Category: VOLUME II, No. 5

LIKEABLE, LONG-SUFFERING HUNGARIANS

What did both Hitler and Stalin admire about Hungary? It sounds like the question in a university quiz show which no contestant can guess the right answer to. “The water-polo team?” hazards one contestant. “The women?” offers another. “Goulash?” asks another, desperately. The right answer, however unlikely this may sound,

ON MUD AND MIRACLES

The First Anniversary of the Red Sludge Disaster Three colours, green, white, and brown dominate the landscape in the village of Kolontár and the town of Devecser, nearly a year after the disaster. The colours are deeply restful to eyes grown accustomed to the all pervasive red left by the

ON BUSINESS-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS: THE HUNGARIAN CASE

U-Turn in taxing big firms Soon after the change of government in May 2010, the new Parliament voted for a “bank tax” – in fact, a surprisingly high levy on financial sector companies. A second package included a surtax on telecoms, energy and large retail firms (typically foreign owned), as

PUTIN OR MEDVEDEV

Preparing for the 2012 Elections Sergey Brin, one of the two inventors and billionaire owners of Google, the world’s largest Internet company, emigrated from Russia in 1979 at the early age of six. He described his country as “Nigeria with snow, controlled by a bunch of cowboys”. The question is,

2010: WHAT HAPPENED?

The Reconstruction of the Political 2010: What Happened?1 Not long ago, at the close of a televised roundtable conversation, one of the participants, a historian and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, spoke a few words of admonition to me. The histoire des mentalités, he explained, is a history

AMERICAN AND HUNGARIAN PERSPECTIVES ON MINORITY ISSUES

Hungarian-Americans have faced a daunting task in lobbying for the rights of Hungarian ethnic minorities of East Central Europe. The challenge has been to overcome American predispositions regarding what is a bona fide minority. The American perspective has been quite different from the Hungarian perspective although both pay lip-service to

OFFICIAL ENEMIES, SECRET ALLIES PART I

(Excerpts from a book in progress) Go to, go to;You take a precipice for no leap of danger.And woo your own destruction.Shakespeare: King Henry VIII. A small nation wedged between the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Hungary joined the Second World War in 1941 on the

AN OASIS ON THE DANUBE: ADA KALEH

Ada Kaleh, which means “the island of the fortress” in Turkish, was 1.75 km long and 400–500 metres wide. Due to its great strategic importance, guarding the river after it emerged through the treacherous waters of the Iron Gates, between the Carpathians and the Balkan mountain ranges, it was occupied

THE HISTORY OF THE GIPSY BAND 1904-1944

The gypsy bands with which we are familiar today began to form in the decades around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their evolution and transformation have been steady ever since, a process without breaks or milestones. The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, offers a