Abstract
István Deák was a gifted teacher of undergraduates as well as graduate students. In this essay, two Columbia College alumni who were inspired to become historians because they took classes with István as undergraduates remember his inspiring presence in the classroom.
The honor of honoring István Deák’s extraordinary career has fallen, on the whole, to his former graduate advisees, who have followed his path and become academics, connected to the broader “Deák community” by ties both personal and professional. But those graduates are just a fraction of the students whom István taught and inspired during his decades at Columbia. What of the thousands of undergraduates, whose cumulative hours listening and engaging in the classroom and reading and writing at home were exponentially greater? Dispersed to the corners of the earth, plying trades that have little connection to academia, nearly all are likely unaware of István’s passing. And, yet, his legacy lives on in them as well.
Although the profession assesses academics largely based on their publications, in most years the majority of our time is spent preparing courses, teaching them, and, unfortunately, grading. István was no exception, though his dedication to his undergraduate classes was. Few scholars approached their lectures with such commitment and passion for the subject. For István, the Habsburg monarchy and the predicament of Europeans in the twentieth century were not the pretext for an abstract intellectual exercise but critical to appreciating how individuals comprehend and respond to events that they largely have no ability to control. For István, the history of Central Europe was personal, understandably, because for him it actually was, but also because he believed it to offer knowledge and means of understanding that were invaluable in the present and for the future. Perhaps most importantly, István did not only have that passion; he shared it.
What follows is a pair of reflections by two of István’s undergraduate students. We are in some ways atypical. Both of us eventually became historians—in István’s own field of expertise no less—unlike the vast majority of Columbia undergrads whose paths led elsewhere to other achievements. But we believe that our memories of István as a teacher of undergraduates are representative in all the ways that truly matter. In the classroom, István distilled his knowledge as a scholar and his experience as someone who had lived Central Europe’s twentieth century into a model of thinking and questioning that was inspiring, inviting, at times intoxicating—and always humane.
Benjamin Frommer (CC '91)
Back toward the end of the 1980s, amidst a gray Morningside Heights winter, in the depths of Columbia’s soulless International Affairs Building, István Deák stepped to the front of the classroom. The atmosphere, a windowless room of affixed, half-broken seats, could have hardly seemed less inviting if not for István’s unbridled enthusiasm and unconventional approach. In the days before PowerPoint, he managed to break the fourth wall of the traditional lecture thanks to books, posters, and postcards from his private collection of Habsburgia that he regularly passed around the classroom. I will never forget one particular day, when he handed out a dozen or so postcards, each of which featured the Habsburg imperial anthem in a different language of the monarchy: German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, etc. One intrepid student asked, “Professor Deák, how did the anthem go?” Deák, modestly, first apologized for not being able to sing it in German. After a pause, he straightened his back, hands to his side, and then proceeded to belt the tune out in his native Hungarian. For a brief moment his allegiance to a monarchy long gone transported the class nearly a century backward to the land and times of Emperor/King Franz Joseph.
If Deák’s attention to his graduate students’ written work was laudable, his attention to that of his undergraduates was truly incredible. Deák’s marginalia were legendary—dozens upon dozens of penciled-in comments that engaged with the text and pushed the writer to consider complexities and holes in arguments that most teachers would leave unremarked or even unnoticed. Sometimes it seemed as if he scrawled more on the papers than the students had written themselves. In my particular case, István volunteered to read the draft of a research paper for another class and, unsurprisingly, commented more thoroughly and productively on the paper than did the instructor of record.
Although I was long aware that István had substantially determined my choice of career, it was not until I read a draft of Europe on Trial that I truly appreciated how fundamentally he had shaped my understanding of history. Page after page, I relived what I had first confronted decades before in his classes as an undergraduate: that resisters were not necessarily heroes, nor were they often viewed as such by their neighbors; that collaborators came in many flavors and frequently enjoyed popular support; that many in occupied Europe supported and even participated in both collaboration and resistance, even as most simply sought to get by. István’s penchant for turning categories inside out and upside down resonated, for example, in his statements that “one could actually argue that both Denmark and Spain were in reality German allies” and that “to be in the resistance required distrusting others, hiding, lying, threatening, blackmailing, denouncing, and, if necessary, killing suspects, even if they were your friends.”1
On the whole, the book recalled István’s incomparable ability to understand the complexity of life and death in war-torn Europe: his emphasis, for example, that saving Jews in the East required a different kind of courage than it did in Denmark; that the French had choices denied to Poles, not to mention Jews; and that we should endeavor to understand, if not judge, those who joined the Russian Liberation Army or other collaboration forces on their own terms. In Europe on Trial I also recognized vignettes that captivated me as an undergraduate and still provide material for my lectures today: above all, Count Ciano’s apocryphal tale of the hapless Hungarian diplomat’s attempt to explain why a kingdom without a king, headed by an admiral without a navy, chose to declare war on the states it most admired, while remaining allied to the countries on which it had territorial claims. Back then I was one of the few who laughed at the joke; today I still am.
Benjamin Frommer and István Deák having their last beer al fresco on Broadway, March 2019. (Courtesy of author)
Benjamin Frommer and István Deák having their last beer al fresco on Broadway, March 2019. (Courtesy of author)
István Deák with his class at the Városmajor elementary school in Budapest, 1936. The 10-year-old István is seated in the second row, third from the right, in white. (From the Deák family collection)
István Deák with his class at the Városmajor elementary school in Budapest, 1936. The 10-year-old István is seated in the second row, third from the right, in white. (From the Deák family collection)
Paul Hanebrink (CC '94)
I met István Deák in the early 1990s. Like every Columbia student, I had spent my first semesters in Morningside Heights taking core courses like Lit Hum. And I had sampled the many riches that the university’s History Department offered in those years. But a combination of family tree and world events—the Berlin Wall had just come down and war was erupting in Yugoslavia—focused my first serious intellectual interests on East Central Europe. A few of my professors recognized this and suggested that I take a class with István. So I enrolled in a junior seminar that he was scheduled to teach. The topic was army and society in European history.
Undergraduates never ask why professors design and teach the courses they do. Instead, they consider the course listings—in those days still a slim printed volume of numbers and course descriptions distributed to every student—as a set of more (or less) appealing ways to satisfy their graduation requirements. For this reason, it did not occur to me then that István had created the course while he was researching and writing his pathbreaking study of the Habsburg officer corps, which was published the year I arrived in New York as a freshman.2 Still, I could sense that the course reflected a counter-intuitive and highly personal approach to the topic.
The syllabus that István gave us on the first day of class consisted of classics and soon-to-be classics, such as Gordon Craig’s book on the politics of the Prussian army and István’s own book, all of which considered military officers as political agents or a social caste. But there was precious little on the reading list about battles, tactics, or weapons. In class, István could speak at riveting length about dueling and honor codes among officers or about the choices that Hitler’s generals made as Germany launched a disastrous and genocidal war. But he said little the entire semester about offensives or maneuvers and nothing at all about things like tanks. And when I went to his office to ask what else I could read about the Habsburg army, he recommended Arthur Schnitzler’s great novella Lieutenant Gustl rather than something about Solferino or Caporetto. Much later, I recognized that even though the class was about armies, István was teaching us social history and not military history. He was always open about this. “Armies,” he declared one day, “are most interesting during peacetime,” a pronouncement that confounded the expectations of some students in the class. I found it thrilling.
István’s provocation remains stuck in my memory. In one way, I think he simply meant to focus our class discussions on the roles that armies play in defending or undermining democracy. Little did I know in the early 1990s how relevant I would later find the course. When the mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and commentators on CNN began wondering openly about how the National Guard or the Army might react, I was instantly drawn back to the discussions we had in that long-ago seminar. But I’ve also come to think that his focus in the class on what military men do when they are not at war reflected his keen appreciation of the political ambiguities and ideological paradoxes that shaped lived experience in East Central Europe during the several decades on either side of 1918, a sensibility he passed on to so many of his doctoral students.
Teaching the seminar, István often cast his remarks in the form of revealing anecdotes about historical figures whose lives embodied contradictions not easily explained by rigid classificatory schemes: the Austrian officers who served their emperor loyally and then became socialists; the Hungarian officers who abhorred communism but chose to fight in Béla Kun’s Red Army because they believed it was their patriotic duty; the German officers like Ludwig Beck who despised democracy but worried that Hitler would ruin Germany. All these illustrated a larger question that he unfolded for the class with infectious enthusiasm: What did words like collaboration and resistance mean to soldiers determined to remain professional in an era of bewildering political change?
One passage from the epilogue to Beyond Nationalism captures the combination of magisterial recall of historical detail and personal reflective reminiscence that made him such a magnetic presence in the classroom. In it, István begins with a description of Colonel General (and Baron) Samu Hazai, an ennobled Hungarian Jewish officer who served as Hungary’s Minister of Defense during World War I, who remained proud of his service despite the antisemitism that swept across the country after 1918, and who “was allowed to die in peace in Budapest in 1942,” two years before half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. He then follows this with another, this time personal, impression from 1944 that captured the surreal collision of Habsburg-era conduct with the brutality of Central European fascism, in which an unnamed Jewish captain and World War I veteran stigmatized by Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws “[sat] in the administrative center of the Budapest Jewish community and receiv[ed] some Hungarian Nazi militiamen. They stood at attention and he gave them only a casual salute.”3
Conclusion
In conversation, as in his writing, István’s examples were vivid and, to impressionable undergraduates, always mesmerizing, transforming the twelfth floor of Columbia’s International Affairs Building into a small corner of East Central Europe, if only for a few hours. But his accounts—of soldiers unsure which of the many oaths they had taken in their lives were still binding, of resistance fighters who betrayed comrades in the service of fighting Nazism, and of a young Hungarian schoolboy who learned an anthem devoted to a king who no longer existed—also crystallized the ironies and contradictions of life in that region after empire and in dark times. Looking back on those classes with the hindsight of our later professional training, what seems most striking to us now is his acknowledgment of the messiness of individual lives and the caution that he exercised before assigning clear-cut labels to actors from the past.
István continued to inspire us long after those first classes had finished. He encouraged each of us, several years apart, to register for one of his graduate seminars. There we were introduced and welcomed as equals. The experience was transformative and, ultimately, determined the path of our professional lives. Paul began to study Hungarian, a turn of events that clearly pleased István. By contrast, Ben disappointingly chose to leverage his knowledge of Russian to learn Czech, but István generously remained supportive. In the years that followed, he remained our mentor (though we went elsewhere for graduate school) and became a good friend. But in many ways, our first encounters with István were the most decisive. The lessons of his classes wormed their way into our brains not because they gave us topics to study but because they taught us a way to think about the past. Because of István, we became historians.
Notes
István Deák, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015), 83 and 113.
István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Ibid., 211.