László Péter (1929–2008)

Abstract

Professor Laszlo Peter, who died on June 6 2008 at the age of 78, was a historian, teacher and writer on the history of political ideas and the constitutional history of Hungary. Peter served on the editorial board of Central Europe from its inception in 2001, regularly contributed articles to its issues, and unfl aggingly attended meetings of the journal’s board even from his hospital bed. The last work that he published in his lifetime appeared in Central Europe, 6.1. It is hoped that a fi nal contribution, dictated during his last, protracted illness, will be published posthumously in this journal. Laszlo Peter was born in Rakosliget in Hungary in 1929 and attended the Arpad Gimnazium in Budapest’s third district. His father belonged to the lower levels of the Beamtenstand and the family was solidly Roman Catholic — indeed, as Peter proudly recalled, a distant forebear had been none other than Janos Szily, whom Maria Theresa had appointed the fi rst bishop of Szombathely. In childhood Peter was an enthusiastic Boy Scout and he spent many school holidays camping and climbing. A passion for mountaineering remained with Peter. Even in his mid-70s, he would still ‘scramble’ and raft in the Carpathians, often in the company of his life-long friend, the historian and politician Geza Jeszenszky. The outbreak of the Second World War in Hungary in 1941 did not interrupt a happy childhood. Although, as Peter later recalled, he was certainly aware that something nasty was going on in the Vojvodina, then a part of Hungary, and that all was not well with the Hungarian army on the eastern front, he remained, like most Hungarians, largely oblivious to the confl ict, continuing to camp with the Scouts as late as 1943 in Hungarian-occupied Ruthenia. All this changed in October 1944. In a Nazi-backed coup, the Arrow Cross seized power in Hungary. Overnight, Hungary’s antique constitution and its gentry-dominated society were overthrown. Within a few months, with the Red Army besieging Budapest, Peter was forced to spend long periods in the communal cellar of the family’s apartment building. One day, the little Jewish girl that he had being playing with the previous evening was removed with her family from the cellar and shot by the Fascist Arrow Cross in the courtyard above. A few months later, following Hungary’s ‘liberation’, Peter’s cousin, a violinist, was abducted by Soviet troops and never seen again. For the rest of her life, his aunt attended concerts by Russian visitors in the vain hope of seeing her missing son in the orchestra. In the years immediately following, Hungary was ‘Stalinized’ and converted into a Communist satellite. Its peasantry and middle class were destroyed; central europe, Vol. 6 No. 2, November 2008, 85–90