I dedicate this essay with friendly feelings to Korunk, a review which I used to be a contributor – it published my first essay which I devoted to the discussion of Attila József's poetic greatness. I wrote the following piece for a reprint of the 1937 special issue of Szép Szó entitled "What is a Hungarian now?". I have to add that Attila József wrote one of his best poems, "My Fatherland", especially for this publication. (On 20th November, 1992)

I don't believe in anything that could be regarded as the essence of Frenchness or Hispanicness.
F. BRAUDEL

"Endow us humans with humanity,
endow us Magyars with sovereignity"
ATTILA JÓZSEF

History is essentially future's challenge to the present.
J. GRACQ

It is probably not accidental that these days more and more people refer to the sizeable collection of essays What is a Hungarian? edited by Gyula Szekfû in 1939. Amongst the authors of this book there were such big names as Mihály Babits, Zoltán Kodály and Dezsô Keresztúry. It is not by chance that foundations or limited companies are founded to promote "the awareness of being a Hungarian" (magyarságtudat) and that Hungarology, the discipline of Hungarian studies has become fashionable; incidentally I know only one equivalent and that is Deutschkunde (German studies).

A discipline always means a search, a quest, a search for an explanation to some complicated question raised by life. It is interesting to recall what it was that led Gyula Szekfû, author of Three Generations and Somewhere We Have Made the Wrong Turn with 5–6 friends to this project. "We were worried" he wrote in his foreword "and we thought that with this book we shall be able to show the way to those Hungarians of goodwill who in the chaos of mercilessly aggressive ideologies and propaganda messages when Hungarians point to their fellow-nationals as if they were weak, bad, false or sick Hungarians, no longer know what is the true meaning of the word Hungarian... We had not been aware how suggestive was the title "What is a Hungarian?" and what a wide echo it could find amongst the people. There was a veritable avalanche of books and articles in which questions whirled concerning the Hungarian character, the racial image, the idea of nationhood, the people; questions such as what is a Hungarian? who is a Hungarian? what was a Hungarian in the past? and what has become or what will become of him in the future?"

In course of their research the authors realized what a difficult task they took upon themselves. When looking for foreign examples, scholarly characterologies on other nations, they were disappointed. When an outsider drew up the picture of another nation in most cases it contained too little recognition and too much criticism or even contempt; in the inverse cases only rarely were certain forms of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation avoided. At any rate, attempts at objectivity constantly stumbled upon the obstacle indicated by Szekfû according to which: "the concepts of people, nation, nationality, nationalims, nation-state and culturally defined state (Kulturstaat) are exceedingly ill-defined, their meaning is uncertain, one can hardly find two authors whose views would be identical on this subject". Already the definition of what constitutes an individual, what or who is he, what is his essence and identity, is a very difficult task. On what grounds can I state about myself that I am a unique person in this world? In order to say that I should be able to know everyone else with all the constituent parts of their individuality. What criteria, what qualities and shared traits make this or that nation different, superior or inferior to all other nations? If we would like to go deeper than the language community what other criteria should we look for?

It only adds to the problems that those interested in the specific character of their nation should base their self-knowledge not only on the knowledge of other nations but that they should compare their own nation's past with its present. Modern nationalism is based on historical consciousness, on the contemplation of a nation's past, present and future, on the fact that in a nation's life there are high points and low ones, and even that the idea of a nation's death could be considered. Hungarian Romantic consciousness wished to rescue the past glory of the nation from the dusk of the night: the poet Berzsenyi was the first who asked the question in the form: "what is a Hungarian now?" and answered it with pessimistic scorn, recalling past greatness: "the ugly shape of a Sybarite". Gergely Berzevicy and then István Széchenyi wanted to awake the consciousness of Hungarians to nationhood as an existential project to be realized, as something not-yet-existing. But if we want to give not so much a lyrical or mythic but a scientific answer to the question "what is a Hungarian?" then-as the ethnographer Lajos Bartucz put it- we have to refer, no doubt, to the competence of anthropology, a science which studies "the whole human being, that is a closed entity which is a sum of all human qualities, the inherited and acquired ones as well as the physical and mental idiosyncrasies." It goes without saying that since the 1930s anthropology has undergone an immense development but Bartucz's definition which denied all scientific value to the concept of "racial purity" introduced by racist ideologies is valid to this day. He finished his essay with these words: "The progress of human culture, the end to the isolation of different peoples, the very numerous peaceful and warlike contacts of nations of diverse racial qualities, their separation and merging, naturally led to the situation where different people became more and more mixed racially and all nations, and especially the culturally most developed ones constituted a complicated racial mosaic. Such a many-coloured mosaic is also the Hungarian body of the nation." Ultimately Bartucz reached this rather artful definition: "The essence of Hungarianness, something that makes Hungarians different from all other nations is a manifestation determined by the thousand year-long course of history and the natural and social milieu given to the Hungarian fatherland by a physical and spiritual heritage of special racial components that were inherited from generation by generation through blood-related individuals who have lived within the Hungarian body of nation, a biological and reproductive circle of permanent contact." This definition – whether in spite or on account of its complexity – I find wanting, for it leaves out exactly that what prompted Bartucz and the other contributors of the Szekfû book to consider the essence of the Hungarian nation: a feeling of confusion, uncertainty, even a disorientation that affected the awareness of national identity. For the kind of self-image, self-awareness that a nation has about itself plays an important role in its existence. Its pathology may force upon itself hysterical, self-damaging forms of behaviour, such patterns which harm both its spiritual and moral fibre. Even today we experience that the fear of changes and of competition, inferiority complexes vis-á-vis nimbler, more resourceful, more creative people may lead (using the pretext of a struggle against the danger of cosmopolitanism) to self-isolating, self-mutilating preferences and withdrawals. Also again and again we hear the view of István Bethlen which is supposed to justify elitist, minority commandeering, that "the Hungarian people are not yet mature enough for democracy" and that in order to pass the examination of maturity before the court of history it still needs the leadership of a specific "historical" class, that is guidance and instructions from the bureaucracy.

Szekfû and his fellow-authors wanted to be realists but they were fundamentally utopians, for they wanted to preserve the Hungarian nation in the form as they had inherited it from the previous generations, from the times of István Tisza, (the last Hungarian Premier of the pre-war Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) as they pictured the ideal of the gentry-Hungarian in their minds. They stressed opposition and resistance rather than progress. Opposition, as Babits put it, against the imperiousness of foreigners, against a world which ignores ancient, sacred rights, which prostrates itself in front of naked force and does not tolerate individual liberty – neither does it allow the calmness of contemplation, the happiness of creativity, or the permanent rule of law, the sanctity of morality and the validity of truth. That this conservative opposition of Szekfû and Babits was directed against the gaining ground of totalitarian regimes is beyond doubt. Only it is doubtful whether the regime which Szekfû and his friends would have liked to conserve against this process would have really suited the image which they had held of it. They were, after all, not defending the Hungarian values of an Eötvös, only of an István Bethlen who did not always respect individual freedom, the sanctity of morality, the permanent rule of law and the dignity of other nations.

Two years before the publication of Szekfû's book in June 1937 the review Szép Szó published a thematic number entitled "What is a Hungarian now?". This may have had somes success among the general public, but it failed to arouse the same reaction amongst the wider strata of society as its successor, even if it had painted a more realistic picture of Hungarian society of the Thirties than the Szekfû anthology. At any rate, it had a different approach to the "Hungarian panorama" and to that what Szekfû called "the decay and discomposure of the ancient, unbroken Hungarian character" and in his footsteps László Németh (in such works as The Revolution of Quality and In Minority) speaking "from the very midst of the Hungarian nation" called Hungarian baseness. This degradation and decay was attributed by both of them to the decline of the leading stratum in Hungarian society and they blamed for it liberal Hungary, which "in spite of Széchenyi's warning opened the borders before the Jewish immigrants coming here in droves to escape their half-human (!) life. (One may add here that according to new historical research the mass-immigration of Jews took place prior to the 1867 Compromise and the "liberal" period that followed, so one cannot blame the liberalism of the two Tiszas for that).

Gyula Juhász in the introduction to a book published in 1988 (To Be a Hungarian) not without reason drew attention to the strange phenomenon "to what a large number of people were to be excluded from the national community [by politicians] in the course of Hungarian history, and especially in our century". These were on one occasion "Magyars of German origin", at other times "Slovaks [who] are not [quite] human" and at another time (and mostly) indviduals who had "assimilated" from the Jewish people. When we look at it today with a sober mind or from outside, it may appear as bizarre that a nation in the midst of a demographic crisis which had survived many centuries only at the price of embracing and digesting many other ethnic groups, began to listen to the advocates of exlusion right after the country's territorial dismemberment (after World War I). It is also bizarre that this policy intended to displace precisely that group of people-accusing it of parasitism and colonial attitudes-which unlike the Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians and Croats who had tried to assert their nationalities, actually wanted to choose integration with the Hungarian people (keeping or abandoning its old religion) – something that it had done in Northern Hungary (now Slovakia), in Transylvania and in the Vojvodina as long as its vast majority was not simply destroyed.

At any rate, the question: "What is a Hungarian?" from the very beginning or rather from the end was always identified with the question: who is a Hungarian and who is not? That is from the multitude of those who were, one could say, pressing forward to become one. So what had to be proved was why isn't someone a Hungarian even if he is legally a Hungarian citizen, speaks the Hungarian language, and adapts himself to Hungarian culture even enriching it in his own way. I have spoken about it earlier how hard it is to prove this scientifically, how difficult it is "to approach the essence of Hungarianness with objective methods and tools." The fact remains that at the time when we produced the thematic issue of Szép Szó, among the majority of the Hungarian intelligentsia more or less that (rather subjective) view prevailed that more or less everyone who lives in Hungary is a Hungarian, with the exception of the Jews. According to Gyula Juhász – and here I am leaping over half a century – "a great step forward of democratic thinking" manifested itself in "the forging ahead of the view that... everyone is a Hungarian who feels himself a Hungarian". Clearly we have not managed to shake ourselves free from subjectivity; the only thing that we can claim is that we had left behind an exclusive subjectivity and we arrived at a different, embracing one which Juhász today calls democratic and which Attila József and his friends, following the traditions of Eötvös as well as Ady and the periodicals Nyugat and Huszadik Század, thought to be in line with liberal and democratic thinking fifty-odd years ago. The fact that the spokesmen of the so-called "Christian political order" looked for different criteria in defining "Hungarianness" in the post-Liberal period was obviously related to their conviction that, as László Németh put it, "nineteenth-century democracy had lost its ground", so Hungary needed a different policy, though the same Németh also stated that this new policy should not be sought either in the direction of Socialism (which "shows regressive signs"), or Fascism ("which may become the grave-digger of humanism"). Also Németh did not want to answer the question "how can the Hungarian nation straighten its back?" with "paying allegiance to the racial doctrine". "If race is meant as an anthropological concept – no "– wrote Németh –" but if it is meant a moral one: yes". And this moral sense he hoped to find "in the still inactive nobler persons and in the relatively unexplored masses of the Hungarian people... in the still hiding new nobility (!)" or else in those "whom this new nobility could pull forward". Somewhat later in his book In Minority he completed this rather obscure definition (which related more to the uncertain future rather than the realities of the present) with the opinion that "the Hungarian nation lost itself in the entity that claimed to be Hungarian". According to Németh the Hungarian nation was more a potentiality than a reality. As for the real Hungary, Németh saw it as something that became crooked and consequently it had to be straightened; it had become corrupted, so it had to be ennobled.

I have no intention to minimize Németh's literary achievement or deny the good intentions motivating his patriotism, but I think that his concept of the nation reflected the political, social and economic decline of Hungary following the First World War, including her crisis of identity and the Hungarian consequences of the distorted spirit of the world economic crisis. If we are looking for guidelines for the present then those are to be found in the traditions that were disrupted in 1918 and not in the blind alleys of the post – 1919 period.