Caught In The Middle

You cannot write a history of the twentieth century and not mention the lifetime achievements of the Hungarian who is the subject of the third in this series: Edward Teller. He, along with the physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and mathematician John von Neumann, unleashed the power of the atom in a way that changed the world for ever. Teller, widely regarded as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” was at the very epicentre of those early days of atomic, then hydrogen and finally nuclear weaponry. While all played their part, Teller was perhaps the most ardent of the proponents of this type of weaponry and indeed all things nuclear.

He was, like his Hungarian colleagues mentioned above, scientifically brilliant: but he was also a difficult person to get along with and in his dedication to his ideals broke many friendships. His legacy is in some ways ambivalent: Dr Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate who worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II, called Dr Teller ”a danger to all that’s important”, adding that ”it would have been a better world without Teller”. A harsh judgement to be sure, but one cannot discount the importance of his work in ensuring the West was the first to have atomic weapons and in ensuring their continued military and scientific leadership during the Cold War.

Edward (Ede) Teller was born into a prosperous Budapest family in January 1908. His family was not untypical of Budapest at that time: both parents were Jewish, and both were from “greater” Hungary: his father was from Érsekújvár (now Nové Zámkj in Slovakia) and his mother was from Lugos (now Lugoj in Romania). His childhood and early school years were, by all accounts, not that happy. He was, for example, teased at high school for being “too bright”.

He was close to his mother (who moved, along with his sister, to the United States in 1959, thanks to the efforts of Edward). But those were also turbulent times: the World War, the disintegration of Hungary, Béla Kun’s short-lived revolution and the violent reaction that followed. I doubt many Hungarian children growing up in that era had a particularly happy time.

As soon as he turned 18, Edward went to Germany to study for his doctorate. But by 1933 it became to clear to him that as a Jew, Germany, and indeed Europe was no place for him and like so many others, he emigrated to America. His childhood sweetheart, Augusta Mária Harkányi, affectionately called Mici, eventually joined him and they were married for sixty-six years.

Understandably these upheavals made a deep and lasting impression on him. He remained a bitter opponent of all totalitarian regimes, be they fascist or communist, and with his fierce independence and determination, he was not prepared to stand on the academic sidelines while the great ideological battles of his century unfolded and played out. His family suffered while in Hungary. His brother-in-law died in a concentration camp in 1945. His mother and sister were internally exiled in 1950 and returned to Budapest, having lost everything, in 1953. Edward never forgave the communist government for these actions against his family and it only served to strengthen his determination.

In 1938 Teller entered history, as he liked to joke, as Leo Szilárd’s chauffeur. He was referring to the occasion when Szilárd and Wigner were driven by Teller – the only one who owned a car – to see Albert Einstein and persuade him to write to President Roosevelt and advise him that not only was an atomic bomb possible, but it was imperative that America act quickly to develop one. The letter would lead to the eventual formation of the so-called Manhattan Project to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Some have argued this letter was the most important of the twentieth century: perhaps somewhat of an exaggeration but the role these three Hungarians had in persuading the greatest scientist of his epoch to write to Roosevelt and thereby prod the United States government into action, is undeniable.

In 1943 Teller joined the Manhattan Project, led by Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer to develop the first atomic bomb. It should be added that it was Leo Szilárd who provided the intellectual and theoretical impetus to this project. The first successful test on 16 July 1945 in the Nevada Desert, at a place called, curiously, Trinity, did indeed signal a new world: the genie had been unleashed and could not be put back in the bottle. The world had undeniably changed forever.

Teller then embarked on a project to develop the hydrogen bomb, a device that would be hundreds of times more powerful than the Nagasaki and Hiroshima blasts. However, this set him firmly against Oppenheimer, who was just as intense and obsessive as Teller. Oppenheimer would have none of Teller’s ideas regarding them as unworkable and indeed unnecessary, and given the enormous destructive power that would be inevitably unleashed on civilian populations, immoral. He remarked, “God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarian within!”.

Their clash would reach its peak at the so-called Oppenheimer Hearings in 1954. This was the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Oppenheimer was anonymously accused of being a Soviet spy and his security clearance was called into question. Teller testified and while agreeing that Oppenheimer was not disloyal to the United States, he did suggest that he personally would feel “more secure” if such vital public matters were in other hands. The authorities agreed and Oppenheimer was denied his security clearance.

A great cleaving took place in Teller’s life at this junction. Many of his colleagues were dismayed at his actions, accusing him of putting personal power and ambition before the loyal and talented Oppenheimer. The rifts would slowly lessen over time but for many in the scientific community Teller had become persona non grata. This hurt him and Mici a great deal and her health suffered badly.

For the rest of his life Teller continued to be an ardent supporter of all things nuclear, being – among other things – the chief proponent of the anti-missile Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as ”Star Wars”. He would become an easy target for the “mad scientist” stereotype with his accent and bushy eyebrows helping to reinforce this image. Indeed, he was also rumoured to be the inspiration for the character of Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical film of the same name. He bristled at that suggestion!

After 1989 and the fall of communism, Teller often returned to Budapest, the city of his roots. He died in 2003, aged 95, having earlier that year been awarded America’s highest honour, the Medal of Freedom.

It is often said that two of the greatest gifts parents can give their children is roots and wings: roots to know where their home is and wings to take what has been taught them and exercise their imagination and talents. Szilárd, his colleague, long-time friend and fellow Hungarian once said “I would rather have roots, but if I can’t have roots, I shall have wings.” Teller certainly took all he learned in his beloved Budapest and soared above his century.

In any parade of famous Hungarians who have made significant contributions to the wider world, the life of Hungary’s greatest ever composer, Béla Bartók must rank high. His name is worthy of mention for his one single greatest achievement: the preservation of Hungarian folk music. Without him, and his colleague, Zoltán Kodály, the centuries old folk music of Hungary may not have been survived to the extent that it has – it certainly would not have enriched twentieth century classical music without his pioneering efforts. No history of classical music can be written without reference to the life and work of Béla Bartók and the importance of Hungarian folk music.

Bartók was born as the nineteenth century began to close, on 25 March 1881, in the town of Nagyszentmiklós in what is now known as S ânnicolau Mare in Romania. His early life reflects the geography of Hungary of that time : when seven, after his father died, he moved to Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine), and later to Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) before moving to Budapest at 18 years old where his musical education and career began in earnest.

As I have written several times in this series, Budapest at that time was a burgeoning city of immense energy, talent and industry. Nearly all the great Hungarian artists and intellectuals spent time in that seething, dynamic, confidant city and it is no wonder that Bartók’s talent emerged quickly and profoundly. In 1903 he wrote his first great work, Kossuth, a tone poem to the great Hungarian who had died a few years earlier. By 1907 his talent was clear and he was teaching at the Royal Academy as piano professor. Sir George Solti was one of his pupils at this time.

It was also at about this time that his greatest achievement: the discovery and subsequent preservation of Hungarian folk music took place. To understand the impact of this discovery, it is important to understand the prevailing view of ‘Hungarian’ music at that time. This view held that authentic Hungarian folk music was that of the Gypsy bands that were such a feature of musical life at that time. In other words, gypsy music was the authentic, organic musical voice of Hungary.

This misconception, for that is what it was, was propagated by for example Liszt whose Hungarian Dances are based on Gypsy themes, rather than what we know today as authentic Hungarian folk music. This mistaken view of what constituted authentic Magyar music influenced many composers of that era, mostly notably Brahms. The music of Bartók would change all that.

It was in the summer of 1904 that Bartók overheard an eighteen-year-old nanny from Kibéd (today Chibed) in the heart of Transylvania sing folk songs to the children under her care. Here Bartok discovered the authentic music and voice of Hungarians. The music he discovered in this village was quite different to that of the Gypsy tones and patterns: it was based on the pentatonic scale (five pitches in each octave, as opposed to that heptatonic found in Gypsy music). This music was similar to that found in Oriental folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia and Siberia. It is tempting to consider that the origins of the original Magyars could be heard in this music.

In 1908 Bártok and Kodály set out to collect examples of this ‘new’ Magyar music. They used a phonograph machine to record songs onto wax cylinders. They quickly began to incorporate their newly found treasures into their music. For example, Bartók’s For Children (A Gyermekeknek) consists of 80 piano pieces based on Hungarian and Slovakian folk tunes were written between 1908 and 1910 (As late as 1945 he was revising this work, reducing the number of pieces to 79 because he had learned that the melodies he used in several were apparently not of genuine folk origin.)

Those early journeys throughout the Hungarian heartland were the happiest of Bartók’s life. He had found something authentic and as a proud and patriotic Hungarian imbued with the strong nationalism of the time his discovery of the rich traditions of dance, music and song he found throughout the land inspired him. In 1903 he wrote to his mother, “All my life, in every sphere, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.” Bartók would spend the next10 years collecting and transcribing the music of his homeland – for the good of his country and Hungarianess.

Amazingly, many of his original recordings can still be heard today. For example the Hungarian folk group, Muzsikás, produced a CD called the Bartók Album in which their interpretations of Hungarian folk music interspersed with Bartók’s original recordings. It is strange indeed to listen to the first track on the CD, Elindultam a hazámból/ I left my homeland, recorded in 1906 in Békésgyula. Faint and scratchy though the recording may be, it does give one a glimpse into the world Bartók and Kodály were discovering. This song would be the first he reworked and incorporated into Hungarian Folksongs I.

The aftermath of World War I and the loss of much of Hungarian territory and the corresponding hostility of many of the successor states, restricted, if not actually prohibited him from further research. Bartók become increasingly pessimistic and experimented with atonal music that makes much of his music ‘inaccessible’.

1939 was a turning point in Bartók’s life. He felt the coming war deeply and his liberal attitude was at odds with much of the common discourse. When the Nazis came to power in Germany refused to give concerts there and broke from his German publisher. After the war started he and his family immigrated to the United States. He never really settled there. Artistically misunderstood and impoverished, Bartok lived his final years in adversity and ill-health. Exile from one’s homeland is always hard but for Bartok it was the unhappiest part of his life. The pain of separation from the soil that nourished and the destruction of his country were too much for him to bear. His body ravaged by leukaemia, he died in September 1945, with few attending his funeral.^[1]

Forty-two years later, following the efforts of his two sons, Béla and Péter, his remains were returned to Hungary and reburied in the Farkasréti cemetery in Buda, where his life-long friend Kodály is also buried. He was home at last.

Bartók’s place in the canon of modern classical music is undeniable. But he was forever a Hungarian and his work in preserving the authentic music of his native land is his greatest achievement. But the love of one’s country often comes with a price. His distress and sadness at the state of his homeland in the early 1940s was profound. His view was that he would rather break away from the land that nourished him than remain a witness to its destruction. This most difficult of all decisions, and one all refugees must deal with, came at great existential cost to Bartók.

As his farewell concert at the Music Academy in Budapest, the epicenter of Hungarian musical performance and learning, was ending to thunderous applause, someone in the audience began to sing the words of the folksong Bartók had first heard and recorded in Békésgyula:

“I set off from my homeland
From famous little Hungary
I looked back when I reached halfway
And the tears spilled from my eyes.”

Within moments the entire audience began to sing this quintessential Hungarian folk- song. Bartók had discovered, rescued and preserved this tradition forever. He stopped for a moment, took a few steps backwards, then quietly left the stage.

Footnotes

BACK TO POST ¹ I would thoroughly recommend the film of Bartók’s American exile,After the Storm – The American Exile of Béla Bartók which is available from the Kultur Video or the usual sources.

Useful Links

A simple Google search will reveal the useful plethora of links about Bartók, his life and his music. Below are several that are particular useful.

• Bartók Archive. Comprehensive information about the composer from the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In both Hungarian and English
• The Living Tradition of Bartók’s Sources. A review of the Muzsikás’ Bartók Album from the Hungarian Quarterly. There are lots of other articles in the Hungarian Quarterly so this it is well worth searching this site.

I am currently writing an article for the Magyar Szó on Paul Erdős as part of the series, Famous Hungarians. Before I started researching for the article, I knew next-to-nothing about him, other than he was Hungarian and had something to do with mathematics. What a truly fascinating character in turned out to be! First of all he was born at the end of what I think was the most fertile, prosperous and extraordinary time in modern Hungarian history, perhaps matched by the glory of Mathias reign in the 15th Century. That time was of course the decades after the Compromise of 1867 and outbreak of World War I. These nearby forty years produced many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century such Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Sziliard, Andre Kertesz, Frank Capa – the list goes on and on. Nearly of these individuals were born in Budapest and many were Jewish. For some reason the creativity and intelligence found fertile ground in Budapest at this time. Erdős was born into this great circle in 1913.

What is remarkable about his early life is how protected he was by his Mother – no doubt spurred by the loss of her two daughters to scarlet fever a few days before Erd&;#337;s was born and that her husband was a prisoner of war for nearly six years. She did everything for Paul apparently. He didn’t tie is own shoes till 14 and didn’t know how to butter toast at 21! Amazing. Throughout his life he never bothered with the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday tasks of like such as cooking, washing clothes, learning to drive, having a bank account, cooking a meal, mowing the lawns, getting a mortgage… you get the picture.

Erdős was always looked after by a wide circle of friends who found him stimulating to be around. Thus he always had people to take care of such things. But he was an extraordinary generous man. Once when a student sought to repay a $1000 that Erdős that given to him so that he could go to Harvard, Erdős refused to accept the repayment. But what should I do with the money, the student asked. “What I did with it”, came the reply.

I always try to finds the Hungarianness in such people, even after they invariably leave Hungary. Erdős, like many Hungarians loved language and word-plays. His use of English was consistently quirky as with many Hungarians. He was also concerned with becoming senile and he fretted constantly about old-age. he combined his love of language and his neurosis when he parodied some lines from Pétőfi’s famous poem, One Thought/Egy gondolat bánt engemet.. when he wrote, ‘One thought disturbs me, that I may decease/In slowing progressing Alzheimer’s disease.’ A particularly amusing example of his peculiar use of language was when he mother, who began to learn English at the age of 84, asked him, “Pálko, what is the English word for ‘szilva’ [plum]?”. “Plimm, mother, plimm.”, was his reply. Anyone who has heard a Hungarian speak English with that ‘quirkiness’ they seem to possess, will appreciate how funny that must have sounded.

I am not all qualified to judge is contribution to mathematics but his output was prolific – some 1500 papers – over his long life-time. Indeed it lead to the development of the concept known as “Erdős Number”. This is used by mathematicians, and other scientists too, to measure their ‘collaborative closeness to having worked on a paper with Erdős. For example, if you co-authored a paper with Erd?s you had an Erdős number of 1, if you co-authored a paper with someone who had an Erdős number of 1, then your Erdős Number was 2. And so on. Naturally his own Erdős number was 0! Mathematicians in particular treasure there Erdős number as a badge of honour. Those with a number of 3 or less are considered notable in their own right. Needless to say, a goodly number of these are Hungarians. But not only mathematicians are measured by their Erdős number. If you look at Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry or even Economics you see many with a Erdős Number of 2, 3 or 4. Albert Einstein as an Erdős number of 2 and even Bill Gates of Microsoft fame has an Erdős number of 4.

A wonderful man and another Hungarian genius! I’ll post the full article once it is published in the Magyar Szó.

This is the first of series of articles in which I will look at the lives of famous Hungarians.  What do I mean by famous?  I mean those Hungarians who made a contribution beyond their shores and who influenced the world in some significant manner in science or similar field.  I guess you could say it those lives made a difference to others.

I have chosen as the first Hungarian live to examine that of André Kertész, one of the greatest photographers of the 20^th century.  He is regarded as a seminal figure in the development of the documentary style of photography, or photojournalism, the telling of everyday life of everyday people.  The 20^th century is really the democratic century: the time when the “common man” would find his true place.  The photographer who captured and echoed this imperative best and led the way for all photographers who followed was Kertész. His career as a photographer was the longest of any of the greats of the last century and there is no other who has some many great photos whether, portrait, still life, landscape or abstract.

There was a peculiar Hungarian quality to his work; there is a romanticism lyricism in his photos that echoes the Hungary he grew up in: both in Budapest where he was born and in the countryside where he spent many happy days. Kertész was a poet in the great Hungarian tradition, but he was a poet of light; he created images of simple, everyday life and objects that constantly reveal themselves to the viewer, that draw you in to the photo and transport you, mysteriously and dreamily to another world.

Take for example, the photo Montmartre, taken in1927.  We are looking down some stairs, the shadows of the railings casting peculiar, disparate angles, unsettling the viewer. At the bottom of the stairs, beside a lamplight, sits a man, waiting: what for we can’t know, perhaps a beggar waiting to accost passers-by, perhaps just a man, tired and watching the world go by.  A woman is walking briskly towards the steps, striding forward.  She seems almost to be veering away from the man, as if sensing danger.  There is a feeling of menace in this photo.  We can only imagine.  The light, the diagonals, the everydayness of the scene is pure Kertész: the photo touches our heart, our spirit, our mind. Pure poetry.

Were did this genius spring from? Kertész was born at the height of the golden age of Budapest, in July 1894. The city he grew up was bustling, prosperous and confident. Everywhere you looked there was energy, excitement, in the cafes, along the tree-lined avenues, the ring roads, the promenades along the Danube and in the vibrant buildings that sprung up celebrating its Hungarianness and a thousand years of history.  This was the city of Krúdy, Ady, Bartók, and Molnár. Of Hungary’s seven Noble prize winners, five were born, like Kertész, in Budapest, between 1875 and 1905. Kertész first picked up a camera as an 18 year old and would spend the next ten years developing his craft in Hungary, capturing light and the Magyar world in which he inhabited.  His early photos are of village life, of the puszta and of his beloved Budapest.  His unorthodox approach, his experimenting with angles and light also began here. Take for example, his Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, 1917 which he took while recuperating from wounds suffered while fighting on the Serbian front.  Here we see light, distortion, irregularity, yet a lyricism and softness, all traits of Kertész.  At the age 23 he was a fully mature photographer, confident and certain, his genius already formed and evident.

In 1925, with a social and political climate unsympathetic to artistic creativity, he moved to Paris and like many other Hungarians saw in this city echoes of their own Budapest.  In Paris he experimented with distortion, his nudes in particular. But he captured Paris and the life of the artists, all brimming with new ideas such as Surrealism and Dadaism.  This spilled over into his own work, including a series of distorted nudes that broke new ground. The Fork, or La Fourchette taken in 1928 is one of his most famous from his Paris years.

His profound lyricism found its truest expression in the photos of him and his wife, Elisabeth. She was the love of his life and they were together for nearly all of their adult lives.  Perhaps his most profound picture of the two of them is entitled, Elisabeth and I taken in 1931. The full-frame version shows him sitting beside Elisabeth, his arm around her, his hand resting on her shoulder, while he looks adoringly at her. She however is looking straight at the camera, as if accepting that her world is also the world of the camera.  While moving and tender in itself, Kertész took the photo one step further by cropping it.  Now we only see the left side of her face, staring at the camera, and his hand on shoulder.  This has been described as one of greatest photos of the bond between a man and woman. Its strength and beauty lies in its utter simplicity.  But I think only of Ady and his great love poem, I guard your eyes/ Őrizem a szemed when I look at this photo.  As I think Kertész must have too: This is a Hungarian love poem created with light. When Elizabeth died in 1977 he reprised this photo (titled For Elizabeth) by photographing the cropped version of the photo and adding a wreath around his hand on the original photo. You can almost feel his grief.  With my old man’s wrinkled hand,/with my old man’s squinting eyes,/let me hold your lovely hand,/let me guard your lovely eyes.

In 1936 Kertész and Elizabeth moved to America.  The storm clouds of Fascism were growing darker and there was less and less work available for such an innovative and apolitical photographer as Kertész.  His Jewish background did not help either.  For many decades he would not receive the recognition he had in Paris and he spent years working as a freelance photographer for magazines such as Look, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Town and Country. He regarded these as his “dead” years, describing his work from 1949 until 1961 as “worthless hackwork”. He retired and embarked on a series of personal projects; including photographing the view was is the twelfth-story Fifth Avenue apartment.  He was angry at being ignored and misunderstood He was after all, a European, steeped in the language and art of the Old World, and not in the brash, commercial, yet prudish world of America.  He was bitter at his lack of recognition. But such was his strength, and talent, that he resurfaced in his late sixties and started to receive the recognition he richly deserved.   His photo Washington Square is classic Kertész, unorthodox, lines and angles with a single figure, alone, going somewhere.

My personal favourite from his latter years is Martinique from 1972. The composition is simplicity itself, the view from a balcony looking out to sea, the photo divided by the frosty glass door, behind which we see a dark, mysterious figure, matching the mood of the dark clouds and the slightly angular horizon.

He would visit Hungary again in the 1980s shortly before his death in 1986 at the age of 91.  The photos from that time show the same love of the everydayüness, the landscape and the people.  By this time he had received the recognition he deserved; prizes and accolades poured to him. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased 100 prints from him in 1984, the largest ever acquisition of photographs from a living artist by a museum.  Andre Kertész is now regarded as a great artist of the 20^th Century, a genius who captured the essence of the everyday life in a unique, yet Hungarian manner.

On May 5th, we celebrate the 100th birthday of Miklós Radnóti, a great Hungarian poet and a great poet of the Holocaust. His last poem, in which he predicts his imminent death, Razglednicák (‘Picture Postcards’ in Serbo-Croat), written while on a death-march, is one of the true Holocaust poems. Remarkably it was sewn into his clothing and discovered on him nearly two years after his murder in 1944. He is a major focus of any study on Holocaust literature.

Yet he wrote some of the most sensous poems in any language, my favourite being Bájoló (The Charm), beautifully sung by the another icon of Hungarian culture, Zsuzsa Koncz (YouTube link). There is the inevitable Wikipedia article on him, not to mention at least two Facebook groups. He has been the subject of several excellent films. Hungarian readers have the ever reliable Hungarian Electronic Library to access his poetry, English readers should head for their favourite bookshop, electronic or otherwise, Foamy Sky, a bi-lingual edition of his major poems. We can also turn to Lóránt Czigány’s epic A History Of Hungarian Literature for deeper understanding of Radnóti’s genius.

And even if you can’t understand a word of Hungarian listen to the great, yet tragic, Latinovits, read Radnóti’s homage to his homeland, (written even after it betrayed him),Nem tudhatom/I Know Not What (YouTube link) and understand the power of the poem to transcend the everyday.

Disclaimer:I posted the above on Metafilter (see link here) so this is a vanity re-post!  Some people said some nice things about the post so I thought I would also post it here.  Pure vanity, as I say, but that is a good enough reason. Besides, I get to correct my spelling mistakes here!