My Conversations with István Deák

I met István when I first visited New York in 1992 as a visiting fellow of the newly founded Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, as a researcher and the academic secretary of the 1956 Institute in Budapest. Later we met at international conferences, in Warsaw, in Budapest in the mid-1990s, and, a decade later, at Columbia University in 2006 at a conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, as well as in Cleveland during that same fall, where the two of us were the keynote speakers.1In 2007 I was invited to be the István Deák Visiting Professor for East Central European History at Columbia University for the fall semester. While I had been a Fulbright Visiting Professor at New York University—just before this time, during the 2006/07 academic year—which I enjoyed a lot, now this big challenge became a truly life-changing experience for me. Fortunately, this position did not only have a symbolic relationship with the holder of the name of the professorship, but it helped me establish a lifelong and very close friendship with Deák, despite the thirty-year age gap.I was awarded the Deák position five times: in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2015 and 2016, each time for one semester. During the first three occasions I lived in an apartment that was just one floor below the Deáks’s in the same building, and even later my place was very close to their home. So I spent a lot of time with István and his wife Gloria; sometimes we met daily, mostly I was their guest in their apartment on Riverside Drive. During those many conversations we talked about history, politics in the US and in Hungary, family, and his eventful life, as well as any other issues we found interesting at the time. It soon turned out that our basic approach to studying history was rather similar: we both liked to challenge mainstream narratives. In a recent H-Diplo tribute I wrote the following: “As for his credo as a historian . . . , one point-blank description is Dominique Kirchner Reill’s view, who wrote: István Deák ‘abhorred convenient histories and paid notice to uncomfortable truths.’2 Indeed, he liked—in fact, he enjoyed—challenging traditional convenient mainstream narratives; he was always thought-provoking, raising surprising or unusual and really, often purposefully uncomfortable questions, that nobody wanted to hear. He was a born revisionist in the best sense of the word, as he always wanted to revisit old positions and use a fresh, critical, and dialectical approach in dealing with his subject matter, and he never cared about any potential reactions.”3 While his revisionist drive can be traced in all his works, including his many long book reviews published in the New York Review of Books for several decades (the manuscripts of some of which we discussed in the later period), this approach truly culminated in his last book, Europe on Trial: The Story ofCollaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II.4 In this volume one of his most striking propositions is that Romania’s withdrawal from World War II in August 1944 shortened the war at least as much as opening the second front, that is, the Allied landing in Normandy. While this claim is hard to prove unequivocally, it would be equally difficult to refute it.Thus from the outset we had a common ground for striving to revisit old and convenient narratives, articulating not exactly unknown but rarely publicized uncomfortable truths, putting old knowledge into new context. Our research fields supplemented each other: István mostly dealt with the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, while my interest has been in Cold War history; but of course there were many connection points, especially concerning the 1940s. So, in my case István’s influence on my scholarship “happened” predominantly through our many conversations during the five semesters I spent at Columbia between 2007 and 2016, and of course it is impossible to tell “how” exactly it happened.Most likely we had a strong influence on each other and strengthened the determination in each other to revisit mainstream narratives even at the expense of stimulating criticism by some. Thus in my latest book, Hungary’s Cold War,5 published in 2022, I decided to list in the introduction some 20 theoretical innovations and new interpretations put forward in the book, item by item, so that the reader would not lose sight of any of them in the 400-page volume. This was considered an unusual procedure by some, but I am still confident that I did it right and such an introduction will help the reader better understand the novelty of the book. István’s support for this option surely had a great impact on me while making this decision.

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