Category: VOLUME VII, No. 1

THE NEW UTOPIA AND THE MIGRANTS

Utopia is always an important country, always one of the great powers. English columnist Frank Johnson Other things being equal, the editors of Hungarian Review would prefer to be dealing with topics other than migration. We have dealt with it in earlier issues in some detail, and the world offers

ON VIOLENCE: LATTER-DAY MASS

What comes as recognition out of the blue is often mistaken for a major juncture. The shock of revelation can usually be dampened if it is possible to say that one lacked the requisite historical experience to understand the moment. With the phenomenon we are going to look at, however,

REFUGEE REFLECTIONS

In late September I visited Thuringia on an official trip to attend a conference on regional planning. I took a train to Bad Blankenburg, an enchanting small town tucked away in a valley of the Thuringian Forest and regarded as an iconic place by educators. It was here that Friedrich

MIGRATIONS IN HUNGARIAN HISTORY – PART I

Part I With entire peoples on the move, we live once again in the age of great migrations. While migration is as old as humanity, today it has become a phenomenon on a global scale involving 231.5 million people, according to statistics posted in 2013 by the UN-OECD. The numbers

BLACK LAND

“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

ÖDÖN PÁSINT: A PRISONER OF HIS CONSCIENCE – PART I

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

GREX MONACHORUM

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

TRAVELLING IN TRANSYLVANIA 1987–88

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

SAYING WHAT COULD NOT BE SAID: CSABA LÁSZLÓFFY’S THE HERETIC

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