Edit: I’ve been preparing this post for a while now, and it turned out to be my magnum opus, as well as a culmination of my series of Hungarian themed posts. Release the Kraken! Enjoy!
Where be Hungarians? I touched upon multiple facets of Hungarian identities and socio-psychological phenomena. But where are they? Before you throw an atlas in my face, let me stress that yes, I know, Hungarians are in Hungary. But this is transnational history. And indeed, this module opened my eye to the historical patterns of Hungarians migrating all over the world, and Hungarian diasporas showing up in the most unlikely places. How does a Hungarian rabbi end up in Montevideo, where he preaches in a Hungarian synagogue to a congregation of Hungarian Jews? Well, he was my ancestor through the Liedemann line, from whom my family, the Metzgers are descended . The name was changed from von Metz to Metzger, to Mészáros. (I was considering changing it back to Metzger after I moved to Scotland, but I decided to give you guys a hard time instead.) That said, my ancestor in Montevideo anticipated little about the interconnected and wide-spread network of Hungarian diasporas in the 21st century world, such as about my patriotic Hungarian uncle living in Basel, Switzerland, who escaped from Hungary much later, in the 1960s. I would like to elaborate on the various Hungarian communities in the world, how they ended up there, and how they remained connected throughout the years.
Most notable of famous Hungarian expats is most likely the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who happened to go to the same high school as I did, back in Budapest, albeit more than a hundred years apart. While Herzl himself needs no introduction, as he is widely regarded as a rather significant figure as the Chairman of the First Zionist Congress, the story of his cousin, Jenő Heltai is a much more intriguing one. Heltai stayed in Hungary despite the urging of Herzl to migrate to the Holy Land. Heltai was a reformed Jew, and as such much more neatly integrated into Hungarian society at large. In fact, he refused to leave the country even during the Second World War, when Jews faced prosecution and genocide. Heltai was so insistent on staying in Hungary that he asked the governor Miklós Horthy for a letter of immunity from the Nazis, which would have allowed him to leave with a British passport, but he refused, and locked himself into his cellar instead. His diaries are an invaluable account of the atrocities committed by the Arrow Cross during the final days of the war. Heltai himself survived, and thankfully his biggest complaint based on his diaries was that he ran out of pipe tobacco around December, 1944, and resorted to smoking herbs and spices instead, just like the invading Red Army, whose infamous blend of tar, grass, and herbs (machorka) was a staple of the Soviet experience of World War II.
However, much more interesting are the Hungarians who left. Sándor Márai for example immigrated to America during the hard line communist dictatorship of the 50s, and ended up in San Diego, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. He documented his entire journey and his prior experiences in Hungary in a quite elaborate manner, and his published journals served as a scathing criticism of the regimes in Hungary. President Reagan personally wrote to him on his 75th birthday, and proclaimed him to be a vanguard of democracy and freedom. To this day, Márai remains a national icon and has a cult following within the Hungarian intelligentsia. In San Diego a Hungarian community centre bares his name, where Hungarian children can learn about the motherland, and incorporating their Hungarian studies into their new American identities.
A pair of Hungarian nuclear scientists worked on the Manhattan Project as well, namely Ede Teller and Leó Szilárd. Both of them Jewish – they immigrated to the United States along with Albert Einstein and were awarded medals by presidents Truman and Eisenhower respectively. Reading Einstein’s biographies, it seems apparent to the reader that Teller’s contributions to the atomic bomb were crucial in the preliminary phase of research, whereas Szilárd was overseeing the development of the hydrogen bomb. Hungarian scientists worked on the development of modern science en masse, and nearly all in immigration, the exception being Albert Szentgörgyi, who discovered a method to extract vitamin C from paprika. János Neumann left Hungary as a Jew in the late 1920s because anti-semitism was on the rise, and went on to invent game theory and the first modern computer in Germany, then in America. Furthermore, Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his auto-biographical novel, Fateless, recounting his experiences as a fourteen years old boy in Auschwitz. Having survived the camp, he returned to Budapest, but also faced prosecution by the communist regime, thereby escaping to West Germany, where he worked on his book for twenty years. A further twenty years passed between the initial publication and the Nobel Prize in 2002, after which the Hungarian neoliberal left proclaimed him to be their hero, but Kertész refused their support, claiming that they would turn him into a ‘holocaust clown’. He suffered from depression all his life and died of old age in 2016. May his memory be an inspiration to all of us.
A great many Hungarians ended up in much more unlikely places. The oddest towns across the American Midwest have flourishing Hungarian communities, such as the Twin Cities in Minnesota, or Cincinnati in Ohio. These communities have been aiding the resistance movement in Hungary for the last 150 years, ever since Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian uprising of 1848 against the Habsburgs was banished. He founded many Hungarian communities in America, and assisted the work of utopian socialist thinker, the Scotsman Robert Owen, who built phalansteries in the New World, where the workers held communal ownership of the means of production. Hungarian Jews are still a notable chunk of the Orthodox community in Williamsburg, many of whom are descendants of the Szatmár Jewish community in Eastern Hungary, who faced wide-spread prosecution in the late 1890s, as a result of a young Christian girl being murdered in the village of Tiszaeszlár, and the townsfolk blaming it on the Jews, who supposedly baked her blood into their bread. Despite the Prime Minister’s best efforts, the community was nearly wiped out, and their descendants formed a diaspora in 1920s New York.
Jews and political refugees aren’t the only kinds of Hungarians living abroad however. In fact, many of them did not make the decision consciously, but it was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that caused the border to simply go over their heads. For this reason, out of the roughly 15 million Hungarians alive today, around 2.5 million live in neighbouring countries, such as the Vojvodina Hungarians in Northern Serbia, the Burgenland Hungarians in Austria, or the Hungarian minorities in Western Ukraine and Southern Slovakia. Most notable of them are the Székely tribe of Transylvania, who were the first Hungarians to migrate to the Carpathian Basin, as long ago as the early 880s. Their culture is a unique blend of Hungarian patriotism, and rural Romanian culture, and they preserved one of the most colourful Hungarian dialects, along with their trans-Carpathian compatriots, the Csángó. I take immense pride in meeting Székely people in St Andrews, and being able to converse with them in Hungarian, be they from New York, or Nagyvárad (Ordaea, Romania).
A famous comedian Louis CK also elaborated on his Hungarian ancestry in his latest special. Indeed, CK does not stand for anything, it is just a more palatable way of pronouncing Székely for Americans, which might also help you in the endeavour if you were wondering. Coincidentally, but not indicating his lineage, his Jewish family converted to Catholicism in the early 1920s, adopting the Székely family name. CK’s grandfather, Géza Székely was not convinced that the changed name would be suffiecient to shield them from prosecution, so he fled to Mexico with his family, where Louis CK himself resided until he was seven. The rest of their lineage was wiped out by the Nazis, 44 members of their family, if we believe CK.
To sum up, the global Hungarian community stands together on June 4 of each year, which is the Day of National Belonging. On this day each year, expats come back to Hungary to help the disadvantaged members of the community and schoolboys are involved in charity programs to help the poor. I myself took part in this endeavour, having taken children with Down Syndrome to a sailing trip around Lake Balaton, the largest body of water in Central Europe. The date marks the anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, the very signatories of which ended up spending their life in immigration in Paris and London, such as Count Albert Apponyi, whose brilliant speech in defense of Hungary was told in four languages at Trianon, but achieved little more than compassion on part of the Entente Cordiale. Fragmented and challenged by the tides of 20th century history, the transnational community of Hungary keeps in touch and remains well-organised and interconnected to this day.