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• Reviewing the difficulties of Hungarian higher education in the first quarter of the 20th century and the role of university youth after the ‘Great War’: A newsreel supported pragmatic survey

  79-100

  Róbert Kerepeszki

  Views:

  294

  The basic idea of this paper was generated by some motion pictures shot on October events of 1918. This, at that time fundamentally novel media of mass communication can be considered as a visual interpretation of the moral behavior and the role attributed to the contemporary university youth in the series of revolutions after the ‘Great War’. Young people, many of them from universities, collected shocking experiences in the war that generated their moral and behavioral transition. At the time of the turn of the century there were development processes initiated in the Hungarian higher education, however, the war caused a break in these processes and, there were also certain structural changes introduced during and immediately after the end of the war which resulted in chaotic circumstances that kept on deepening the stress of students. Both the traditional press together with other printed documents and the contemporary newsreel have provided us with the sources being necessary and enough for making an attempt to answer, in what here follows, the questions: how the drastically changed, consequently chaotic situation within the Hungarian higher education along with the declined activity of student associations influenced the students, as well as how the most highlighted phenomena, such as the impact of war on everyday life and economy, the emergence and spread of violence, the reactions to the increased admission of female and Jewish students at universities affected the entire society and within this the university circumstances immediately after the armistice, and why the violence, radicalization, and “brutalization” of the so-called “war generation” became featuring at demonstrations.

• A Humanist Diplomat in Early 16th Century Hungary: Hieronymus Balbus

  11-48

  Attila Bárány

  Views:

  476

  The article investigates new sources, Western European, mainly English diplomatic reports – several being so far unknown for Hungarian scholarship, or, if known, not examined in this regard – e.g. held at the British Library Manuscript Collection to shed light on Hungarian-Ottoman relations at the eve of the fall of the “shield of Christendom”, Belgrade in 1521. The article follows the mission of Hieronymus Balbus, an Italian at the diplomatic personnel of Jagiellonian Hungary, in 1521 to the Habsburg, Tudor and Valois courts. Balbus’s diplomatic workings – through the embassy to the Emperor (Charles V in Worms and Brussels), a peace conference at Calais and Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, King of England – has not been adequately seen in Hungarian historiography, and some of his letters and political activity ranging from Bruges, Worms, Calais, London and Cologne has not so far been mapped, yet new insights can be given for the understanding of Louis II’s diplomatic efforts during the stress of the siege and loss of Belgrade in 1521. The investigation is largely based on Balbus’s dispatches – which has not survived in Hungarian archival material but were preserved in the reports of English envoys of his activity, to the maker of Tudor policy, Chancellor Wolsey. The correspondence of Balbus provides valuable information on the administration of Louis II, about its relationship with the Turks and the Emperor. The leaders of Hungarian diplomacy did not lack astuteness and “had a clear picture” about the international power relations. The government experimented with alternatives, provided they did not receive any aid from the Habsburgs: they were willing to go as far as making an alliance with not only the English, but even with the Emperor’s enemies, the Valois. In 1521, despite the powerful Habsburg dominance, Hungarian foreign politics did have some room to manoeuvre.

• 1956 at Ten and Beethoven’s Tenth: Edward Alexander and Hungary, 1965-66

  185-199

  Tibor Glant

  Views:

  316

  This article looks at Edward Alexander, an American diplomat who served in Hungary between 1965 and 1969, and his various writings. An Armenian-American man of letters, Alexander served in psychological warfare in World War II, then joined cold war radios and later the Foreign Service. Our focus is on the years 1965-67, when he served as Press and Cultural Affairs Officer at the Budapest Legation. Available sources include his official diplomatic reports, his rather large Hungarian state security file, a lifetime interview conducted under the aegis of the State Department in the late 1980s, a book on Armenian history, and a semi-autobiographical intelligence thriller he penned in 2000. These sources allow for a complex evaluation of his performance in Hungary and of his writing skills on account of his attempt to fictionalize his own exploits.