From Part I The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 1919-1926 Among the many waves of exile throughout Hungarian history probably the one following the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 drained Hungarian art and culture most. It was preceded by decades of peace, economic growth, and cultural prosperity before World War I, and a multi-faceted development of the arts, which also laid the foundations of Modernism. The 1919-20 exile and emigration of a great number of Hungarian artists, philosophers, writers, emerging filmmakers, and intellectuals put an abrupt end to the ongoing discourses and debates between the many different and often conflicting views and tendencies. One of these was the budding avant-garde's conflict with the leading modernist forum, the journal Nyugat (1908-41). The sharp exchange between the proletarian free-verse poet Lajos Kassák and the erudite poet Mihály Babits in 1916 was an unusually articulate verbal duel about just how much radicalism and destruction of the classical forms could be accepted or tolerated in modern Hungarian poetry (see "Dada in Hungary"). The continuation of this debate would have certainly helped to hammer out opposing but equally relevant views on poetic forms and modernity in Hungarian literature. The post-1919 decimation of Hungarian Modernism put an end to all such debates, and the prospect of a multifaceted and pluralist culture of political and stylistic diversity with ongoing dialogues and debates between the many different groups and voices faded away. By the time some of the exiles returned to Hungary after a 1926 general amnesty, they found that hardly any room was left for the kind of avant-garde practices they had known prior to August 1919.
Shaken by World War I, the ensuing October 1918 revolution, the inadequacy of Count Mihály Károlyi's coalition government that emerged out of that revolution, and driven by a desire for social justice, almost the entire Hungarian intelligentsia participated is some way in the Commune. Few of them became communists by making a full ideological commitment like philosopher György [Georg] Lukács who converted to Bolshevism at the end of 1918, and served as Vice Commissar of Public Education during the Commune, a position so that Lukács became de facto the Commissar. Many were self-conscious socialists like Lajos Kassák and most of his group; others were liberals as Oszkár Jászi and his circle around the periodical Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), championing sociology; Jászi had reservations with regard to the communist dictatorship but felt that the time for action to replace theorizing had come. Many young artists, poets, and thinkers had not been committed to any political party or social organization, but enthusiastically plunged in various educational activities in order to be of use to the poor. In 1919 the word ''Communist' had no Stalinist connotations, as it resonated positively with the young idealists and radicals in post- World-War-I Budapest. Some of the artists exhibited their paintings during the Commune and a few of them designed political posters. Such activities stamped them as dangerous communists or fellow travelers in the eyes of the retaliating regime of Admiral Horthy, and they had to leave the country for fear of imprisonment or worse. In the wake of the Commune's defeat, special commandos were sent out to sift through villages and farms to find communists in hiding.
Some of those who emigrated did not have to fear punishment, but simply did not wish to live under the new rule, which promised to eradicate even the vestiges of socialist and communist ideas, and free thinking in general. Many had to run for their lives in disguise (as poet Béla Balázs who wore a fake mustache), or smuggle themselves out under the protection of the night, as did Kassák. Vienna was the first stop for all émigrés. Many traveled further West, to the cosmopolitan cultural metropolis Berlin where a sizable Hungarian group of artists and art critics settled, or went on later to London (as painter and sculptor László Péri did, after his Berlin years), Amsterdam (where painter Dezso Korniss spent several years), Moscow (where former Ma members Béla Uitz, János Mácza, Sándor Barta, and Erzsi Újvári immigrated and a contingent of Hungarian architects including István Sebok and Tibor Weiner), and the United States (where, among others, former Bauhaus members Marcel Breuer, Andor Weininger, and László Moholy-Nagy ended up). In the 1920s and the early 30s about thirty Hungarian-language periodicals were published in Vienna (some of them short-lived), reflecting the structure of the pre-1919 intellectual and political scene in Hungary. Émigrés in Vienna did not feel completely safe. They feared the agents of the Hungarian secret service and wondered whether the Austrian police protected them or cooperated with the Hungarian authorities. Hence they tried to keep a low profile.
In December 1919 Balázs noted that his friend Lukács "looked heart wrenching. His face sunken, he is pale, nervous and sad. He is being watched and followed in the streets; he walks around with a gun in his pocket because he has good reason to fear that he might get kidnapped. In Budapest he is accused of instigating murder, on nine counts." Balázs himself moved to Schloss Waisnix, further into the countryside from Vienna. He did not fear the kind of danger Lukács was in, but reflected on his new situation in terms of having become an obvious outsider, as if making his previously covered outsider position legitimate: "The question is this: have I been exiled when I ran abroad, or have I arrived home? [.] The ''aura of the far-away'', the feeling of foreignness gnawed at me already in my childhood like some kind of reversed home-sickness. [.
] From the Hungarian foreignness where I was not understood and was scorned as a stranger I have, by all means, come home to be among people who understand and recognize me instantly. Still, what hurts?" Balázs's musings point to one of the central issues of the post-1919 Hungarian exile: most of the émigrés had ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds that had set them apart of what had been considered mainstream Hungarian culture for at least a decade or a decade and a half before they actually left Hungary. But they were the emerging intellectuals. The group around Lukács and Balázs included mostly upper class Jews who wanted to raise Hungarian culture to a higher level, whereas the members of Kassák's circle were mostly working class or lower middle class poets and artists, some of them also of Jewish background, who gave voice to a segment of the population that had not appeared on the intellectual scene before. Their exodus deprived Hungary of most of the next generation progressive modernists. In an age of nation-states, political views and views on a nation or nationalism in general were hardly separable, particularly at the time of World War I, when nations were pitted against nations and an internationalist attitude was tantamount to disloyalty to everything the word fatherland entailed. The emotional impact of patriotism was not only high - it was raised to an ethical standard that was denied legitimacy to groups and individuals who were not considered a genuine, historic part of the nation or who proved themselves unpatriotic by showing pacifism and internationalism. The artists and intellectuals who went into exile after the August 1919 defeat of the Hungarian Commune were also outsiders.
They were Jews or socialists and/or communists coming from the working class, who sought to establish an international network of solidarity and a network with artists and thinkers who occupied similar outsider positions in their respective countries. The international republic of the avantgarde was, with few exceptions like the Bauhaus in Germany, an extremely thin network of outsiders that most of the insiders of the European national cultures did not even notice, or dismissed as extravagant and insignificant. In 1915, Lukács and his friends, mostly assimilated Budapest Jews, formed the Sunday Circle, a loose, by invitation-only group consisting of idealists seeking to graft German idealism and philosophical thinking onto Hungarian culture. Already their earliest publications were criticized for cultivating abstract thinking in the German and Viennese tradition, which was considered alien to Hungarian clarity and tenacity. They were also reproached for not using correct Hungarian style and grammar. Reviewing Lukács's volume of essays A lélek és a formák (The Soul and the Forms; 1910) Elemér Kutasi wrote in the Huszadik Század: "One would never have thought that in our Hungarian language, a language made for concrete tangibility, the unambiguous, crystal-clear language of János Arany, it was possible to write a book so lost in obscure incomprehensibility, so inflated with tortuous, bloodless abstractions as that of György Lukács." The leading poet and essay writer Mihály Babits, who was also the highest authority in literary criticism, remarked in his review.