Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941

Abstract

With the country lacking the possibility of a nationally driven foreign policy during the years of Austro-Hungarian dualism, cultural diplomacy was a pursuit that Hungarian politicians could engage in only with the creation of an independent state in 1918. After the turmoil of the immediate post-war years, punctuated by the demise of the short-lived democratic-liberal Hungarian republic born on November 16, 1918 and the rise and fall of the Soviet Republic of Councils in the spring and summer of 1919, Hungary turned into a conservative authoritarian regime under the leadership of Regent Miklós Horthy for the rest of the interwar period. It is therefore the cultural diplomacy of this regime that Zsolt Nagy’s book examines, by focusing on state agencies, cultural institutions, scholarly publications, tourism, radio, and newsreels as instruments for creating a specific image of Hungary for audiences abroad.The core chapters of the book are framed by the perspective of the transition from a rather ineffective wartime propaganda, whose reach was limited, to a more coordinated peacetime cultural diplomacy supervised by the government and various national institutions during the interwar years. After uncoordinated attempts during the early 1920s by a variety of right-wing groups at persuading the Allies of the injustice of the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty, it was mostly after 1927 that cultural diplomacy gained more traction in Hungary’s foreign policy. The institutions in charge of this effort were the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Religion and Public Education. Subordinated to the broad goals of revisionism and improving Hungary’s image abroad, Hungarian cultural diplomacy of the late 1920s and 1930s tried to change negative Western European perceptions of Hungary. It attempted this by emphasizing the country’s belonging to the sphere of Western civilization and modernity, which—in the interpretation of its proponents—entitled Hungarians to claim cultural superiority over their southeastern neighbors. The architects of this new strategy were Count Kuno Klebelsberg, the Minister of Religion and Public Education in the István Bethlen government between 1922 and 1931 and, to a lesser extent, Miklós Kozma, the first head of Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI – Hungarian Telegraphic Office), whose reach as cultural propagandist also extended to a variety of other media such as radio and newsreels.However, there was often disagreement about what kind of image of Hungarianness to highlight for the consumption of foreign audiences. Ever since the rise of Hungarian nationalism in the nineteenth century, Magyars oscillated between adopting Western and Oriental identities. The split consciousness that the continuous movement between the two caused in Hungarians’ self-image was well encapsulated by Endre Ady’s metaphor of komp-ország (ferry-land) that he coined at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, however, rejecting both the internationalist image proposed in 1918–19 by liberals and communists and the oriental fantasies of extreme right-wing groups, conservative nationalist governments chose to emphasize instead the Western and Christian character of Hungary. Instantiated by the promotion of the image and cult of St. Stephen, the first Christian king of Hungary, over that of Árpád, the pagan chieftain who led the Magyar tribes to Pannonia, this self-image connected Hungary both to European civilization and a transnational Catholic ecumene. By virtue of the battles that the medieval kingdom of Hungary fought against the Ottomans, this connection was further cemented in the portrayal of Hungary as scutus Christi (the shield of Christianity), a trope that came to be frequently used in debates about the Hungarian national character that took center stage during the interwar period.As the chief architect of Hungary’s cultural diplomacy, Klebelsberg warned against relying on past achievements; he wanted the country to enter the future on new terms based “on the rejuvenation and reconstruction of the country’s cultural life,” which would allow “Hungary to join European cultural life” (94). Therefore the ambitious cultural reconstruction program that he set out for Hungary included not just the expansion of public education domestically and the borrowing of foreign models for the rebuilding of the country’s scientific infrastructure, but also the establishment of several outposts of Hungarian culture abroad. Following in the footsteps of some older Hungarian cultural institutions established in Vienna and Rome prior to the war, he developed a new network of Collegium Hungaricum institutes in Berlin, Vienna, and Rome, together with a “Hungarian-French University Information Institute in Paris, and five lectureships at institutions of higher education in Germany, Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Poland” (117). A lesser-known outpost of Hungarian culture abroad, discussed in detail by Nagy, is the Hungarian Reference Library in New York City, opened in 1937 with materials purchased indirectly by the Hungarian government from the widow of Károly (Charles) Feleky, an American-Hungarian collector of English-language books, journals, and news clippings about Hungary. The activities of these institutions were supported from home not just financially but also through a wide array of foreign-language publications aiming to acquaint foreign audiences with Hungarian culture, science, and literature, among which the Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie and the Hungarian Quarterly stood out.Propaganda in the service of tourism was also soon enrolled to help with these efforts. With the foreign orientation of its tourism development, Hungary differed from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, where the focus of the state fell on developing domestic tourism. Based on a wide array of archival evidence, Nagy convincingly explores the variety of connections and interactions between different government organizations, Hungarian embassies abroad, and municipal and civic tourist organizations at home, whose ultimate aim was to attract more foreign tourists to Hungary. In parallel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also made it one of its priorities to sponsor foreign journalists and public figures to write and speak favorably about Hungary, a practice in which the country competed with the Little Entente powers. The 1930s indeed turned into a golden age of Hungarian tourism, with Budapest and Lake Balaton being visited by many Germans, Austrians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans, along with travelers from the neighboring countries. Conflict over the meaning of Hungarianness resulted in tourism promoters presenting an image of Hungary which included the modern architecture, spa culture, and cosmopolitan nightlife of Budapest, together with romantic and folkloristic highlights such as the wilderness of the Hungarian puszta (plain) and the matyó costumes of Mezőkövesd—a composite image which continued to place the country in an ambivalent Western/Eastern position.In the last chapter of the book, Nagy analyzes the role that radio programming and Kulturfilme (culture shorts) had in Hungary’s overall cultural diplomacy efforts. Once turned operational, radio broadcasts were used by the government both as an effective outreach tool to Hungarian speakers living in the neighboring countries and as a medium enabling it to promote Hungarian culture abroad. Economic considerations were also important, since radio programming enabled the government to collect a license fee from listeners. Rather than giving in to pressure from extreme right-wing groups to broadcast exclusively in Hungarian, and in line with Klebelsberg’s efforts to Europeanize Hungarian culture, radio broadcasting was multi-lingual, including numerous programs in English, French, German, and Italian, as well as music ranging from magyar nóta (Hungarian folk songs) to American jazz. The author’s discussion of the infrastructural development of radio broadcasting, with a veritable race developing between Hungary and its neighbors for the greatest possible power and reach of their respective radio stations, provides another interesting comparative insight. The production of Hungarian newsreels and Kulturfilme was also an endeavor that encountered fierce competition on the international market for such fare from the Little Entente countries. Although Hungarian propagandistic shorts like Hungária (produced in 1928 and remade in 1934) were successful both at home and abroad, they had to compete against similar products such as the Czech Saint Wenceslas and the Romanian Romania Today—Picturesque Romania, which lessened their overall impact on foreign audiences.The book breaks new ground by providing thematic, comparative, and analytical insights into the way interwar Hungarian cultural propaganda was developed at the intersection of governmental and private interests. With its wide and informed coverage of the history of Hungarian cultural diplomacy during the interwar years, Nagy’s work can be usefully read along such publications as Andrea Orzoff’s Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914-1948 (2009),1 which discusses parallel propagandistic image-making efforts in interwar Czechoslovakia. In contrast to Czechoslovakia, whose propaganda campaigns were largely effective, Hungary’s efforts—based as they were on the promotion of the country’s cultural superiority and the need for the revision of its borders—ultimately foundered, due not just to the country’s siding with Germany in WWII, but also to a sense of cultural arrogance that could not accept Hungary’s status as a minor power and acknowledge interwar realities.