Category: History

NSZ: Contemporaneous debates in Parliament and various memoirs make it clear that the gas price hike which triggered the taxi blockade in October 1990 was a contested issue within the government itself. What do you recall about the controversy as Minister of Industry and Trade back then? PÁB: To understand

Letters from Turkey, generally considered the best Hungarian prose work of the eighteenth century, was written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rákóczi II, last prince of independent Transylvania. After the unsuccessful War of Independence (1703–11), in which he had endeavoured to liberate Hungary

The author of this collection of studies on Kelemen Mikes is Lajos Hopp (1927–1996), renowned literary historian, who dedicated his life to the eighteenth-century Hungarian writer who not only renewed epistolary fiction but also developed it into real art. Research into Mikes has been carried out since the first publication

NSZ-ZN: First of all, can you briefly describe what was your status in the government at the time? GYK: During the first two years of the administration I was Head of the Prime Ministerial Advisers Office, at the same time Chief Adviser on Foreign Affairs, answering directly to the Prime

“As a Hungarian, Stefan and his family may have faced discrimination in Czechoslovakia. As Catholic “Hunkys”, they definitely faced discrimination in the United States as it was during the first half of the twentieth century. The Ku Klux Klan, today associated in the American mind with segregation, lynching and other

A Voice for Minorities in Dangerous Times Part I Chief of the Prime Ministerial Department Ödön Pásint (1900–1950) was the Transylvanian born son of a Unitarian pastor’s family, later on a secretary of Count István Bethlen, Hungarian Prime Minister (1921–1931), who maintained close and confidential ties with him up until

However many the items of knowledge imparted by a Hungarian schooling, two in particular are all but universal. One seldom finds a person even of a distinctly unbookish tendency that cannot call to mind at least a line or two of János Arany’s celebrated poem A welszi bárdok (The Bards

INTRODUCTION  I came to Hungary in the autumn of 1987 as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at Kossuth Lajos University that has since become part of the University of Debrecen. Hungary at that time was a police state under dictatorial communism with an active Secret Police, especially in

A prolific Hungarian poet, fiction-writer, essayist and playwright, Csaba Lászlóffy (1938–2015), member of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Romania, lived part of his life under the dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, in a world that strongly resembled that pictured in George Orwell’s 1984. Hungarians living inside the Romanian borders had to endure

A Play in Two Acts Act One  Scene One   A dismal office. Shelves up to the ceiling, several filing cabinets, a safe. Two desks with files piled up on each; a telephone on each, one telephone has a microphone and tape-recorder with a microphone attached to it. A smaller