https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3831-5123
Abstract
The contribution describes István Deák as both personification and propagator of paradoxical plurals, or seemingly self-contradictory elements concentrated in a single entity. Drawing on examples from his life, scholarship, public-facing writings, and extensive interview material, the authors explore this facet of his career and person.
In 2013, a band of awkward young Hungarian rockers called Kozmosz (Cosmos) released the steam-punk anthem “The Land of the Smart Ones,” a riposte of sorts to the national anthem’s opening line, “God bless the Hungarian.” Decked out in a variant of Hungarian national costume with machine-age accessories, the band tallies the paradoxical plurals of Hungarianness: “We are the heroes and we are the casualties, the Nazis and the Commies were Hungarians, too. We are our own problem.”1
Hungary and indeed East Central Europe are famous for their paradoxical plurals, or their seemingly self-contradictory elements concentrated in a single entity. The iconic example is the Habsburg (Austrian) emperor, who was legally distinct from, yet the same person as, the Hungarian king. In an essay from 2003, the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy described how even ordinary inhabitants of the region have embodied incongruous multitudes: “It’s like someone who has always lived in Munkács, and has never left Munkács his entire life, but who has been, nevertheless, a one-time Hungarian, one-time Czech, one-time citizen of the Soviet Union, then a citizen of Ukraine. In our town, this is how we become cosmopolitans.”2
István Deák—well-dressed, gracious, serene, erudite, and quite possibly the only person on earth who wore an ascot around his Manhattan apartment (without irony) into the 2010s—knew paradoxical plurals intimately. At several points in his life he was part of a group that seemed to definitionally exclude another group of which he was also a part. He learned at age twelve that although as a baby he had been baptized Catholic, and “believed in Hungary and the Catholic religion, confessed and took eucharist once a week,” his family heritage was Jewish.3 His great-great-grandfather, Theodor Gutthard, had even been the president of the Veszprém Jewish community.4 Meanwhile, his parents favored non-Jewish Hungarian suitors for his sister.5 He was not quite fully Hungarian-Catholic, nor quite fully Hungarian-Jewish, but certainly not quite neither, and definitely both. Though he was told once as a Hungarian boyscout “you don’t fit here,” he was also the “young master” (úrfi) to the Szekler villagers he encountered during the Second World War.
A young István, about age seven, as a Hungarian boy scout. The picture was taken around 1933 on Pasaréti út in Budapest, at his godfather’s villa. (From the Deák family collection.)
A young István, about age seven, as a Hungarian boy scout. The picture was taken around 1933 on Pasaréti út in Budapest, at his godfather’s villa. (From the Deák family collection.)
Unlike many of his later friends among the Hungarian émigré community in New York—including the literary scholar and translator Ivan Sanders and the architect and social historian András Körner—who arrived in the United States following the 1956 Revolution, István Deák spent the late 1940s and early 1950s mainly in France and then Germany, finally settling in New York in 1956, just before the revolution.6 He enrolled as a student at Columbia where he trained as a historian of Western Europe.7 But after the Soviets successfully launched the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) into space in 1957, resources began to flow toward programs and institutions relating to the Eastern Bloc. As Cold War politics began shaping the academy, Deák was offered his first appointment in 1963 at Columbia’s East Central European Center.8
Although Deák was the right person in the right place at the right time, his thinking was never a clean fit with postwar geopolitical preoccupations. Instead of trying to explain state socialism, his first move as an East Central Europeanist was to write about the nineteenth-century origins of paradoxical plurals. The Lawful Revolution (1979) was a book about the 1848 Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth, “a liberal and a nationalist for whom the two ideologies were not incompatible.”9 Beyond Nationalism (1990) was arguably even more anachronistic, completed before the fall of the Berlin Wall and prior to the horrific wars of Yugoslav Succession. Though it would later prove ground-breaking, it was published at a time when the question of whether the region would or could move “beyond nationalism” was not yet the signature preoccupation of practically the entire field, and certainly long before Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made a name for himself by touting a brand of Hungarian “illiberal nationalism” for export.10
Paradoxical plurals are difficult to render in plain prose, but Deák was insistent that one’s writing style should not reflect the knottiness of the problem itself. In his book on Kossuth, Deák noted “I have tried to tell the story [of 1848] logically and simply. This is not easy,” he admitted. “If there was one emotion common to the forty million inhabitants of the Empire, it was bewilderment.”11 A small asterisk follows this statement in the book, and in tiny print at the bottom of the page, spreading onto the next, is this illustrative anecdote:
In the summer of 1848 a Habsburg army colonel named Blomberg—a German national at the head of a regiment of Polish lancers—was in charge of the defense of a district in southern Hungary inhabited mainly by Germans. Confronted by an attack of Serbian rebels, Blomberg turned to his commander for instructions. The commander, a Habsburg general of Croatian nationality, instructed the colonel to fight the Serbs, and so did the local Hungarian government commissioner, who happened to be a Serb. But the leader of the Serbian rebels, a Habsburg army colonel of Austro-German nationality, begged Blomberg to think of his duty to the emperor and not of his duty to the king (the two were the same person), whereupon Blomberg, easily persuaded, ordered his Poles out of the region, leaving his German conationals to the tender mercies of the Serbs.12
The extent to which this perplexity was quite personal for Deák is evident from a few details. The Lawful Revolution is dedicated “To my father who served Emperor Francis Joseph in the Great War and to the memory of my great-grandfather who served Lajos Kossuth in 1848.” Nevertheless, in each of his scholarly works Deák refused to yield to the temptations of terminal bewilderment. One is reminded of the words of another scholar born in the long shadow of the Dual Monarchy, the applied mathematician George Morgan. In writing on the figure of the historian, Morgan emphasized the value of “consistent selection, coherent linkage, and evaluation” as the operations at the historian’s disposal to combat “the ubiquitous confusion” that otherwise reigns.13
Though Deák’s histories were rendered “logically and simply” in elegant prose, he nonetheless troubled countless pieties and platitudes, his own as well as others. He took a magnifyinig glass to his own thoughts and experiences while seeing beyond them. When reflecting on how he felt upon discovering at age twelve that he was a Jew, a pariah, he immediately added that the feeling was “what the Roma today must feel.” In his teaching as well as in conversation, Deák was famous for offering all kinds of counterarguments and qualifications to his own statements, effectively exhausting the field of possible critical engagement in situ, and often ending a sentence by starting another with the phrase, “but then of course . . . ” The scope of this self-refinement and self-correction was practically endless, and oftentimes cut very close to home, touching upon the attitudes, experiences, and beliefs of people he loved and admired, right down to his very own pieties and revelations. “I should have been more honest,” he recalled of his twelve-year-old self, balking at the news that he was Jewish.14
When Europe on Trial was published in 2015, it received a great deal of critical acclaim, including a glowing review by Christopher Browning in The New York Review of Books. Holly Case recalls that Deák, after being congratulated on the reviews, waved a hand dismissively and said, “Yes, that’s all very nice, but why don’t they argue with me more?”15 This constant casting outward toward the counterposition or greater precision, his famous “but then of course,” likely stemmed from his personal experiences of the Arrow Cross terror and Soviet “liberation” during the siege of Budapest. Having seen for himself the widespread collaboration with and sympathy for the occupying German authorities in Hungary, Deák was skeptical of the easy “grand narratives” relating to the wartime behavior of Europeans. As he emphasized some six decades later:
People just did not think, did not speak among each other the same way as politicians and intellectuals spoke about them. . . . I attended an assembly in a theater at the end of January 1945, as there were still ongoing fights in Buda. The actor Oszkár Ascher recited revolutionary, anti-German poems, while another actor Tamás Major noted that we awoke to a “glorious dawn.” The audience seemed moved, but I personally felt that something is not right here, because the people I met on the streets and in the air raid shelters and cellars were not at all glad about being liberated by the Soviets–with the exception of the Jews. At best, they were glad that the street fighting was over. Everybody was afraid of “Russians” and to tell the truth, they had reason to be.16
History continued to personally confront Deák with situations in which people told different stories at home and in public, or in which they denounced one another or compromised themselves under pressure from state authority. He traveled frequently to socialist Hungary and maintained deep ties to academics and family there. Unsurprisingly, the state security services took a keen interest in him and managed to turn some of his colleagues into informers. Despite having good connections to the Party’s official historians, including the renowned Iván T. Berend, Deák was briefly banned from Hungary in 1973.17 He nonetheless played a central role in repatriating the Crown of Saint Stephen to Hungary in 1978, as part of the delegation that ceremonially handed the crown over to the socialist government of János Kádár.18
Although he was often critical of communist regimes and political elites in general, when it came to socialist Hungary, he rarely condemned individuals, not even the informant who reported on him to state security.19 In 2021, Máté Rigó stumbled upon a state security report detailing a conversation between Deák and “Perényi.” Deák reacted with compassion and understanding for the informant—a historian at the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—and even sought to explain why the details in the report made sense.20
Similarly, in the case of Orbánism, Deák was one of the early vocal critics of the Orbán regime, invoking castigation from conservative historians Géza Jeszenszky and György Schöpflin in 2011.21 He proved precise in his judgment. Orbán has since become a radical right-wing politician, alienating many conservative intellectuals, and even Jeszenszky himself, who had served the regime as ambassador from 2011 to 2014.
Deák’s hesitancy to pass judgment on friends and colleagues who made their compromises with the Kádár and later the Orbán regime may be indicative of the peculiar nature of both Hungarian state socialism under Kádár and the “illiberal democracy” of Orbán (which has adopted a number of Kádárist strategies).22 Both are viscous and heterogenous forms of state hegemony, as exemplified by the popular Cold War moniker “gulash communism.” Most of daily life, and even some independent intellectual activity, persists without much direct intervention from the state. To maintain its monopoly, the ruling party prefers and privileges its favorites while consistently pestering, frustrating, and limiting the reach of its opposition. Paradoxical plurals are a fertile habitat for such forms of governance, which peddle in an instrumental and unself-critical version of “but then of course”—in the form of whataboutisms and tu quoques—wielded to justify their policies and actions.
As scholars adopt their own attitude toward the region’s paradoxical plurals, we might recall the introduction to Beyond Nationalism, wherein Deák notes the “inflation of grades” that plagued the Habsburg Army just as it does American colleges. “A ‘good shot’ was a poor marksman indeed, and a ‘fairly good rider’ did not know how to ride a horse.”23 Deák’s gripe with grade inflation was an oblique expression of his humility in the face of an overwhelming history, and of his stubborn refusal to be overwhelmed. We rightly seek to understand, contextualize, and give one another the pass. But then of course humanly, as much as intellectually, we can and should do better.
Notes
Kozmosz, “Az Okosak Földje (official musicvideo),” October 10, 2013, Vimeo, video, 4:27, https://vimeo.com/76596463.
Péter Esterházy, “How Big is the European Dwarf?,” in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War, ed. Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (London: Verso, 2005): 74–79, here 74. The quoted translation has been edited slightly to correct for syntactic errors.
Holly Case and Máté Rigó, “Extended Profile: The Life and Career of Professor István Deák,” East-Central Europe Past and Present (blog), https://ecepastandpresent.blogspot.com/2013/09/extended-profile-life-and-career-of.html; István Deák, interview by Holly Case and Máté Rigó, Third Interview Series, Part I, October 6, 2013, min. 7:50, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/34132/Third Deak Interview.m4a?sequence=8&isAllowed=y.
“Id. Deák István önéletrajza, valószinüleg 1979-ben irta” (Autobiography of István Deák Sr., likely written in 1979), typescript from the personal collection of István Deák.
Holly Case and Máté Rigó, “Extended Profile”; István Deák, interview by Holly Case and Máté Rigó, First Interview Series, Part II, December 5, 2009, min. 51:50, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/34132/Deak Part 2 - Dec 5 2009-final.mp3?sequence=3&isAllowed=y.
Case and Rigó, “Extended Profile”; Deák, interview, Third Interview Series, Part I, min. 24:15.
His first book, based on his dissertation, was on leftist Weimar intellectuals: István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); based on “Weimar Germany’s ‘Homeless Left’: The World of Carl von Ossietzky” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1964).
Case and Rigó, “Extended Profile”; Deák, interview, Third Interview Series, Part I, min. 40:15.
István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), xvi.
Zsolt Enyedi and Péter Krekó, “Explaining Eastern Europe: Orbán’s Laboratory of Illiberalism,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 3 (2018): 39–51; Holly Case, “Viktor Orbán’s Hungary,” Jewish Quarterly 244 (2021): 37–52.
Deák, Lawful Revolution, xvii.
Ibid., xvii–xviii.
George W. Morgan, The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1968), 172.
Case and Rigó, “Extended Profile”; Deák, interview, First Interview Series, Part II, min. 8:15.
Conversation with Holly Case. Christopher R. Browning, “When Europe Failed,” New York Review of Books, July 23, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/archive/, n.p.
Péter Csunderlik, “Kollaboráció, ellenállás és felemás megtorlás—Deák István a második világháborúról és emlékezetéről,” Múltunk 4 (2020): 162–94, here 163–64. Translation by Máté Rigó.
István Deák, “Scandal in Budapest,” New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006, https://www.nybooks.com/archive/, n.p.; Péter Csunderlik, “Szibériában dőlt el Magyarország sorsa—Peter Pastor történész Trianonról,” Népszava, June 20, 2020, https://nepszava.hu/3080611_csunderlik-peter-sziberiaban-dolt-el-magyarorszag-sorsa--peter-pastor-tortenesz-trianonrol.
István Deák, In Search of the Crown: Hungarian Nationalism and the Crown of St. Stephen (Ithaca, NY: publisher not identified, 2007), DVD, Cornell University Library; Case and Rigó, “Extended Profile”; Deák, interview, Third Interview Series, Part I, min. 59:15.
Deák, “Scandal in Budapest.”
Police colonel László Csordás to lieutenant-colonel Mrs. Béla Mészáros of department III/III-B of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior, March 29, 1985, ÁBTL, O-20041/2 “Humán,” Historical Archives of the State Security Services, Budapest, Hungary. The file was not explicitly critical of Deák, yet it was clear that someone close to him had to have written the report. The informant noted to the officer of the state security services that “There is increasing disillusionment at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute as regards the Hungarian grantees of the Soros Foundation. People question the scholarly aptitude of grantees, their level of English, and their personal and professional behavior. At times, their research topics are not deemed noteworthy. Even as they know little [in New York] about the selection process of the grantees, they believe that only a small circle can access these grants. The Harriman seriously considers closing down its East Central European Center, through which the American curator István Deák channels the funds of the Soros Foundation. To avoid the closure, Deák now attempts to raise the quality of the grantees, which is why he invited history professor Gyula Juhász.” When Deák received the transcripts of this report in 2021, he immediately responded via email with the help of a dictation device that “the grantees of the Soros Foundation were among the most renowned opposition writers, musicologists, and poets. Yet it was not easy to accommodate them, as they had no desire to study and research at universities but to travel and get to know people. I performed much labor of love to György Soros.” Five minutes later, Deák sent another message to add something that the informant did not explicitly state, namely that “I indeed invited Gyuszi Juhász at the request of the [Hungarian] ministry [of culture and education [?], but I did well to do so. He was an excellent human being.” István Deák to Máté Rigó, email, February 5, 2021.
István Deák, “Hungary: The Threat,” New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/archive/, n.p.; György Schöpflin, “The Threat in Hungary: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/archive/, n.p.
Holly Case, “The Great Substitution,” in The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989, ed. Ferenc Laczó and Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2020): 111–22.
Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 21.
