deter him. In an immediate and very important way, the act of research and writing was

satisfying in and of itself, with his underground scholarly pursuits providing a

comfortable space into which he could retreat, and somehow feel safe and whole again.8

Commenting in 1951 on research he was engaged in for a planned book on the history of

out all of his old friends, but nobody even wants to reminisce about him. [...] I have to rely on materials collected primarily in libraries to write my biography of him." Blocked by those who were once closest to mem, and unable to fully trust anyone outside his immediate family, Fodor could only really rely on himself, especially in the years leading up to the "thaw" in 1952. See Fodor "£letem esemenyei," 52. 8 As his wife writes, it was natural that he would continue researching and writing, since this was such a big part of who he was. MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete" (1962). Hungarian geography, Fodor noted that it was meaningful work, "even though there is likely no hope that it will see the light of day."9 At the very least, he would later add, it would distract him from the day-to-day miseries of his life under communism. "Once again I escape into my work," he admitted, "so that I'll occupy myself to the point that I won't have the time to worry about the present situation."10

More than this, however, Fodor wrote for the sake of future generations. Driven by a sense of patriotism and national pride, he wrote so that, if and when the opportunity for the resurrection of Hungary arose, the nation would have at its disposal an "accurate" sense of itself, both historically and geographically. Communism, he hoped, would one day collapse, and out of the rubble Hungarians would be given the chance to rebuild their nation anew. Fodor, therefore, intended to provide one of the necessary pillars for a rebuilding process which, because of the communist takeover, had been postponed indefinitely.

This is not to say, however, that Fodor confined himself solely to private, and for the time being secretive, conservative-nationalist projects. Far fromretreatin g entirely into his underground work, Fodor actively sought out academic projects in the public sphere. In fact, between 1949 and 1957 (the year of his last publication), Fodor managed to publish no less than five books and thirteen scholarly articles. Though this body of work admittedly paled in comparison to the massive corpus he had compiled in the interwar period, it nevertheless marked an important scholarly contribution, at least

9 Fodor "Eletem esem&iyei," 54. Here Fodor is referring to work he was doing on his "History of Hungarian Geography," a massive volume which he began collecting material for in June, 1949. Though he doubted in 1951 that he would ever get it published under communism, he nevertheless submitted a shorter version of it to the TMB in 1957 to be considered as his dissertation for academic re-accreditation. But more on this in section one of this chapter below. 10 Ibid., 55. 241 within the context of the building of state socialism in Hungary (his very last book, in fact, a largely mechanical study celebrating the river-improvement achievements of

Hungarian engineers in the Tisza Valley between 1700 and 1867, was awarded a first- place prize from the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1954).11 Fodor's willingness to engage in such state-building work meant, of course, a concomitant willingness to conform to the semantic parameters established by the communists, and Fodor proved to be a quick study of the new discursive requirements that the party instituted—albeit at times haphazardly—in the first half of the 1950s.12 In both content and especially style,

Fodor's published, communist-era writing marked a definite departure fromhi s interwar scholarship, and certainly diverged significantly from his postwar, "underground" work.

Gone were the sentimental references to the nation's once-unified territorial body, and to the moral, God-fearing Christian people who gave it a timeless and racially distinct

Hungarian character. Absent also were references to the injustice of the Treaty of

Trianon, and to the national trauma and suffering that this was said to have caused. In its place, Fodor offered studies which, if they were not strictly technical in nature, painted a picture of Hungarians as a progressive people whose laborers and intellectuals had been united in an heroic struggle against both the legacy of Turkish barbarism and the threat of

Western imperialism in Hungary since the early eighteenth century. Focusing on

11 This award-winning essay was eventually published as Magyar Vkimernokdknek a Tisza-vdlgyben a kiegyezes kordig vegzettfelmiresei, vizi munkalatai e~s azok eredmenyei (Budapest: TankQnyvkiadd, 1957). The actual translation of the book is The Completed Surveys, Hydrological Works and their Results of the Hungarian Engineers of the Tisza Valley to the Time of the Compromise. For brevity's sake I will, as Fodor does in his own papers, refer to this work as Magyar Vhimernokoknek a Tisza-vdlgyben (Hydrological Engineers of the Tisza Valley). 2 As Tibor Valuch writes, the implementation of a new discursive regime to meet the political and ideological needs of communism was beset by a number of problems, both practical and theoretical. See his very useful essay "A Cultural and Social History of Hungary, 1948-1990," in A Cultural History of Hungary in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Laszlo Kosa, ed. (Budapest: Osiris Kiad6,2000), 249- 349. 242

individuals rather than borders, and on an evolving proletarian social order rather than a

romanticized image of an ancient, territorially-rooted Hungarian spirit, Fodor's work

echoed at least some of the major tenets of communist politics and ideology.

The fact that Fodor remained a die-hard, "underground" conservative deeply

committed to the Hungarian nation while simultaneously producing socialist geographies

devoted to the building of communism in Hungary presents some interesting and

important questions for the historian. How, in fact, do we explain his published,

communist-era scholarship in light of his underground work? What meaning, if any, can

we ascribe to it beyond the purely opportunistic? On the one hand, Fodor's underground

work suggests that he was intent on resisting communism, retreating into clandestine

scholarship as a means not only of dealing with the present, but also of preserving

conservative-nationalist discourse and memory for the sake of future generations. On the

other hand, however, it certainly seems as if Fodor was guilty of compromising these

very same conservative-nationalist convictions in order to produce his socialist

geographies, effectively "selling out" to the new regime in a desperate attempt not only to

survive economically under communism, but also to enhance his socio-intellectual

status.13 Indeed, beyond providing him with an additional source of income to

supplement his modest pension, Fodor appears to have pursued socialist projects as a

means of re-attaining all that had been lost to him when the communists came to power in

1948-49. Judging by a series of letters written to various government bodies between

1950 and 1960, Fodor obviously hoped that his socialist geographies would redeem him

13 Between 1952 and 1957, Fodor used his "socialisf' work as political capital in his ultimately futile struggle to have his house de-nationalized, and his academic credentials reinstated. 243 in the eyes of the regime, at least enough to have everything that he felt had been wrongfully taken from him returned.14

At present, there is no complete framework available in Hungarian historiography for a comprehensive rendering of the inherently complex response of conservative- nationalist intellectuals to communism in Hungary, especially during the tumultuous years of consolidation and revolt which marked the period between the communist seizure of power in 1948-49 and the October Revolution of 1956. In large part this is because much of the intellectual history of this period, and especially that written from an explicitly right- or left-wing perspective, has tended to either overlook or oversimplify the complicated, and in many ways seemingly contradictory, role played by conservative- nationalist intellectuals in the simultaneous consolidation of, and resistance to, state socialism in Hungary.15 This oversimplification has contributed to the production of distorted and often one-dimensional accounts of conservative nationalists under communism. Though marginalized and oppressed (to varying degrees, of course) by the regime, members of this sector of Hungary's prewar and pre-Communist middle class did not withdraw en masse into "internal exile,"16 as some historians have argued, nor did they completely abandon their conservative, bourgeois identities, as the "cooperative" actions of an older generation of conservative politicians and intellectuals like Fodor

14 See MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/8, "Budapest Abel Jen6 u. 31. Sz. Hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947- 1959" (Documents Pertaining to Fodor's House on Abel Jen5 street in Budapest). 15 Some historians, for example - typically those of a conservative or populist persuasion - choose to ignore the public compromises of conservative-nationalist intellectuals, arguing instead that their underground efforts to preserve traditional Hungarian values and ideas provided, and continues to provide, an authentic basis for the renewal of the nation in the post-Communist period. 16 This is one of the main observations to come out of James Mark's work on middle-class identity in the Communist period. See James Mark, "Discrimination, Opportunity, and Middle-Class Success in Early Communist Hungary," The HistorkalJournal48/2 (2005), 514. Here he challenges the views put form by Ivan Szelenyi et al. in Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisiement in Rural Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), ch. 7, and by Tibor Gati and Agota Horvath, "A haboru eI6tti kisvarosi kSzeposztaly utotort&iete," Szocioldgiai Szemle I (1992): 81-96. 244 might at first seem to suggest. Conservative Hungarian nationalists, in fact, employed a variety of strategies in order to navigate, and even benefit from, the often turbulent social, political, and cultural waters of the Communist period.17 Looking specifically at Fodor's case, this chapter illustrates how these strategies—some public and some private, some overtly opportunistic and others subtly subversive—overlapped in multiple but meaningful ways, contributing to a complex, intersecting politics of survival and resistance under communism.

Scholarship and Survival: The Geography of Opportunity (and Resistance)

For Fodor and bis family, the years immediately following the communist takeover in

1948-49 marked a difficult, miserable, and ultimately frightening period. Under the leadership of Matyas Rakosi, the Hungarian Communist Party began implementing a repressive system modeled on the Stalinist example already in place in the Soviet Union.

The profound hopelessness and even fear that Fodor had felt in the period of political and economic uncertainty that followed the war now became much more palpable. Watching as the communists implemented increasingly oppressive measures against Hungarian society at large, and the middle class in particular, Fodor was again left to wonder what possible future there could be for himself, his loved ones, and the nation.

The distinct sense of a noose being slowly tightened around their collective necks

(a feeling which would persist even though, as we shall see, opportunities began to open up for Fodor) became especially pronounced with the commencement of mass deportations from Budapest at the end of June 1951. In a move that affected between

17 For a recent study which suggests this complexity, see Janos Rainer, "Submerging or Clinging on Again? J6zsef Antall, Father and Son, in Hungary after 1956," Contemporary European History 14/1 (2005): 65- 105. 245

14,000 and 15,000 people, the communists began seizing houses and apartments throughout the city, more often than not in the more affluent, middle-class districts of the capital.18 With their property seized, displaced residents were re-settled, often forcibly, to smaller towns and rural villages, where they were typically forced to engage in manual labor.19 For an aging Fodor, the thought of re-settlement was deeply upsetting and frightening. Tied as he was to his house, Fodor waited despairingly alongside his family for what he feared was now inevitable. Reflecting on the nearly two-months of perpetual dread that they lived through in the summer of 1951, Fodor wrote:

End of June. The deportations from the capital begin. So many of my friends are taken away in the most inhuman circumstances imaginable. Every day at dawn we watch with our hearts beating, waiting to see whether or not a police car will pull up in front of our house to take us away too. This daily worry continues uninterrupted until the middle of August.20

To this he later added: "July-August. Difficult times. We go nowhere, and simply wait to be re-settled. Our health and nerves deteriorate completely."21

In the end, though their house would later be nationalized, Fodor and his family were not affected by the re-settlement program. Noting their good fortune, Fodor wrote:

"By the grace of God we were allowed to stay in our house. Vira would not have been able to bear being removed in such an inhuman way." However, despite his family's relative "luck," life under the Rakosi regime was by no means easy for him or his family.

Like all other Hungarians (with, of course, the exception of certain high level Communist

See James Mark, "Society, Resistance and Revolution: The Budapest Middle Class and the Hungarian Communist State 1948-56," English Historical Review CXXX/488 (Sept 2005): 967. 19 Ibid. 20 Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 54. 21 Ibid., 54. 22 Ibid., 54. Party members ), Fodor and his family suffered heavily under the austerity measures imposed in the early 1950s. His small pension, one which was often not paid out to him in full, and was even briefly suspended, was woefully inadequate, at least by Fodor's standards, and did little to compensate for the impoverished conditions that he, his wife, and his daughter's young family were forced to endure. The nationalization of his house in February 1952, in turn, came as an even more serious blow for Fodor. So much of his own labor and identity as a conservative, middle-class nationalist was tied up in his house, a structure which served as much as a symbol of his socio-cultural position within

Hungarian society as it did an extension of himself. Forced to pay rent for a building which represented "his life's work," and which he and his wife had once owned outright, was not only costly, but also fundamentally degrading.24

Equally as damaging to his finances, and also his pride, was his scholarly marginalization. Though he had been cleared by a political screening committee in

August 1945, and had even been deemed worthy to lecture at the University of

Economics between 1946 and 1948, Fodor did not figure into the communist restructuring of the educational system in the postwar period, and was denied the opportunity to teach or lecture at any level.25 Moreover, like everyone else who had received a post-graduate degree prior to the communist takeover, Fodor was essentially

23 See Valuch, "A Cultural and Social History of Hungary, 1948-1990," 252. 24 Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete," 32. 25 For a discussion of academic restructuring in Hungary after 1945, see GySrgy P6teri, Academia and State Socialism: Essays on the Political History of Academic Life in Post-1945 Hungary and East-Central Europe, (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1998). See also Valuch, "A Cultural and Social History of Hungary, 1948-1990," in particular pp. 325-37. For a comparative study of the socialist restructuring of higher education in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland between 1945 and 1956, see John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). For a study of universities and totalitarianism more generally, see John Connelly and Michael Griitner, eds., Universities Under Dictatorship (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University State University Press, 2005). 247

stripped of his academic credentials. With the Hungarian academic system remodeled on the Soviet pattern, Fodor found himself having to apply to the newly-established Board

for Post-graduate Academic Awards (the Tudomanyos Minosito Bizottsag, or TMB, a

body set up under the aegis of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) in order to be

granted the title of "doctor of science." As we shall see below, Fodor's on-going struggle with the TMB was both frustrating and humiliating and, as with his efforts to have his

house "de-nationalized," eventually came to naught.

The impact that this combined social, political, economic, and intellectual marginalization had on Fodor cannot be underestimated. It damaged his reputation, it effected his health, it compromised his relationships with former colleagues, and it wounded his pride. Life on the periphery, in short, seriously disrupted his sense of self, and only served to heighten his anxiety over Hungary's problematic present, and questionable future.

And yet, despite the social, political, and cultural marginalization he faced as a conservative-nationalist intellectual, scholarly and professional opportunities nevertheless opened up to him. Indeed, the renegotiation—and ultimately public reinvention—of nation and self which preoccupied Fodor throughout the communist period took place within a complex social, cultural, and political space, one which at once both blocked him, and, curiously, allowed him considerable room to maneuver. Though communism as a political-ideological system sought on one level to eradicate all traces of bourgeois- capitalist hegemony, and to transcend the narrow discursive and systematic confines of the nationalist paradigm, the system itself nevertheless retained not only the territorial foundations of the nation-state, but also much of its technocratic and bureaucratic infrastructure. This fact alone meant that a number of technocrats, intellectuals, and experts from the old order were recruited into the new. Though they were often compelled to perform menial and mechanical tasks under the supervision of typically young, poorly-educated, and ill-trained party members, they nevertheless played an important, even vital, role in the socialist system. Indeed, without them, the state quite likely would have ceased to function altogether.

Fodor himself recognized this, and though he continued to cling in private to a set of culturally-determined, conservative-nationalist values which had sustained him since adolescence, he was also willing to capitalize on openings within an ascendant system which allowed him to pursue his scholarly interests, even if, on an obvious level, such pursuits required something of an intellectual, and probably even moral, compromise on his part. Driven by a combination of economic necessity, bourgeois pride, and a complex discursive inertia which dictated that, above all else, he keep researching and writing,

Fodor was determined to make the most out of the otherwise limited opportunities that were afforded him.

Falling back on the only "marketable" skills he really had, Fodor immersed himself in scholarly research, hoping to find a place for his work within the newly emerging socialist order. As early as November 1950, in fact, Fodor began working in the map collection of the National Museum with the aim of collecting primary source material for a book on the history of Hungarian cartography. Though it is not entirely certain what made Fodor believe that this would be a worthwhile project in the eyes of the communists, he was evidently confident, or at least hopeful, that he would be able to find a publisher for it. Fodor busied himself throughout the first half of 1951 with his research and writing, finishing an initial draft of the voluminous manuscript in early July.

On July 11, he submitted the manuscript to the Hungarian Home Army's Institute of

Cartography (a Honved Terkep&zeti Intezet), which at some point earlier in the year had agreed to publish it.27 Receiving his first set of revisions on December 23,1951, Fodor was hopeful that his manuscript "would soon see the light of day." For reasons not fully explained, however, it would not finally be published until September 1954.

Having failed to have his "History of Hungarian Cartography" published as quickly as he had initially hoped, Fodor was desperate, and by the beginning of 1952 found it necessary to search more actively for paid work. With his house nationalized, and his very modest pension temporarily suspended, he saw himself as having no other choice but to do so. On February 23,1952, Fodor took stock of his increasingly distressing situation, writing that: "My grievous tribulations have begun. In my sixty- fifth year we go without food. I look for work at the Foldtani Intezet (Geological

Institue), the Novenytani Muzeum (Botanical Museum), and the FQldrajzi Kutatocsoport

(Geography Research Group)." Receiving "only promises," Fodor was understandably discouraged. Quite to his surprise, however, he was offered some work by the Fdldrajzi

It is quite possible that he was encouraged by the fact that he was able to give at least four lectures at the Saint Istvan Academy between 1948 and 1950, two of them coming after the nationalization of the Academy by the state in the spring of 1950. These lectures, which differed significantly in thematic scope and content from his interwar work, were obviously more communist friendly. 27 Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 54. It is worth noting that in a letter written to Budapest city officials in 1958, Fodor writes that he was originally approached by the Army in 1952-53 to compile a textbook on Hungarian cartography, and not in 1950. See "Budapest Abel Jen6 u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Ferenc Fodor to the Budapest City Council Executive Committee, no date (1958?), 1. 28 In September 1952, Fodor was informed by the Terkepeszeti Intezet that diey were no longer going ahead with the publication of his work. In 1953, Fodor again tried to have it published, but to no avail. The first volume of The History of Hungarian Cartography was finally published in 1954 after the intervention of the Academy of Science's Committee for the History of Engineering. The other two volumes followed in 1955. See Fodor "Eletem esentenyei," 55-57. Kutatocsoport only two weeks later. Entrusted with the job of organizing the Budapest map collection, the work, though largely clerical and unchallenging intellectually, nevertheless provided him with an extra source of income, one which would help ease his financial situation, at least temporarily.29

This job, one which paid him 800 forints a month, finished on June 14,1952.30

His "hard work," however, had not gone unnoticed, and he was immediately offered a new position with the Committee for Monuments to research old maps of Hungarian castles. Paying 200 forints a month less than his first job, his work here came to an end on January 15,1953. This marked the beginning of a few "lean months" for Fodor and his family. Out of a job, and with no immediate prospects, Fodor again turned to independent research, encouraged, no doubt, by the recent publication of an article he had written on the Hungarian hydrological engineer Jozsef Besz&les in the December 1952 edition of the journal Vizugyi Kozlemenyek (Hydrological Papers).31 Taken from a much broader project on the history of Hungarian geography that he had begun collecting material for as early as June 1949, this biographical essay conformed to the communist search for a usable Hungarian past, one which, at least in this case, played up the technological ingenuity of Hungarian engineers and scientists in the building of a truly modern and progressive industrial state. Though Fodor himself had originally intended

Despite Fodor's complaints of economic hardship, his pension of roughly 800 forints a month, supplemented here by a temporary monthly salary of 800 forints, was actually a tidy sum, especially when we take into consideration that his daughter and son-in-law (who lived with him) were also contributing to the household income, and that his wife Vira, as a retired school teacher, was quite likely also collecting a pension. The rent mat he would be forced to pay once the house was nationalized early in 1952 amounted to less than 200 forints a month. His professed poverty, therefore, must be seen in terms relative to his bourgeois expectations. Indeed, Fodor himself notes on a at least a few occasions in "£letem esem&ryei" that he and his family were better off than most under communism. 31 Fodor was paid 400 forints for the article. As he would later write, mis gave him some spending money for Christmas. More importantly, it obviously encouraged him to pursue similar, communist-friendly projects for publication. 251

his comprehensive history of Hungarian geography to serve as a nationalist, rather than

socialist, study, he was obviously prepared to rework the language and ideological focus

in order to get parts of it published under communism. It was, after all, a question of

survival (or so he would have us believe).

With his first "socialist" article published, and his work with the Committee for

Monuments finished, Fodor began working on a new biography, this time of Antal Balla,

an eighteenth-century cartographer and naturalist who was a pivotal figure in the history

of modern Hungarian cartography and natural science. Working at his typically

accelerated pace, Fodor completed a first draft of the manuscript in the late spring of

1953, and by May 10 had arranged with the Muegyetemi Konyvtar (the Technical

University Library) to have it published.32 The very next day, he was offered more work, this time fromth e VizgazdaMkodastudomanyi Kutato Intezet (Hydrological Engineering

Research Institute). Acknowledging Fodor's expertise in the field, the institute employed him to track down and catalogue previously unpublished Hungarian hydrological maps.

Despite the fact that he was paid a "meager" 480 forints a month, his new job— one which would last until January 1955—marked the beginning of a veritable flood of work and publications over the next three years.33 Benefiting from the post-Stalinist political changes that took place in Hungary in the middle of 1953, Fodor wasted no time in capitalizing on the new opportunities that opened up to him and other so-called

"creative intellectuals." At about the same time as his lengthy essay on the life and

32 This study was eventually published as Balla Antal ilete is miiszaki munkdssdga. 1739-1815 (Budapest: Budapesti Miiszaki Egyetem Kozponti KSnyvtara, 1953). 33 Fodor "Eletem esem&iyei," 56-7. Less than a month after finishing his work cataloguing hydrological maps for the Vizgazdalkodastudomanyi Kutato Intizet, Fodor was offered a job editing an encyclopedia (he identifies it simply as "the Hungarian Encyclopedia"). This job, which only lasted until April 1,1955, was to be his last. On August 6,1955, Fodor suffered a stroke. The only work he appears to have done after this was on his private papers, primarily "Eletem esem&ryei" and his scrapbooks. technical work of Antal Balla was published (for which he received a payment of 2,400 forints), Fodor began collecting material for a history of the Institutum Geometricum in

Budapest, an institution established in the late eighteenth century which was one of the historical pre-cursors to the University of Budapest's Faculty of Engineering. Submitted to the Budapesti Muszaki Egyetem Kozponti Konyvtar on March 20, 1954, Fodor's study was published the following year under the awkward title Az Institutum Geometricum. Az

Egyetem Bolcseszeti Koran 1782-tol 1850-igfenndllott mernoki intezet (The Institutum

Geometricum: The Precursor to the Present Day Engineering Department of the Faculty of Science at the University, 1782-1850).34

Between the submission of his historical study on the Institutum Geometricum in the spring of 1954, and its eventual publication in 1955, Fodor also saw the first volumes of two separate multi-volume projects published. On July 20,1954, the first volume of his three-volume catalogue of hydrological maps was released,35 while on September 29th of the same year the first of three volumes on the history of Hungarian cartography was finally published.36 This second was undoubtedly the more satisfying of the two, at least financially. Though he had written in the introduction that his study of Hungarian map- making would not only fill "a gaping hole in the history of Hungarian science and technology," but also contribute to "the work of building socialism in Hungary,"37 Fodor could not conceal in his private papers his obvious glee over the 16,000 forints he

34 See Ferenc Fodor, Az Institutum Geometricum. Az Egyetem Bdlcsiszeti Karan 1782-011850-ig fenndllott mernoki intezet (Budapest: Budapesti Muszaki Egyetem Kozponti Kdnyvtara, 1955). For chronological details pertaining to the research and publication of this book, see Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 56. 35 These volumes were released under the title A magyarorszagi kizirdtos vizrajzi t&rkepek katalogusa 1867-ig, and were published by the Budapesti Muszaki Egyetem KSzponti Kdnyvtara between 1954 and 1956. 36 Ferenc Fodor, A magyar terkepirds 1. k5tet (Budapest: Honved T6rke^)&zeti Intfeet, 1954). 37 Ibid., 3. 253 received for his work. Though his study had ostensibly been written to help the socialist state reach its Utopian goals, for Fodor the payment itself was perhaps the most important consideration, in large part because it provided him with an opportunity to buy new clothes for his entire family. As he would write upon receiving the money on November

24, 1954, "we have already begun the shopping."38

But the writing and research did not stop there. Somewhere between the shopping and his on-going work for the Vizgazdalkodastudomanyi Kutato Intezet, Fodor found time to write yet another lengthy monograph, this time on the history of hydrological engineering in the Tisza Valley during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Completing a draft of the study in early December 1954, Fodor submitted a version of it to the Academy of Science to be considered for their yearly essay competition. On

March 10,1955, it was announced that he had won first prize for engineering history, and that he would be awarded 5,000 forints for his efforts. Encouraged by his wife Vira that he needed to take a break from his work, Fodor used a good part of the money to pay for a vacation for the two of them. Leaving Budapest on August 4, 1955, Fodor and his wife traveled north together to a small town in the Tatra mountains where they planned to spend some time relaxing amongst nature. Perhaps ironically, it was here, only two days later, that Fodor suffered a serious stroke, one which temporarily paralyzed his right side, and which would leave him bed-ridden in hospital for nearly two months. Though Fodor had long been suffering from high blood pressure and "a weak heart," this turn of events took him by surprise, and brought him face to face yet again with his own mortality.

Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 56-7. 254

Taking his last rites in a hospital in Salgotarjan, Fodor no doubt felt that his days were now very limited indeed.39

Before long, however, Fodor felt sufficiently recovered from his stroke to return to his work. Having been informed by the Academy of Science that, with some revisions, his award-winning study of hydrological engineering in the Tisza Valley would be considered for publication, he was anxious to continue with his research and writing.

Released from hospital on September 20,1955, Fodor spent the very next day in his library working. Still unable to use his right arm, he enlisted Vira's help to take down notes for him. By the middle of November he was well enough to start going to the

National Library by himself. This was obviously a great relief for him, especially since he was keen on completing as much work as he could before dying. With an unmistakable sense of urgency, Fodor wrote in December of the same year that "my health is still in an incredibly delicate state, and it is because of this that I work."40

Fodor's tenacity once again paid off. Though the return of a hard-line communist government at the end of 1955, followed by the revolutionary events of 1956, put a temporary hold on Fodor's attempts to have his latest study published, it was finally released to favorable reviews in December 1957. Comprised primarily of colorless biographical sketches of 568 "hitherto nameless" engineers and surveyors who had worked in the Tisza Valley between 1700 and 1867, and supplemented with a rather dry chronological accounting of what they managed to achieve in that time, Fodor's Magyar

Vizimernokoknek a Tisza-volgyben (Hungarian Hydrological Engineers of the Tisza

Valley) nevertheless presented a much-glorified image of the ingenuity and persistence of

Ibid., 57-8. See also Vira Fenczik Fodorne\ "Fodor Ferenc 61ete.' Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 58. regional and municipal engineers who, in spite of indifferent Austrian monarchs and woefully negligent Hungarian aristocratic landowners, initiated a wide range of locally- funded irrigation, river improvement, and flood control projects. It was to the foresight and energy of these men, concluded Fodor, that "a nation of swamps which remained at the end of the Turkish occupation was transformed into a nation of wheat."41 The collective straggle against the forces of ignorance, tyranny, and nature by educated

Hungarian men engaged in practical, state-building work was something to be celebrated, while their perseverance, skill, and foresight was a trait worthy of being emulated by

Hungary's newly-constituted "socialist man." As one of Fodor's reviewer's put it, these

"forgotten heroes" of Hungarian history "deserved to have the flag bowed before them."42

Like his earlier socialist geographies, Fodor's Magyar Vizimernokoknek a Tisza- volgyben stands as a testament not only to his unwavering fortitude in the face of great misery and suffering, but also to his dogged determination to provide for himself and his extended family. And yet, at the same time, the praise that this work garnered must have rung like so much empty rhetoric. In letters and petitions sent to the TMB, for example, as well as to municipal housing officials in Budapest, Fodor drew repeated attention to a lifetime of scholarly work, and especially to the socialist scholarship that he had produced or was producing under communism. This latter body of work, he was careful to point out, had not only been lauded and even rewarded by the regime, but also was actively contributing to the building of a strong socialist state. His appeals strongly suggest, in fact, that his communist-era scholarship was intended, at least in part, as

41 Fodor, Magyar Vizimernokoknek a Tisza-volgyben, 3 and 264-65. 42 This unidentified review is cited in Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete," 33. 256 political leverage to be used as a means of reclaiming his former status as a politically and culturally relevant intellectual of some national import. Accompanied by claims that he was a man of the people genuinely devoted to socialist ideals, Fodor underscored the academic and political importance of his socialist work in the hope that it would not only enhance his chances of being reinstated academically, but also would convince municipal authorities to "de-nationalize" his house, and return ownership to him and his family. As he would write in a letter to housing officials in 1957 (one to which he had attached a list of his socialist scholarship), "I come from a family of workers... [and] despite being 70 years old, devote myself tirelessly to raising the cultural level of our socialist-building country [szocializmust epito orszagunk]."43

Much as he had been compelled to rework the language and ideological focus of his scholarship in order to get it published, Fodor also found himself in the position of having to rewrite his life narrative, at least in his petitions and applications to government authorities. A look at his parallel struggles with the TMB and Budapest housing officials, in fact, reveals much about the lengths he was willing to go to "publicly" reinvent himself as a means of recovering both his academic title and his house. A short autobiographical essay sent as part of an application to the TMB in February 1960, for example, illustrates how he reworked and concealed aspects of his life in order to present himself in terms he felt would be welcomed by the authorities. Beginning his essay with reference to the small eastern village of Tenke (Tinea), his birthplace in Bihar County, Fodor noted that his father was "a tradesman," and stressed that his "origins" were therefore "amongst the people." Whereas in earlier autobiographical essays these humble beginnings were

43 "Budapest Abel Jeno u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Fodor to XIth District Tan&cs V^grehajtobizottsag, Budapest, My 9,1957. presented as a hurdle that he had been forced to overcome on the path to bourgeois

respectability, Fodor here chose to idealize them, highlighting as he did so a continuity

between his rural, working-class origins on the Hungarian periphery and his work as a

class-conscious intellectual engaged in the building of state socialism. Overlooking the

fact that he had lived his life as a dedicated anti-communist, Fodor instead stressed his

willingness to cooperate with the new regime. Referring to his retirement as school

district superintendent in 1946, for instance, Fodor insisted that he had voluntarily chosen

to leave his post in order to give his place to a younger Party member (in reality he had

been forced to retire so that a communist functionary could take his place).44 This

gracious act, he continued, was recognized by the Minister of Education himself.45

This notion that he had always been at heart a man of the people dedicated to the

building of a truly democratic socialist state ran through this and other petitions during

the communist period. In a letter written in November 1950 to the Kiskakas£pitesi

Valtsag—megallapito Bizottsag, for example, Fodor highlighted his democratic

credentials as part of his petition to be relieved of monthly debt payments that the state

44 Indeed, Fodor's account in "Eletem esem&iyei" of his "retirement" as Pest District School Superintendent in 1946 is much different than the one provided in this 1960 application to the TMB. According to his autobiographical account, he was told by the Secretary of State for Kultusz (kultusz allamtitkar) on May 10,1946 that "had to retire" since his position was needed for a Party member. To this Fodor added that he was glad to give up his position, one which was causing him great stress and trouble. See Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 48. 45 Fodor's portrayal of himself as a life-long socialist overlapped with a parallel argument that his engagement in cultural-politics during the war had done much to combat fascism. Pointing to his work in Pecs and Budapest between 1940 and 1944, Fodor suggested that, in his efforts to erect "a pedagogical programme in the face of the dangerous Volksbund movement," he had contributed much to the struggle against fascism (Fodor in fact argues that it was because his anti-fascist efforts were so successful that he was immediately dismissed from his superintendent's position by the Arrow Cross when they came to power in 1944.) This, of course, was only half the truth, since much of his work in Pe*cs and Budapest dealt not only with fascist German elements working fromoutsid e the ethnic Hungarian core, but also radical ideological elements working to undermine the nation fromwithin . Though Fodor was of course a committed anti-Fascist, he by no means regarded socialism or communism as acceptable alternatives. See Magyar Tudomanyos Akademiai Leveltar (MTAL), file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," "Fodor Ferenc Sn&etrajzi adatai," February 21,1960. 258 had recently required him to pay (Fodor had taken out a loan in 1945 in order to repair his house, and the communists were now asking him to pay back 95 forints a month).46

Noting that both he and his wife were "elderly and sick," and that "two broken, old, and sick people.. .could not possibly bear these new burdens," Fodor asked that his debt be forgiven, a request which he felt was reasonable given his past service to the state.

Stressing that he had "worked his entire life," and "would gladly work again if only I was able," Fodor pointed to his admittedly brief re-appointment as school district superintendent by Hungary's democratic government in February 1945 as proof of his true political and ideological convictions. Anxious to provide further evidence to back up this claim, he referred to the fact that he had been cleared by the political screening committee in August of the same year, noting that "my democratic conduct and attitude was backed up by Ivan Boldizsar, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who provided definitive evidence of this in my favor."47 With such democratic credentials,

Fodor felt it would be wrong to deny him a fair hearing in the matter.

Such a conviction that proof of his long-standing "democratic" nature would hold him in good stead with the regime persisted well into the 1950s in spite of the fact that it rarely, if ever, generated a positive response on the part of communist bureaucrats. In an ultimately unsuccessful protest launched a mere four months after the nationalization of his house in February 1952, for instance, Fodor complained about the "illegal" raising of his rent to 2550 forints per annum. Stating that "despite my age, I am still in the service of democratic culture," he pointed to the important scholarly work that had been assigned

46 See Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 54. He added that this financial burden "is extremely difficult for us to bear." 47 "Budapest Abel Jeno u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Fodor to the Kiskakdsepitesi Valtsag - megallapito Bizottsag, Budapest, November 9,1950. 259 to him by various government agencies. Much of this "extensive academic work," he continued, was done at home. Pointing out that the raising of the rent would force him to move to a smaller apartment, he suggested in no uncertain terms that such a move would make his work quite difficult, if not impossible, to carry out. Without an adequate work space and a library, he would be unable to continue with his research and writing, and would be forced to "give back" the work entrusted to him by various government- sponsored institutions. "This," he concluded, "would in no way be in the interest of democratic culture.

Of course, for reasons that will be explored in more detail below, Fodor himself was reluctant to "remember" his desperate, deeply frustrating, and on some level perhaps even degrading attempts to be recognized by the regime. Casting himself in his private papers as a helpless victim wronged by the injustice of an oppressive regime, Fodor made no reference to his active pursuit of either his academic re-accreditation, or the de­ nationalization of his house. His own account (or, rather, lack of it) of the on-going struggle with the TMB in "Eletem esemenyei" is a good example of how he underplayed and thus conveniently "forgot" this opportunistic element of his communist-era work.

Despite the fact that he submitted no less than five official applications for academic re- accreditation between 1952 and 1960, Fodor made only one short note of it in his rather comprehensive, chronological overview of his life. Briefly noting that he had received an

"invitation" from the TMB in November 1954 to submit a dissertation for review, he suggested, if only implicitly, that it was they who sought him out, and not the other way

48 "Budapest Abel Jeno u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Fodor to KIK 17sz. kirendeltseg, Budapest, June 23,1952. Fodor ended the letter with the following request: "I conclude by asking once more therefore, that if the increase in rent was a mistake, that it be corrected, and that if it was intentional, that you would be kind enough to lower it." around. Though this may have been at least partially true in this one particular case, the

existing correspondence which documents Fodor's long-standing dealings with the TMB

clearly shows that it was Fodor himself who initiated and actively pursued the possibility

of reintegrating himself into Hungarian academe.

Fodor, in fact, proved determined, even relentless, in his pursuit of academic re-

accreditation. His first application to the TMB was submitted on December 31,1952, not

long after the establishment of the board itself.50 After waiting two years without

receiving a response, Fodor again applied, this time with the encouragement of Elemer

Vadasz, a member of the Academy of Science and a former colleague. In the covering

letter sent as part of his application in November 1954, Fodor wrote:

On December 31,1952,1, a former university professor, submitted a request for academic re-accreditation. This request was not dealt with, or, at least, I have yet to receive an answer with regards to this. I therefore respectfully submit the three volumes of my work The History of Hungarian Cartography. The first volume of this work has recently been published by the Hungarian Home Army's Institute of Cartography. I ask that this be considered as my dissertation, and that it be deemed worthy enough to be defended and accepted.51

An internal TMB memo written on December 30 of the same year indicates that Fodor's

application did in fact come under review. However, despite the initial recommendation

49 Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," 57. In letters written in 1956 and 1960, Fodor indicated that it was Elemfr Vadasz who had invited him to apply to the TMB. See MTAKK, Ms 5271/111, Ferenc Fodor to Bella Bulla, Budapest, July 10,1956 and MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," Ferenc Fodor to the TMB, Budapest, February 22,1960. 50 There is no archival record of this first application, and no indication in any of the later correspondence dealing with the TMB as to what scholarly work he sent along to be considered as his dissertation. For brief references to his application in 1952, see MTAL, fileno . 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," letter from Ferenc Fodor to the directors of the TMB, Budapest, November 18,1954; and MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," letter from Ferenc Fodor to the TMB, Budapest, February 22,1960. In the letter written in 1954, he notes "az elSbbi beadvanyom szama: 1952 XII.31 .F-12." 51MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," letter from Ferenc Fodor to the directors of the TMB, Budapest, November 18,1954. 261 by the Miiszaki Tudomanytorteneti FSbizottsag that his three volume work be accepted, a hand-written note on the memo stipulated that "for it to qualify as... [an acceptable] dissertation, it needs to conform to the customary format [i.e., it needed to be a previously unpublished work]." It is worth pointing out that the unidentified person who scribbled this note was perhaps not unsympathetic to Fodor's situation, and added in brackets that they should break the news to Fodor as nicely as possible.52

As it was with his first application, however, Fodor never did receive a letter from the TMB, and it was only much later that he learned from Vadasz himself that previously published manuscripts would not be considered by the board. Undeterred, Fodor tried his luck again two years later, this time soliciting the assistance of the geographer and

Academician Bela Bulla, a former friend and colleague from the interwar period who had clearly been much more successful than Fodor in integrating himself into the new academic order.53 On July 10,1956, Fodor wrote to Bulla informing him that he had submitted his application to the TMB along with a new dissertation, a roughly 100-page, type-written manuscript entitled "A magyar foldrajzi tudomanyok multja Anonymustol

Hunfalvy Janosig" (The History of Hungarian Geographical Science from Anonymous to

J&nos Hunfalvy). Obviously disappointed with Vadasz's inability (or unwillingness) to help two years earlier, Fodor not only wanted to inform Bulla of the nature and contents

52 MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," memo from Mihaly Boros to Pal Kerekes, December 30,1954. 53 For details of Bulla's application for re-accreditation, see MTAL, File no. 917/617, "Bulla B6Ia (1906)" It is worth noting that, as Bulla's senior, Fodor had on at least one occasion in the past been able to help him in the early stages of his career, securing a position for him as a "practice teacher" at the EOtvOs Kollegium in Budapest in 1929. See MTAKK Ms 5271/110, letter from Fodor to B&a Bulla, Budapest, June 7,1929. See also MTAKK Ms 5271/109, letter fromFodo r to B&a Bulla, Budapest, May 13,1929. of his application, but also wished to encourage his continued support by thanking him in advance for his "kind assistance" in the matter.54

Despite whatever efforts Bulla may have made on Fodor's behalf, the application failed. This was followed by yet another unsuccessful application the following year, when Fodor submitted a much longer manuscript on the history of Hungarian geography to be considered as his doctoral dissertation.55 Yet another application—Fodor's fifth in eight years—was filed three years later, in February 1960. Frustrated with the handling of his case, and worried that he would not see it resolved before his death, Fodor implored the TMB to finally give his application fair consideration, writing:

I, Ferenc Fodor, a former university professor, ask the TMB to be so kind as to consider my application, one I have made many times, for academic re-accreditation. I made my first application at the time of the TMB's founding, and did not receive a response. I made my second application in 1954 after being invited to do so by the Academician Elemer Vad&sz, again without receiving a judgment or answer. I made my third application on July 1,1956 on the invitation of the Academician Bela Bulla, but likewise did not receive a response.56 My fourth application was submitted on January 9,1957, but this too was not deemed worthy of a response. Now I make my fifth application in the hope that, on the basis of a lifetime of highly esteemed scholarship, my application will finally be granted a hearing. I am a seriously ill, 73 year-old man. I am sure that it is understandable why, in the twilight of my life, I should continue to pursue the recognition I feel my scholarly work deserves. I have included an abridged list of my life's work, as well as a copy of "Hungarian Hydrological Engineers of the Tisza Valley,"

54 MTAKK Ms 5271/111, letter from Fodor to Bulla, Budapest, July 10,1956. For a copy of the covering letter sent to the TMB, see MTAKK, Ms 5271/112, letter from Fodor to the TMB, Budapest, July 10,1956. 55 The only record of the contents of this application is a two-page copy of the table of contents to Fodor's manuscript. See MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," "A magyar foldrajztudomany t6rt6nete: Tartalom." 56 Fodor, I think, is stretching the truth here. Bulla may very well have "invited" him to apply for academic re-accreditation in 1956, but Fodor himself appears to have actively sought out his help in this matter. Again, I point to his letter to Bulla dated July 10,1956 as evidence of this. 263

my latest, award-winning work, to be considered as my dissertation.57

Impassioned but ultimately futile, this was to be Fodor's last desperate attempt to settle

the question of his academic status. Only four months later he would finally get a reply

from the board, though not the one he had long been hoping for. On July 4,1960, Fodor

received a letter stating simply that "the TMB has looked at your application for re-

accreditation. We regret to inform you that this cannot be granted. The publication you

submitted, by virtue of its [previously published] nature, does not meet the requirements

of a doctoral candidate's dissertation." Making reference to the much-abbreviated

bibliography of his life's work that he sent along with his application, they added: "In

making our decision, we are unable to take into consideration your earlier work, no

matter how exceptional this may be."58

There is no record of how Fodor responded to this news, but we can assume that

it must have come as a real blow to his interconnected sense of pride, dignity, and self,

especially in light if his parallel failure to have his house de-nationalized. Fodor, in fact,

had been equally as persistent in this second matter, and perhaps even more so, especially

given all that he had invested in his house both financially and personally. As it was with

his lengthy struggle with the TMB, Fodor's first petition concerning the state ownership

of his house was sent sometime in late February or early March 1952, a mere matter of

weeks, perhaps even days, after the announcement that it would be nationalized. On

March 27 he learned that this petition had been rejected by municipal authorities.

57 MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," letter from Fodor to the TMB, Budapest, February 22,1960. 58 MTAL, file no. 843/1 "Fodor Ferenc (1887.marc.5)," letter from Gdbor Tolnai, TMB secretary, to Fodor, Budapest, July 4,1960. Undaunted, Fodor immediately appealed the decision to the Minister of the Interior, only to be informed on July 12,1952 that this appeal had also been declined.59

This rejection from on high apparently served as the finalwor d on the subject until the summer of 1957, when the government passed a decree stating that those people who had owned or inherited property prior to its nationalization on February 19, 1952 could request that it be returned, so long as the dwelling consisted of six rooms or less.

Though Fodor's house had a total of eight rooms, he was convinced that, by virtue of the number of people living in the house, and the important state-building work that he and his family conducted therein, his petition would be successful. As he and his family would argue in letters drafted on June 5 and July 9,1957, government authorities had not only "failed to take into consideration the size of the family living in the house" when they nationalized it in 1952, but also had overlooked the vital "socialist" work being preformed by each of its adult inhabitants. Pointing out that the family "had never been driven by capitalist intentions," and that they had never rented it out, they assured authorities that the house had always been intended as a family residence, and that it would continue to serve as such if it was returned to them.60

Despite their plea, one which was punctuated with assurances that each and every member of the family was a "working person" (dolgozo ember), the petition was rejected by the municipal body entrusted with rendering judgment on cases concerning the de-

59 Fodor "Eletem esem&iyei," 55. The house officially became state property on March 29,1952. It was from this point that Fodor had to pay rent. 60 "Budapest Abel Jen6 u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter fromth e extended Fodor family to the XIth District Tanacs Vegrehajtobizottsaganak," Budapest, June 5,1957; and "Budapest Abel Jeno u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Fodor to the XIth District Tanacs Vegrehajtobizottsaganak," Budapest, July 9,1957. It is quite likely that his reiteration here and in other petitions that he had no "capitalist" intentions was linked to the fact that he had been "forced" to rent out rooms in his house in the late 1940s as a means of generating some extra income in order to survive. See Fodor "Eletem esem&iyei," 53. It is true, however, that they did mis very reluctantly, and mat they had never rented out the entire house. nationalization of family residences. In a very brief letter sent on May 30,1958, Fodor and his family were informed that the reason their request had been denied was because the house was bigger than six rooms.61 Unimpressed, and no doubt deeply frustrated,

Fodor tried one last time to argue his case with the municipal authorities, appealing not only to their sense of fairness, but also, as in his final application to the TMB in 1960, to their basic sense of decency. Fodor's petition is worth citing in lengthy detail:

The undersigned, Dr. Ferenc Fodor, a retired university professor, is writing to launch an appeal against the decision handed down on May 30, 1958 by the 11th District Council. In the interest of fairness and equality. I ask that our house be released from state ownership. I come from a working-class family—my father was a village tailor—and it was against the greatest difficulties [ones, he implies, that were imposed by a class of bourgeois-aristocratic oppressors] that I struggled in order to become a university instructor.... The superior quality of my academic work has been recognized both at home and abroad. Many of my works have been published, even recently. The Hungarian Academy of Science has awarded me three times for my work.62 Let me just note here some of my most recent work: • In 1952-53, our National Army commissioned me to write a specialized cartographical textbook. The three-volume work which I produced was warmly received by the academic community. • My work on the history of Hungarian hydrological engineers was awarded first prize in a competition sponsored by the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1954. • A three-volume catalogue of [Hungarian] maps that I edited under commission from the Technical University of Budapest was published between 1955 and 1957, generating widespread international interest Its scholarly value is even acknowledged in the Soviet Union. • In addition to my most recently completed work mentioned above, I have, over the course of decades of research and in 35 major published works and hundreds of smaller works, devoted

61 "Budapest Abel Jen6 u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter fromth e XIth District Tandcs Vegrehajt6bizotts6ganak, IgazgatAsi osztaly to Fodor and his wife, Budapest, May 28,1958. 62 Only one of these awards, of course, came during the communist period, though Fodor does not mention this. myself to the service of humanity [bocsatottam kutatasaim eredmenyeit az emberiseg szolgalatara]. I am 72 year-old man. I have suffered from two strokes. The persistent anxiety which has accompanied my constant appeals to bureaucratic authorities has contributed to this [suffering] in a great way. I have worked throughout my life so mat I could leave a family home to my grandchildren. Our house has never been rented out since I didn't build the house for capitalist reasons. I cannot therefore understand the strict position [held by the state] by which my nine-member family is denied the right to own a house which we built through our own efforts, and which best serves our needs. It is completely incomprehensible that the state has set the limit for a family house at 6 rooms without allowing for family size to be factored in. There would be no problem, for example, if a single person was to own a 4-5 room family house. You are penalizing me for the simple fact that there are 8 rooms in our house which can be classified as "living-rooms" [lak6szoba]. You do not take into consideration, however, the fact that in our family, in which nine people live together, there are three family members (one university professor, a high school teacher, and a chemical engineer) engaged regularly in either academic research or intense official business, and four family members who are regularly rehearsing music (my daughter is a graduate of the music academy, my wife sang on the radio, and my grandchildren show great promise as musicians and singers as well). The two pianos in the house are regularly used, as are the two typewriters with which we produce scholarly work. It is here, in a house which is the product of our own labor, and in which we endeavored to create many small rooms, rather than a few large ones, that we live and work. This house meets our needs as a family, and it is for this that we worked, and continue to work. Despite the untold inconvenience [this affair has caused me], my belief in humane reasoning is unshaken. As I am now very much at the edge of my grave [a sirom szelen], I ask, therefore, that the City Council.. .reverse its decision, and return ownership of our house to my family.63

Fodor was quite sincere on one level about his desire to pass the house on to his grandchildren (and ultimately to their descendants). This final petition, in fact, one which apparently fell on deaf ears, reveals a great deal about the profound sense of

"Budapest Abel Jen6 u. 31. sz. hazaval kapcsolatos iratok, 1947-1959," letter from Fodor to the Budapest F6varos Tandcs Vegrehajtobizottsaganak, Budapest, n.d. (1958?). The underscoring is in the original letter. responsibility that he felt towards his family. By the same token, however, it also conceals the fundamental meaning and importance he attached to the house. Though it was more or less true that Fodor had no intention to ever profit excessively from it in a capitalistic way, it was also true that he himself viewed the house as more than a mere workshop for the production of socialist scholarship. The very same typewriter which was used to "give birth"64 to socialist geographies, in fact, was also used to continue work on a number of nationalist and autobiographical projects between 1949 and 1960.

Beginning with a lengthy biography of the conservative-nationalist geographer and former prime minister Count Pal Teleki (which he began collecting material for in

January 1949), Fodor not only produced two other "underground" works dealing explicitly with the geography of Hungarian memory, but also continued to work on a number of autobiographical projects, in particular his "Elettortenet" (or Life History—a work begun in Pecs during the war, and ultimately left incomplete in 1951); his "Eletem esemenyei" (a work which recorded the significant personal and national happenings of his life up to Christmas 1959); and his scrapbooks (a rather comprehensive chronicle of his life in pictures and documents). Dedicated to the preservation of memories both national and personal, these interconnected projects represented an important continuation of his true life's work, a body of scholarship and personal remembrances which was intimately tied to his house.

Indeed, Fodor's writing had not only paid for the building of the house in the early interwar period, but had also been quite literally built into it. In preparation for the laying of the cornerstone in 1931, Fodor had written a thirteen page autobiographical essay, one which situated himself and his house within the history of both his family and

64 This is the literal term he uses to describe the production of socialist scholarship in the letter cited above. 268

the nation while simultaneously stressing the importance of the physical structure to the

future of his family, and to his future legacy as a moral, nation-building Hungarian

intellectual. Bricked up behind this final stone laid in 1931, the essay itself ensured that

the house would serve as a repository of memory. This particular function of the house

was later underscored in the communist period. Having finished his biography of Teleki

(an interwar figure who had been condemned by the socialists as a fascist), Fodor's

daughter and son-in-law encouraged him to destroy it, lest it be found by the authorities

and used as an excuse to persecute Fodor, and perhaps even the entire family. Ignoring their pleas, and convinced of the importance of Teleki's memory to the future re-building

of the nation, Fodor instead hid the manuscript in his basement, concealing it, apparently, behind a wall of brick.65

As much as the house had been fromth e outset an extension of himself, then, it

also came to serve as a microcosm of the nation, a last desperate sanctuary in which

Fodor could work towards the preservation of conservative-nationalist values. The house, in fact, provided an intimate moral space within which conservative-nationalist ideals and practices could be maintained and enacted. As I argue in earlier chapters, it was not enough for Fodor to merely write about the nation and the moral code it entailed.

One had to be free to act it out as well, even if this became a primarily clandestine activity under communism. The picture of Fodor sitting in his backyard sometime in the

1950s clad in his boy scout uniform is indicative of the significance Fodor attached to his house as a performative refuge from the no doubt disagreeable role he was forced to play

65 This account of the manuscript being hidden behind a wall of brick was told to me by Fodor's granddaughters during an informal interview in the spring of 2004. It is a compelling story, but may, of course, be apocryphal. However, Fodor did hide the manuscript somewhere. It only resurfaced in the late 1980s. in the communist public sphere. Within bourgeois-nationalist thinking, the private realm of home and family had always served as a space within which individuals, and primarily men, could retreat from the hardships of public life, and regenerate themselves morally, emotionally, and spiritually.66 Fodor had certainly relied on this in the past, taking flight into the comfort of his family, his library, and his garden as a means of replenishing his inner strength. But now, under communism, this private space had taken on a new dimension, one which saw the home become the underground locus of previously public pedagogical activities. With the outside world closed off to open performances of conservative-nationalism, Fodor turned to the domestic sphere as the last performative refuge of nation and self.67

The significance of his house as a potential site of conservative-nationalist resistance sheds some interesting light on the complex motivations behind Fodor's scholarly engagement with Hungary's communist regime. Though one cannot in the end deny or overlook the fact that, beyond the question of basic survival, Fodor's socialist production was driven by a desperate, and at heart rather self-interested, attempt to retain vestiges of his undeniably bourgeois, conservative-nationalist identity, it would seem that he was also motivated by the pursuit of loftier, more altruistic goals. Beyond being driven by purely selfish motives, in fact, Fodor no doubt saw his socialist work as a

For an excellent discussion of how this classic Habermasian conceptualization of the private sphere has played out in Hungarian conservative-nationalist thinking, see Martha Lampland, "Family Portraits: Gendered Images of the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hungary," East European Politics and Societies 8/2 (Spring 1994): 287-316. See also Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," (1951) in his Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 67 It was in light of mis that Fodor is said to have organized secret youth meetings in his home. Led by a priest, these meetings brought together small groups of children between the ages often and twelve with gymnasium- and university-aged students who acted as group leaders. Based loosely on the boy-scout model, the meetings promoted Christian-nationalist values, and sought to introduce urban children to the wonder of nature through character-building "wilderness" excursions. Fodor's granddaughters, in fact, recollect going on nature walks in the Buda hills disguised as communist "Pioneers." necessary evil in his now frantic struggle to save the moral and ideological core of the nation from total oblivion.

Fodor's strategy of accommodation as a vehicle for resistance opens up some important questions regarding the nature and content of his socialist production. Could his published, communist-era scholarship—even his award winning essay on the history of hydrological engineering in the Tisza Valley—have provided a conduit of sorts for nationalist ideas and symbols which were otherwise driven underground after 1949?

Could it even be read as resistance on some level?

I think it can, though I realize that characterizing his work as such threatens to empty the notion of resistance of much of its meaning. Certainly, Fodor's published work under communism cannot be seen as active resistance, and may not even qualify as passive resistance, since Fodor chose to engage the regime rather than to remain silent.

However, this being said, his socialist geographies were not completely empty of meaningful nationalist critiques of Hungarian communism. As disagreeable as it may have been to him, the communist re-coding of the nation and national memory provided

Fodor with a forum, however circumscribed, to entertain conservative-nationalist themes that were generally rejected or otherwise silenced by Hungarian Communists.

The very fact that the communists sought to graft a socialist state onto a pre­ existing nation-state provided an avenue for carefully coded, and even subversive, allusions to the conservative-nationalist symbols and discourses which had been a staple of political rhetoric and iconography in the interwar period.68 Fodor's account of the

It is important to note in this context that Hungarian communists recognized full well the power of Hungarian nationalism (this, in fact, was one of the lessons of the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik revolution of 1919). For more on mis, see Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The 271 heroic struggle of patriotic Hungarian technocrats against foreign tyranny and ignorance, for example, could very well have been intended as an attack on communism itself as an alien political system, while his laudatory references to the nation-building achievements of the conservative visionary Count Istvan Szechenyi in the first half of the nineteenth century might likewise have been read as an historically-informed critique of the revolutionary program of both communism and its would-be socialist and liberal reformers.69 Moreover, the fact that this same work, along with other studies, dealt with river systems whose main arteries and tributaries extended well beyond the post-World

War I borders of truncated Hungary also meant that Fodor could continue to explore and contribute to the idea of Greater Hungary, even if no direct reference to this geographic body was itself possible.70

Far from marking a radical and inherently cynical departure from his underground conservative-nationalist work, in fact, Fodor's public scholarship was but one strategy employed in a complicated struggle not only against the communist regime, but also against its would-be liberal and socialist reformers, a loose-knit group of primarily middle-class intellectuals whose resurgence during the period of political liberalization ushered in by Imre Nagy between 1953 and 1956 was as unnerving to Fodor as the original consolidation of communism itself. Though Fodor seems to have sympathized

(at least in private) with the nationalistic, anti-communist discourse of the 1956

Revolution, he was certainly concerned with what might emerge in its place, especially if

Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944-48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), in particular Ch. 10.1 am indebted again to Robert Nemes for pointing mis out. 69 Fodor, Magyar Vizimernbkbknek a Tisza-vdlgyben, 142-43. 70 See, for example, articles such as "A Szamoshat Ssvizrajza," Foldrajzi Kbzlemenyek 3-4 (1953): 193- 204; "Pozsony, Buda, Kolozsvar foldrajzi helyzete legregibb terkepeinkben," Fbldmeristani Kbzlemenyek 6/4 (1954): 225-230 (part 1), and in 7/1 (1955): 45-51 (part 2); and "Magyarorszag vizrajzi terkepezese II. Jdzsef koraban," Viziigyi Kbzlemenyek 3-4 (1955): 379-396. 272

a victorious liberal or socialist regime managed to take hold, and gain the broad support

not only of Hungarian society, but also of the international community. Hungary might

indeed be liberated, but at what cost to the conservative-nationalist values and traditions

that he and his colleagues had worked so hard to restore and reinforce in the interwar period (Values, it might be added, that on at least a superficial level dovetailed with the

anti-cosmopolitan, anti-Semitic values of Hungary's hard-line communists)? What

possible good could come from a new regime adhering to a liberal-revolutionary tradition

which, at least from a conservative-nationalist point of view, had done so much damage

to Hungary in the past?

Notes From the Underground: Nationalism and Autobiography under Communism

Despite whatever noble qualities Fodor may have attributed to his socialist work, there

can be no question that he was, on some level, deeply troubled by his on-going

cooperative association with Hungary's communist regime. Beyond the perpetual

frustration and humiliation that he faced in his dealings with communist institutions such as the TMB and the municipal housing board, Fodor was obviously concerned with how his public role under communism would be perceived, not only by his contemporaries, but also by future generations of Hungarians, and in particular by his family. After all, what possible credibility and moral authority would he ultimately have as a conservative- nationalist intellectual and nation-builder if he was seen by others to be nothing more than an opportunistic collaborator?

Admittedly, Fodor himself did not openly address the question of collaboration in any of the existing primary sources. However, there is strong evidence in his 273 unpublished "underground" work to suggest that he was nevertheless preoccupied by the fear of being branded a collaborator. In the communist-era entries in "Eletem esemenyei", for example, Fodor noticeably distanced himself fromhi s scholarly, and very public, socialist work, time and again highlighting the underlying financial need which forced him to seek out employment within Hungary's restructured academic framework.71 Fodor was careful, after all, not only to characterize his scholarly socialist work as "menial," but also to link it clearly to the "grievous tribulations" that he suffered under communism.72 As already noted in a lengthy quotation in the introduction to this chapter, he even went so far as to identify his work as part of the cross he was forced to bear during the communist period. By stressing the necessity of his socialist work while simultaneously pointing to his continued devotion to his family, the nation, and God,

Fodor was obviously keen to justify his actions, and to show, at the very least to himself, that, though he had been forced to compromise his scholarship in order to get it published, he had never fully compromised the conservative-nationalist values which had sustained him throughout his life, and which made him who he was.

This attempt to distance himself fromth e communists, and to obviate accusations of collaboration by reiterating an unbroken continuity with his pre-communist self, is particularly evident in his scrapbooks, a project which, as we saw in Chapter Four, was begun in a fit of existential melancholy during the war, and continued by Fodor into the

71 It is interesting to note that the scholarly exposure that Fodor's publications brought him also opened him up to public criticism from those within the system who questioned his sincerity, inferring as they did so that his socialist work constituted nothing less than cynical, or at best strategic, opportunism on his part. In fact, a number of Fodor's contemporaries charged him with just this. As his wife noted in her biography of him, it was not long after Fodor had been awarded the prize for his work on the hydrological engineers of the Tisza Valley that a "clique of enemies" lined up against him, preparing to denounce Fodor's insincerity publicly. Motivated by ideological differences, political ambition, and perhaps even academic envy, this unnamed band of enemies threatened to undermine Fodor's efforts to reintegrate himself into Hungary's scholarly community. 72 See Fodor "Eletem esemenyei," in particular entries in the mid-1950s. 274 communist period. A product of his autobiographical compulsion to assemble detailed, though highly selective, interconnecting narratives of his life history, Fodor's scrapbooks took on a new sense of urgency in the 1950s. In part this was no doubt due to his rapidly failing health. But, more than this, it was a reflection of his need to prove to others—and quite possibly to himself—that, to the very end, he had lived his life according to a moral code which promoted traditional Hungarian values, religious faith, and an unwavering desire for the territorial resurrection of the historic Kingdom of Hungary.

The photo noted above of an elderly Fodor posing in his backyard dressed in his boy scout uniform is but one example of his effort to illustrate not only his contempt for and distance from the communist regime, but also the continuity that existed between his interwar and postwar self. As if thumbing his nose at communist authority, the preservation of this photo in his scrapbooks suggests defiance rather than collaboration, and further underlines Fodor's self-professed dedication to the perpetuation of a very particular, interconnected vision of Hungarian manhood and nationhood. This photograph—especially within the context of the full scrapbook project—suggests that, though driven underground, the defiant preservation of conservative-nationalist practices, values, and ideals maintained important links to the past.

This interconnected narrative of defiance and continuity is particularly evident in a small, but deeply symbolic, Hungarian flag stapled to a white piece of paper, and glued to the top of a loose page not clearly connected to any of the scrapbooks. Dirty, water- stained, and slightly torn, the red, white, and green Hungarian tri-colour is accompanied by type-written text explaining its significance. Indicating that "this small national flag was the one that was at my seat at the banquet given by Lord Rothermeere (sic) for 275

Figure 6 Fodor's prized flag (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks)

Hungarian [boy scout] officers at the Savoy Hotel during the Jamboree in England [in

1929]," Fodor added with a clear sense of pride that "it has been on my desk since 1942, held in place by a small boy-scout statuette during both World War II and under communism."73 Added to his scrapbooks at some point during the communist period,

Fodor no doubt desired to draw attention not only to his service as boy scout leader in the interwar period, and thus by extension to his well-established credentials as a conservative-nationalist pedagogue, but also to his lifetime of service to the nation.

Under the shadow of his desktop flag, Fodor portrayed himself as a man who had by no means forgotten his roots and his nation-building past; a man who continued to work for the good of the nation and its people, even under communism.

A similar discursive effect is achieved in book twenty-one, the last of Fodor's ambitious scrapbook project. At first this scrapbook, one which appears to have pages missing, comes across as a real hodge-podge of artifacts. Amidst a few family

73 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, loose page. 276 photographs, in fact, are references not only to his underground nationalist work and convictions, but also to his public involvement with, and recognition by, the regime.

Indeed, in addition to including his invitation to a March 1955 meeting of the Academy of Science where he was honored for his award-winning essay on the hydrological engineers of the Tisza Valley, Fodor also included a short letter dated October 13,1956 from the Magyar Statisztikai Tarsasag (Hungarian Statistical Society) inviting him to re­ join the organization. Noting that the society would be undergoing a restructuring "in the near future," and that they had decided to invite past members to join and form the basis of this newly restructured research body, they asked if Fodor would consider becoming a member once more. "Since you were once a member of the Society," they wrote, "we ask in the name of the organizing committee if you would like to join, and kindly ask that you respond no later than the 23rf [of October]."74 For whatever reason, Fodor never did re­ join the society, and it is curious therefore that he would include this letter in his scrapbooks. Could it be that he wanted to show his continued "public" relevance in the communist period? Was he perhaps driven by an egoism which viewed any recognition from state authorities in a positive light? Or did he consciously position these documents alongside others in order to present an "honest" accounting of his life under communism?

In the absence of sufficient primary evidence that deals openly with these questions, it is difficult to discern what Fodor's intentions were when he began assembling this particular scrapbook sometime during the mid to late 1950s. However, judging by how he contextualized these two documents, it is quite likely that, if he did intend on painting a "truthful" picture of his complex life under communism, he was

74 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks," book twenty-one, letter from Jeno" R&Jei, secretary of the organizing committee for the Hungarian Statistical Society, to Fodor, Budapest, October 13,1956. Asking Fodor to respond by October 23 was certainly auspicious, since this is the day that the Hungarian Revolution broke out. 277

keen on justifying or explaining away his socialist, and, perhaps in some eyes,

collaborationist work by highlighting his patriotism and lifelong dedication to the nation.

In the middle of the scrapbook, for example, Fodor included a type-written list of the

fourteen revolutionary points drawn up and broadcast by Hungarian students at the

beginning of the Revolution on October 23, 1956. This list, one which made patriotic

and impassioned demands for Hungarian independence, was immediately followed by a

handwritten letter written in 1957 from Endredy Vendel, a Catholic priest and close

personal friend from the small village of Zirc who had been a great support to Fodor

during his time in Pecs between 1940 and 1943. Reading much like earlier letters he had

sent to Fodor during the war, Vendel's very personal and affectionate letter was full of

praise for Fodor—for his work, his friendship, and his steadfast sense of morality in dark

and difficult times.75 Himself no friend of the communists, Vendel began the letter by

wishing Fodor a happy birthday, and then continued by commending him for the example

he was continuing to set for the nation. Praising him in language that would have been

very familiar and gratifying for Fodor to read, Vendel wrote:

May God bless you for all your decades of tireless work and dedication to the education and spiritual enlightenment [of the nation].[...] May He also grant you the strength, health, and suitable time to do still more for our nation and our youth, and also for your dear family and your friends who love and hold you in high esteem, perhaps me more than all the rest.76

Important and symbolic for a number of reasons, this short letter not only spoke to the

sense of fraternal love and bonding which formed the basis of Fodor's fantasy of national manhood, but also expressed in a clear and succinct manner the image of himself that he

75 For an example of an earlier letter written by Vendel to Fodor, see FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, book fifteen, letter fromVende l to Fodor, Zirc, December 2,1942. 76 FP, Fodor's scrapbooks, book twenty-one, letter fromVende l to Fodor, February 28,1957. 278 wanted to project for posterity. Despite his socialist scholarship, Fodor wanted to show that he had remained at heart a man of God and the nation, a moral patriot who continued to win the praise and affection of other like-minded conservative-nationalist men engaged in their own struggles against the regime. If he was worthy of Vendel's love (and even forgiveness?), he should be worthy of anyone's.

The very last document in this scrapbook, a poem that he saw handwritten on a street placard on November 18,1956, again appears to address the question of collaboration, if perhaps in an indirect way. Entitled "Verje meg az Isten" (God Defeat

Them), the 24-line poem reflects upon the brutal suppression of the Revolution by Soviet forces in early November 1956. Glorifying the nation's heroic youth—students who,

"with our national flag in hand," led the uprising and fought to create "a free and more beautiful Hungary"—the unnamed poet demonized those responsible for unleashing the forces of Russian barbarism. Reflecting on the violent attacks launched by "foreign tanks" against Hungarian freedom fighters, and lamenting the untold destruction wrought by "the Mongol cannonade," the poem repeatedly called upon God "to defeat those who wanted this" (verje meg az Isten, aki ezt akarta). Referring, obviously, to the communist leadership in Moscow, the poem also condemned those within the Hungarian Communist

Party who called for a Soviet intervention to crush the Revolution. Using the poem to align himself symbolically with this popular condemnation of what he and others saw to be truly contemptible Hungarian collaborators, Fodor further distanced himself from a morally-corrupt regime whose actions had caused so much pain and suffering for the nation. 279

Fodor's scrapbooks were but one vehicle for the expression and preservation of his "true" underground self. Driven by his sense of duty to the future, and perhaps anxious to show that his socialist work had not left him "morally contaminated," Fodor continued to research and write truly nationalist studies, ones which, however useful they may have been as source material in the production of socialist geography, would never be published under communism. Concerned by how both he and the nation would be remembered, he devoted whatever free time and energy he had to the production of underground scholarship, work which, along with earlier unpublished scholarship like "A magyar lit foldrajza" (The Geography of Hungarian Being), would function as part of a time capsule to be opened by a future generation of Hungarians in search of their historical, geographical, and spiritual roots.

It was to this end that Fodor embarked in the early 1950s upon a geographical

"biography" of his self-professed home city, Szatmar (Satu Mare), a city located in the northern reaches of the Partium, an historic region of Hungary nestled between

Transylvania to the east, and the Great Hungarian Plain to the west. Entitled "Szatmar foldje, Szatmar n6pe, Szatmar elete" (The Land, People, and Life of Szatmar)77 this introspective, 325-page study sought to refresh memories of a lost city which, torn from the Hungarian body in 1920 by the violence of war and the self-aggrandizing geopolitical ambitions of the victorious powers, had been briefly returned to Hungary during the war,

77 The correct name for Fodor's "hometown" is actually Szatmar-Nemeti, a city which was created in the eighteenth century by the amalgamation of the "sister cities" Szatmar and N&neti. In spite of mis, Fodor insists on referring to the city after the amalgamation almost exclusively as Szatmar. This is potentially confusing, since Szatmar is also the name of the county in which Szatmar-Nemeti was historically located. His constant use of "Szatmar" as the name of the city, however, is by no means insignificant. Szatmar was developed as a fortified position, and was inhabited fromth e beginning, or so Fodor argues, predominantly by Magyars, or ethnic Hungarians. N&neti, by contrast, was founded and was for centuries populated primarily by Germans, and served as a commercial centre rather than as a defensive position. It played, in many ways, a capitalistic and decadent "Pest" to Szatmar's morally-stable "Buda," and was dependent on the later for its safety and security (at least this is how Fodor portrays it). 280 only to be re-attached again to Romania after the combined German-Hungarian defeat in

1945. By tracing the historical and geographical evolution of the city, and by carefully illustrating, more importantly, its fundamental Hungarian character, Fodor hoped to preserve a permanent place for Szatmar in the Hungarian national consciousness.

"Szatmar lives within me," he wrote in the introduction, "and memories from my youth demand that I continue to feel this life, and render it perceptible to others."78 The communists, he implied, might not appreciate his efforts, but future generations of moral, nation-loving (and nation-building) Hungarians would.

Fodor, in fact, presented himself as being ideally positioned to write a geo- historical account of the quasi-biological life history of Szatmar. Underlining the importance of a morally-informed subject whose ties to the land and its people only served to enhance, rather than detract from, an accurate biographical study of a particular place, Fodor wrote: "Every biography stems from two fundamental sources, the life of the subject being examined, and the life of the examiner himself." The closer the two are related, he continued, the more possible it is "to arrive at a more faithful picture of the subject being studied." Consciously writing himself into the geo-historical narrative he was creating, Fodor concluded that "only a researcher with intimate ties to the land can faithfully construct the life of his native country."79 Though he did not use the term anywhere in this particular manuscript, the study itself was very much an exercise in the principles of psycho-geography that he had developed during the war.

In terms of its theoretical point of departure, then, Fodor's biography of Szatmar was not unlike "The Geography of Hungarian Being" which preceded it. Perhaps not

78 MTAKK Ms 10.740/1, Fodor Ferenc, "Szatmar Mdje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar elete" (Budapest, 1954), 2. 79 Ibid., 2. 281 surprisingly, it was also quite similar in terms of content and especially structure. As in his earlier work begun during the Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944-45, Fodor begins by locating and describing his subject spatially, providing not only a detailed description of Szatmar's geographical features, but also an analysis of the city's complex relationship with its immediate surroundings, and ultimately the nation as a whole.

Though it certainly constituted an organic unity in its own right, Fodor shows how

Szatmar was a geographically and hydrologically inseparable appendage of the

Carpathian Basin, a geographic unit which, from time immemorial, had provided a distinctive shape to Hungary's historic, though now-dismembered, geo-body.

Particularly relevant in light of the interconnected political, didactic, and ultimately autobiographical significance of this work is how Fodor periodizes, and then analyzes, the modern era from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War II.

Dividing this era into three periods (namely Christian conservatism, 1800-1867; degenerate "Jewish" liberalism, 1867-1920; and Romanian barbarism, 1920-1939), Fodor shows how Szatmar was built into a modern though ultimately conservative city by a string of visionary bishops, and then how this "brilliant, shining" example of Hungarian morality and industriousness slowly decayed between 1867 and the First World War, a period of decadent liberalism and aggressive assimilationist policies which only served to weaken, rather than strengthen, the nation. Though he admits that this period brought unprecedented growth and economic prosperity to Szatmar, he laments the unprincipled and immoral way in which the process of modernization was carried out, and is even more critical of the adverse, degenerative impact that the wholesale "magyarization" of ethnic minorities had on the city socially and culturally. Weakened by these factors, the

80 Ibid., 169. city's Hungarian citizens faced a difficult struggle against the oppressive and ultimately crippling "occupation" by the Romanians during the interwar period.

Layering and then analyzing the history of Szatm&r in this way allowed Fodor to do two things. First, it provided him with an opportunity to identify an authentic

Hungarian core, one which was at once Catholic, morally conservative, and fiercely patriotic, especially when provoked. The real heroes of Fodor's narrative are undoubtedly the members of this ethnic body, Christian men and women (but primarily clergymen, teachers, and scholars) who functioned as the true builders of modern

Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century, and who went on to serve as its principal defenders during the subsequent periods of internal decline and foreign occupation. Second, it allowed him to position himself, albeit indirectly, within this ethnic core, and to tie his own identity as a conservative-nationalist Hungarian to the self- image of this group. When read against other unpublished autobiographical sources, it becomes readily apparent that he saw himself as being part of an heroic Hungarian vanguard who, even when they were "barricaded" behind the gates of their schools and churches, managed to hold back the forces of degeneration and tyranny. In the introduction to "The Geography of Hungarian Being," for example, and also in a number of autobiographical sketches written at different points in his life, Fodor referred to his pedagogical work, his scholarship, and his social activism as constituting part of a moral defense for Hungary. When he wrote, therefore, that "it was from behind the gates of

Szatmar's Christian schools, churches, and other institutions that the rootless and unpatriotic spirit of the liberal period was held at bay," it is easy to see how Fodor, who 283 attended a Catholic gymnasium in Szatmar, and who later taught in Catholic schools, might have seen himself as being part of this line of nationalist defense.81

The fact that Fodor refers to Szatmar as his home city, even though he was not born there, provides yet another important insight into the autobiographical elements which run through his study. Fodor was, in fact, born in Tenke, a small village roughly

50 km from Szatmar, and only moved fromther e to this much larger regional centre as a boy often to begin his studies as a gymnasium student. Given that a good number of his formative years were spent in Szatmar, it is perhaps understandable that he would regard it rather than Tenke as being home. As he himself admits, "one's home is not necessarily where one was born, but where one gains self consciousness, an awareness of one's purpose in life, and a sense of one's relationship to the outside world. Szatmar is my spiritual and intellectual homeland."82 Again, when read against other unpublished autobiographical material, it becomes clear that Szatmar was not simply a place in which he became aware of himself, but rather was a place where he began to imagine or invent himself—as a scholar, as a man, and as a nationalist. Szatmar was significant because it marked his first attempt to code himself, to lay down roots, and to begin his lifelong struggle to distance himself fromhi s impoverished, provincial, working-class origin in

Tenke. Though he would refer back to Tenke with fondness (especially during the

81 Besides "The Geography of Hungarian Being," see MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/1, Ferenc Fodor, "Onelefrajza/Curriculum Vitae" (Pecs, 1940); and MKVM 28-97.1/3, Fodor Ferenc, "ElettSrtenet," {Life History) unpublished document (written in Pecs and Budapest between 1941 and 1950). On the nature of conservative Christian nationalism in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century, see Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, andAntisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). 82 Fodor, "Szatmar foldje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar 61ete," 2. It is interesting to note that in an autobiographical sketch written in 1931, Fodor referred to Szatmar as his "second home" {mdsodik sziilofdldem). See also Fodor, "Emlelcezetul," 4. 83 See in particular Fodor's "Elettortenet" noted above. 284 communist period, when it was politically astute for him to do so), Szatmar was his true hometown, however imagined it may have been, and served as a familiar discursive and symbolic space in which he could find solace and safety, even under communism.

Like his scrapbooks and the chronological life-narrative he provided in "Eletem esemenyei," "Szatmar foldje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar elete" was not merely a response to the present, but more importantly represented a projection of both nation and self into the future. As a time capsule, it would serve as a vehicle for both national and personal memory, and would further help to vindicate him in light of his socialist scholarship.

This careful packaging of his work, one in which nation and self were intimately linked in such a way as to depict Fodor in the vanguard of the on-going conservative-nationalist struggle against the forces of fragmentation and dissolution, speaks volumes to the important link that exists within the modern paradigm between memory and identity. As

Paul Ricoeur argues in Memory, History, Forgetting, the act of remembering something other than oneself is intimately tied to one's perception of self—to how one sees oneself in the present, and to how this self-image is projected into the future. Connected to his conceptualization of "pragmatic" or "active" memory as creative in a fundamentally phenomenological sense, Ricoeur suggests that in remembering an object, one remembers oneself.84

This self-constructing or autobiographical function of memory outlined by

Ricoeur was obviously present in Fodor's underground work, and especially in his biography of Szatmar. It was, however, also reflected in his published socialist

84 Drawing on the distinction made by the ancient Greeks between "mneme" and "anamnesis," Ricoeur distinguishes between passive or cognitive memory, and active or pragmatic memory. "To remember," he writes, is either "to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory." See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. 285 scholarship, especially in biographical and quasi-biographical studies which focused on the lives and work of often forgotten Hungarian geographers and scientists. His Magyar

Vizimernokoknek a Tisza-volgyben was an obvious example of this, especially given the emphasis Fodor placed on the "heroic" nation-building work of the conservative- nationalist icon Count Istvan Szechenyi. Even more telling in this respect was his 1953 study of the life and work of Antal Balla, an important though little-known eighteenth- century Hungarian cartographer and natural scientist who, much like Fodor, cultivated other educated gentlemanly interests such as archaeology, music, and art. Granted, the narrative of this short work is for the most part mechanical and uninspiring, focused as it is on the more technical aspects of Balla's cartographical and scientific endeavours. The brief glimpses that he provided into Balla's personal life, however, combined with the praise that he lavished on the more creative, artistic side of his work suggests that Fodor projected his own self-image onto the object of his study. The image of himself that he constructed in his own scrapbooks, in fact, runs parallel in many ways with the image that he conveyed of Balla. Foregrounding the nation-building importance of his scholarly work, Fodor nevertheless integrated images and texts documenting not only his talents as an artist, photographer, and musician, but also his skills and achievements as a botanist and gentleman adventurer. Water colours of birds and landscapes that he painted were included in a number of his scrapbooks, for example, as were references to public performances he gave playing the tdrogato, or shawm (a Hungarian double-reed instrument not unlike an oboe). Textual accounts and photographs of his many scientific and touristic excursions, moreover, reflected the self-image of a man who saw himself as Figure 7 Scrapbook montage (source: FP. Fodor's Scrapbooks)

being deeply connected to the land through both his work and his passionate love of all

things natural.

A montage of three photographs (see Figure 7) taken in 1912 and mounted in book four of his scrapbooks speaks volumes to the way that Fodor regarded himself, and wanted to be remembered by posterity. Taken within a year of his arrival at his first 287 teaching post in the provincial town of Karansebes (Caransebe§), the pictures capture a number of the more important, interconnected aspects of his life which he regarded as being integral to his identity and sense of self. At the top of the page is a photograph of

Fodor posed with his tdrogato. He is outside, amidst nature, his weight on his left leg, a cape strung over his shoulders. He appears to be playing the instrument, though the way he is looking at the camera suggests that the photograph was definitely staged. The caption reads simply: "1912, spring." In the middle of the page is a photograph of the room which served as Fodor's study in Karansebes. As in so many other pictures of his living and work spaces that he included in his scrapbooks, his desk is foregrounded. The caption: "my bachelor apartment." On the bottom of the page is a photograph of Fodor obviously dressed for an excursion. He is wearing a Bavarian-style hat, a cape, and leather boots which come up to just above the calf. He is sitting at the base of a tree on one of its exposed roots. In his hand is a walking stick, and on his knee a knapsack. The photographer is slightly below him, giving the image itself an unmistakably noble and majestic air. The caption: "1912."85

This sense of nobility and gentlemanly accomplishment is certainly present in his study of Balla. Indeed, Fodor no doubt saw a kindred spirit in Balla, a man motivated not only by the pursuit of science and the love of his country, but also by the beauty and wonder of nature. Balla, he writes, was an artist rather than a mere technician, a highly- cultured scholar who illustrated his maps with intricate drawings of Hungarian flora, and who inundated his work with mythical and religious symbolism. "It was only after him,"

Fodor assures us, "that the profession [of cartography] became a dry [technical] craft."86

85 This is a common masculine motif mat runs through his scrapbooks. 86 Fodor, Balla Antal elete es mUszaki munkassdga. 1739-1815,53. Figure 8 Watercolor of bird (painted by Fodor in 1904) included in his scrapbooks (source: FP, Fodor's Scrapbooks)

Such a statement ultimately says as much about the nature of scholarship under communism as it does about the state of Hungarian cartography at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In making this claim, Fodor drew attention to his own situation, and to the situation of others who, like him, were compelled to become mere political 289 functionaries, bending their scholarship to the pragmatic demands of socialist state- building. By praising Balla's maps and their artistic, humanistic content, and by further voicing his contempt for the functional yet unimaginative cartography which followed in his wake, Fodor was suggesting—if only implicitly—that he would prefer to be remembered as a creative, free4hinking scholar, rather than as a communist-era drone.

The fear, in fact, that he would not be remembered "correctly," or that he would be forgotten altogether after his death, underlines Fodor's biography of Balla. His lament that Balla's name had "disappeared without a trace from Hungarian intellectual history," and that German-speaking scholars had even attributed some of bis scholarly achievements to Austrian scientists, blends with Fodor's own anxiety that he himself would eventually be buried and forgotten by a regime guided by a foreign political and ideological agenda. In preserving the memory of Balla, therefore, he was, if only by proxy, also preserving the memory of himself. Conclusion; Remembering Fodor

"And so they are ever returning to us, the dead." W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)

Ferenc Fodor died on May 24,1962 at the age of seventy-five. His death was not unexpected, and in many ways had been a long time in coming. Fodor himself had felt his days to be numbered as early as 1955, when he suffered his first major stroke while on holiday with his wife Vira in the Matra mountains. Overlapping with a number of other life-long health problems, including a weak heart, Fodor's deteriorating health only made his old age all the harder to bear. Another set of serious strokes in 1957, and then again in 1960, left Fodor in a more or less "vegetative state" for the last few years of his life.1 His eventual passing in 1962, then, was as much a blessing for him as it was a source of great sadness for his family and friends.

A surviving fragment of the eulogy given at Fodor's funeral provides some insight into the way in which at least one of his closest friends (a priest who unfortunately goes unnamed in the document) felt he should be remembered. Noting that Fodor was a scholar whose love of "Hungarian maps" and of "the Hungarian land and soil" compelled him to "sift through the dust for shining examples of Hungarian legends, Hungarian heroes, and Hungarian greatness," the eulogist declared:

He was an honorable man who never tired of documenting the triumphs of the Hungarian spirit. Throughout his entire life he dedicated himself to the study of every cherished inch of his native land, and in this pursuit he disappointed no one, least of which the Hungarian nation."2

1MTAKK Ms 10.740/77, Vira Fenczik Fodorne\ "Fodor Ferenc elete" (1962), 39. 2 Ibid., 42. As noted above, the name of the eulogist is not given. Fodor's wife, who wrote the account from which this quote is taken, merely indicates mat he was a priest, and a friend of her deceased husband.

290 291

Employing language that no doubt would have satisfied Fodor, the eulogist continued by

stating that "his life displayed a beautiful and monumental synthesis of the individual as a

human being, a husband, a father, a brother, a public functionary, a teacher, and a scholar.

He did not fail in the duties that God assigned to him, and for which the Almighty sent

him to earth."3

Spoken at least in partial defiance of the communist regime that had forced

Fodor's deeply-held nationalist convictions underground in the postwar period, the

eulogy was just one instance of a concerted effort on the part of those closest to Fodor to

remember him after his death. This impulse to keep his memory alive was most strongly

felt amongst his family, and in particular by the three generations of women—his wife,

his daughter, and his granddaughters—who were to act as his principal archivists into the

post-communist period. It was only a matter of months after Fodor's death that Vira, in

fact, began assembling the material needed to write a biography of his life. Begun on

Christmas Eve, 1963—exactly "fifty years to the day," she wrote, "that he placed the

engagement ring on my finger"—Vira's fifty-page, type-written biography of her

husband was intended to preserve for future generations a true and honest accounting of

his life, one which had been marred at points by the "malicious envy and disparaging

deeds of others."4 "The half century we spent together," she wrote, "and the two world wars that we lived through, virtually demand that I preserve for posterity the memory of his spirit, his honest and honorable character, and his loving marital fidelity." As if to justify her own self-appointed role as his biographer, she added: "I am not the kind of person who easily forgets, and now, as I have been left without my life partner, I will not

3 Ibid., 41-42. 4 Ibid., 1. 292 be at peace until I provide a true picture of my husband... .Indeed, nobody could possibly know him as deeply as I."5

The obvious passion and conviction with which Vira committed herself to the preservation of his memory has more recently been matched by his granddaughters Maria and Klara, especially since the collapse of state socialism in 1989-90. Eager, perhaps, to counter the relative oblivion to which communism had cast him, both women have worked to rehabilitate the memory of their grandfather in the eyes of the nation. At least some of their efforts have revolved around the house that Fodor built in the summer of

1930, and which, after nearly three decades of state ownership, was finally returned to the family in the mid 1980s. The symbolism of this reacquisition was in no way lost on the family, who, as Fodor himself had intended, saw the house not just as a physical manifestation of their ancestral roots, but also as a living repository of family memory.

The significance of the house's dual function was made clear to me at the end of my first visit with the family in the spring of 2004, when, on the way out, I was given a

"tour" of the collection of family photographs and portraits that hung on Klara's living- room wall. Like most such collections, the photographs were arranged hierarchically according to generation—a carefully coordinated commingling of paternal and maternal lines of descent intended to trace the ancestral origins of the house's present inhabitants.

Drawing me close, Klara's husband pointed out the pictures of Fodor and his wife, explaining to me how, after the death of their only son in the 1930s, the Fodor family- name gave way to Hunek, and then how Hunek became Kollar when he himself had married into the family some thirty years later. He was careful to identify all the people

5 Ibid. Given the nature of their relationship, one has to wonder if she was perhaps more committed to him in death man in life. 293 in the large family photographs and montages, pointing out blurry or partially hidden faces here, and important names there. Taking a step back as if to survey the whole, he proudly declared: 'These are our roots!" Klara agreed. It was obvious that both were very much comforted by this fact; by the very ability of these framed images to provide a tangible link to the family's past, and thus also to their own identity and sense of self.

The importance that Fodor's descendants have attached to the house goes beyond the mere familial, however. Adding their own voices to the on-going discussion of national identity that has flooded the public sphere in the last two decades, the family has consciously used the house not just as a means of remembering Fodor, but also as a means of revisiting a national self-image that had faded from view in the wake of the

Second World War. Beyond reviving the practice of holding scouting meetings in the back garden, the family also worked hard to publicize the house as the dwelling place of an important interwar scholar and patriot. As the commemorative plaque they had affixed to the house in the mid-1990s explained:

Here, with his family, Dr. Ferenc Fodor (1887-1962) lived and worked. "He devoted his entire life to the pursuit of Hungarian geography and village research."6

Despite his overriding fears to the contrary, it would appear that Fodor is not, and indeed never has been, in any immediate danger of being forgotten. In fact, the renewed interest in the post-communist period in right-wing, conservative-nationalist ideas;—and by extension also in the intellectuals and politicians who created and promoted them in

* "Csaladjaval itt 61t es alkotott Dr. Fodor Ferenc, 1887-1962. "Egesz eletet a magyar fSldrajztudomany es falukutatas fejlesztesenek aldozta." (Inscription on the commemorative plaque dedicated to Fodor by his family in 2003). 294

Figure 9 Fodor's house reclaimed (note the commemorative plaque mounted beside the window). Photograph by author. the interwar period—has led collectors and scholars alike to revisit some of Fodor's unpublished work. Though manuscripts like "A magyar let foldrajza" and with it also

"Szatmar foldje, Szatmar nepe, Szatmar elete" have generated little interest (at least in terms of their possible publication), Fodor's lengthy underground biography of the conservative-nationalist prime minister and geographer Count Pal Teleki has, in fact, finally seen "the light of day." Edited in part by Lorant Tilkovszky, a Hungarian historian whose earlier scholarship actually contributed to the partial rehabilitation of

Teleki in the early 1970s,7 this manuscript had been started by Fodor in 1949 in the hopes that, at some point in the future, a full and truthful rendering of Teleki's life would be

7 See, for example, his biographical sketch Pal Teleki, 1879-1941 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1974). 295 possible. Having been secretly bricked-up in the cellar of the Fodor family house, the manuscript was only discovered in the late 1990s by his granddaughters who, not knowing what to do with it, sold it to a Budapest antiquarian who regularly publishes such historically relevant artifacts. With Tilkovszky's help, the manuscript was carefully edited so as to omit the sections which portrayed Teleki in an overly antisemitic light.

The reason they gave for this was that they did not want to "misrepresent" either Teleki or Fodor. They argued that, given today's racially sensitive climate, the general public could not possibly be expected to understand, let alone forgive, the purported innocence or harmlessness of Fodor's otherwise antisemitic language. My own suspicion, however, is that they were as interested in maximizing sales as they were committed to

"protecting" the reputations of the two men.8

Despite the omissions and changes to the published text, Fodor no doubt would have been pleased that his name was being remembered alongside Teleki's. He would also have approved of the family's efforts to find a publisher for his biography of Teleki, and likely would have agreed with the decision taken by his editors to tame the antisemitic language contained within. Fodor, like so many other nationalist thinkers, was aware, if only implicitly, that "forgetting" is often a central component of

"remembering;" that it is a necessary device used to preserve the essence of the "truths" one so desperately clings to.9 He would have resigned himself, I think, to the fact that the

The Budapest antiquarian to whom the original was sold was Zoltan Mike. Though Mike was gracious enough to share a number of other documents that he had acquired fromFodor' s family, efforts on my part to convince him to show me the original were continually rebuffed. There are rumours that a photocopy of the original does exist, but I was unable to locate even that. For the recently published version of the "underground" original, see Ferenc Fodor, Teleki Pal (Budapest: Mike es Tarsasag, 2001). 9 This observation is borne out by Fodor's own admission in the introduction to his "biography" of Szatmar, written between 1951 and 1953, that "truth" is not always revealed in the facts, but requires a creative human subject to bring it to life. MTAKK Ms 10.740/1-76, "Szatmar fSldje, Szatmar n^pe, Szatmar elete" (1954), 3. 296 politics of the past often need to be rewritten to conform to and support the politics of the present. The fact that Teleki's life story needed to be reworked to conform to a newly ascendant discursive regime, therefore, would not have come as much of a surprise.

Indeed, as he himself might have predicted from his own work on figures like Bela Bulla and the hydrological engineers of the Tisza Valley, old geographers don't necessarily die, they just get remapped.

This process of remapping, one which, in Fodor's case, began with the eulogy, and which is continued in this current project, is no doubt worthy of a study of its own, and I can in no way do it justice in this short conclusion. However, at the risk of opening up questions for which I cannot even begin to provide satisfactory answers, I think it would be worth looking briefly at two very different ways that Fodor has been remembered since his death in 1962. It is my hope that doing so will suggest how

Fodor's life story has been interwoven with the lives and identities of others, including my own.

Until Death Do Us Part: Fodor's Wife as Biographer

In the introduction to his study on autobiography and the construction of national identity in the Americas, Steven Hunsaker notes that, though it may not hold for every case, there is a tendency amongst female autobiographers "to defy traditional gender roles as well as restrictive forms of national and personal identity in their narratives."10 Drawing on

Sidonie Smith's contention that "the mythologies of gender conflate human and male figures of selfhood, aligning male selfhood with culturally valued stories," and that the

10 Steven V. Hunsaker, Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 7. 297 autobiographical female therefore "unmasks [in her writing] her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority," Hunsaker concludes that "[in] speaking aggressively against cultural and ideological pressures that restrict their public identity, these women claim public voices by appropriating for their own purposes a genre that has long supported traditional forms of male identity."11

Though not an autobiography in the strict sense of the term, I would like to suggest here that Vira's 1963 biography of Fodor was, in a very real and meaningful sense, autobiographical, in large part because it conforms so well to the framework outlined by Hunsaker and Smith above. In fact, there is a clear indication in the opening paragraph of Vira's (autobiographical account that she was aware that, by attempting to write the life story of her dead husband, she was transgressing existing gender conventions. As if to establish her own authority as a rational, autonomous agent, Vira began by writing: "Cogito ergo sum—this is not just Descartes' famous phrase, but is also quoted often by those of us who love to think." Noting that it was only after "much contemplation" that she decided to take up the task of writing Fodor's biography, she continued by declaring: "Though it is an unusual and uncommon undertaking for a wife to dare to take it upon herself to write a biography of her scholar husband, I am not alone.

The first biography of the American writer Jack London was also written by his wife."12

Having established her own authority to tell his story, Vira then proceeds to tell his life's tale, consciously writing herself into the narrative she is weaving around the important events of Fodor's life. Working from many of the same diaries and

11 Ibid., 7-8. Here Hunsaker is citing fromSidoni e Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 50. 12 Vira Fenczik Fodorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete," 1. To this she adds: "I do not have the slightest intention of summing up and assessing my husband's geographical achievements; this, and the evaluation of his life's work, is the task of experts." 298

autobiographical fragments that I have used to write this present study, Vira obviously

used the opportunity that the medium of biography offered her to gloss over the more

difficult and painful memories of their lives together and, perhaps even more importantly, to counter the sometimes disparaging image that Fodor appears to have constructed of her throughout his life.

Indeed, though Vira indicates in her short introduction that she "has endeavored to write the truth [of Fodor's life] with complete objectivity," she nevertheless manages in the same stroke of the pen to erase, or at least avoid, a rather stormy period in their early relationship, one which Fodor himself was careful to document in his unpublished autobiographical essay entitled "Eletem esemenyei" (The Events of My Life"). Giving every indication that their years together had been happy ones filled with love and

"marital fidelity," Vira refers to the happy Christmas Eve in 1913 when Fodor "placed the engagement ring on my finger." As happy as this event may have been, however, it was preceded by a full two years of torment for Fodor, a period which, if we think back to Chapter One, was marked by her emotional distance, and his often devastating anguish. The initial engagement, after all, happened sometime in the early morning of

January 1,1911, not on Christmas Eve 1913.

The story of their engagement is not the only discrepancy between their respective accounts of their life together. Whereas Vira obviously sought to gloss over the tension between them, Fodor allowed himself to linger on it in his autobiographical accounts, and especially in "Eletem esemenyei" noted above. Though Fodor did admit to a deep love that existed between them, he was also careful to single out Vira as the source of some of his deepest pain and anxiety. In part this derived from her perceived coldness towards 299 him, and her often lengthy silences. But it also no doubt centered around her own reluctance to be fully controlled by Fodor. Fodor, after all, had sought throughout his life to serve as Vira's spiritual and intellectual guide through the disorienting and often perilous waters of the modern world. Fodor's protective impulse manifested itself in his letters, especially where her health was concerned. Against his own perception of Vira as a physically weak, neurotic, and ultimately dependent woman, moreover, Fodor cast himself as the stereotypically "strong" man, one whose own strength and fortitude would serve as an anchor for her, and for the family.

Judging from her biography of him, Vira obviously resented Fodor's paternalistic stance, and sought in her own re-telling of his life to cast herself in the role not only of the ideal wife and mother, but also as the veritable backbone of the family. Vira's account of the family's "escape" from Kar6nsebes (Caransebe§) in the autumn of 1919 provides a good example of how she attempted to assert her own sense of agency and independence. Whereas Fodor's own account of this same episode overlooks her role,

Vira's narrative reveals that she played a key part in facilitating their desperate flight from the Romanian-occupied city. Stressing in no uncertain terms how Fodor's efforts at acquiring the necessary paperwork had failed, and suggesting that his failure to do so had left him "feeling hopeless," Vira recounted how she herself went to the Romanian prefect to plead the family's case and, with her ability to play up her own "motherly anxiety," how she was able to arrange for the necessary exit visas fromth e city.14

This image of Vira as the true pillar of strength in the family runs through her biography of Fodor. Portraying Fodor as an embattled, and often sick and anxious, man,

13 See, for example, MVMDGy H-20/1 28-97.1/4., Ferenc Fodor, "EmtekezetQl," (1931), 9. 14 Vira Fenczik Fbdorne, "Fodor Ferenc elete", 10. Vira suggests throughout her account that Fodor no doubt would have faltered without

her. Writing of the vindictive attacks that were launched against him in the 1930s, and

noting how his transfer to P£cs in 1940 had left him "listless and broken," Vira explained

that it was "her own ability to withstand even the greatest suffering" that saved Fodor

from total mental and emotional collapse.15 Running contrary to the image we are left

with from Fodor's letters of this same period, Vira wrote: "For us as women, and as

mothers, it is not an option to break under the weight of the cross we are forced to bear.

We must be more heroic than even the greatest of heroes."16 In writing Fodor' life story,

then, Vira attempted to re-claim her own voice, and her own sense of agency, and thus

overcome the passive role in which Fodor seems to have cast her.

Fodor and Me

With the exception of Fodor's eulogist, Vira's biography was the first and, for obvious

reasons, the most intimate retelling of Fodor's life story. However, as I suggest above, it

was also a simultaneous telling, or retelling, of her own life story, and thus an important

reference point in her own on-going negotiation of self. In a similar fashion, all other tellers of Fodor's tale, from the eulogist to Fodor's granddaughters and their families, have in one way or another woven their own lives into the stories they have told, and

continue to tell, of him. Consciously or not, the act of remembering Fodor has had a role to play in their own complex negotiations of self. I cannot pretend to speak for these others here, in part because I simply don't have sufficient documentary evidence to

support my speculations, but primarily because most of them are still alive, and would no

15 Ibid., 21. 301 doubt prefer to speak for themselves. But I can, and I think perhaps should, pause to consider the way in which my own involvement with Fodor's tale has become central, at least at this juncture in my life, to my own identity. After all, in remembering Fodor, I have also been actively engaged in the construction of myself.

My exploration of the overlapping motivations behind Fodor's nationalist scholarship, in fact, forced me to reflect on my own reasons for pursuing his life story as the focal point of this dissertation. In large part, my decision to focus on Fodor was determined by the fact that no other historian has yet devoted an entire monograph to the study of his life and work. At the very least, then, this lacuna provided me with an opening to write something that would contribute to the history of Hungarian nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. More than this, however, was the simple fact that Fodor had left behind a wealth of published and unpublished sources, and would thus serve as a perfect vehicle for the sort of study that I wanted to write. Indeed, it was through him that I hoped to be able to outline a new and somewhat novel approach to

Hungarian cultural and intellectual history, and in so doing define myself as a scholar.

But I can honestly say that it was not simply opportunism, professional or otherwise, that drew me to Fodor. Indeed, despite the obvious opportunistic motivations behind my study of him, my investigation into his life and work was also driven by a sincere desire to understand a nationalist intellectual on his own terms, and in so doing to gain some insight into the nature of both nationalism and modernity, and beyond this also the inner workings of identity, subjectivity, and the negotiation of self. This has by no means proven to be an easy task, with each chapter of his life challenging, rather than solidifying, what I very quickly came to realize was my own rather limited understanding 302 not just of Fodor and modern Hungarian history, but also of the theoretical approaches to nationalism, modernity, and the history of self that had set me on this path in the first place. How my thinking has changed on some of this, I can barely remember now.

Suffice it to say that what I offer here is a product of an intellectual journey that in many ways has only just begun.

In the end, my biggest surprise in studying Fodor is the extent to which I have come to know and understand myself better through my study of him. This is all the more startling given the obvious differences between us, at least on the surface. Unlike

Fodor, who was driven in part by a modernist desire to integrate himself into an essentialist construction of the national whole, I chose to pursue Hungarian history as a conscious means of overcoming what I had started to feel were the inherently narrow and constricting confines of my own Canadian identity. Convinced, as well, that my wholehearted embrace of postmodernism had "set me free," I naively thought that I would be able to demonstrate, at least to myself, where modernists like Fodor had become trapped in a fundamentally middle-class imperative of self. And yet, in deconstructing Fodor, and in trying to understand what made him "tick" as a conservative nationalist, I have come to recognize the extent to which I, too, remain stuck in a modernist paradigm not unlike the one that determined, and in many ways even imprisoned him in, his own negotiations of self. Like Fodor, I remain caught in what

Steven Aschheim describes as a "middle-class, gradualist, meliorist, inward doctrine of self-cultivation and bourgeois respectability."17 Though I am skeptical that I will ever be able to fully overcome what might accurately be called the "burden of self' that this

17 Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 16. 303 enduring nineteenth-century doctrine embodies, and that this dissertation explores, I take some comfort in the fact that I perhaps better understand and appreciate the often anxious—and even traumatic—cycle of identity formation in which we, as modern individuals, are inevitably caught. Bibliography

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