The Office Mate

Every serious visiting researcher got a desk in the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1974, István Deák was put into my room; that is how we developed a closer connection. Our acquaintance of course dated to years earlier. Everyone took note of and was fond of the modest, reserved—or rather, consciously formal—but good-natured and elegant Columbia professor. It took time for a friendly relationship to be able to develop between us, since it was just one year earlier that he had been expelled from Hungary—the true reason for which I still don’t know to this day. As a person with experience why wouldn’t he have been careful, even distrustful, thinking that the authorities were watching him—which they obviously were. Professional topics—the decisive questions of historic Hungary (and the Habsburg Empire) in 1848/49, the manifold tragedies of World War II, the problems of evaluating Transylvania’s past—naturally took our discussions into current political topics as well, primarily the analysis of the Bucharest regime, just then becoming ever more savage, which—to my delight—he was quite familiar with. But I also got from him a really expert orientation on the currents of the American student movement. On the other hand, I will never know how much my anti-capitalism and, respectively, anti-Americanism might have bothered him initially. It’s true that he quickly understood that I was not trafficking in proto-Muscovite or Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party narratives, nor Maoist platitudes. Everyone had long seen eye to eye on the substantial negatives of the capitalist order; however, he too acknowledged that the construction of a better world is not possible without the US.Those were not “discussions reaching late into the night”; his professorially concise competence otherwise didn’t mix with social chit-chat—although he was a good discussion partner on any subject. He gladly spoke about his university environment, his students, his travels, his Paris student years—above all his runs in the New York City marathon—but never about his time at Radio Free Europe (RFE). It’s true that I didn’t think it appropriate to ask him about that, nor about his political activities. (We’ll surely get to know more on this from his memoirs. It would be good.) He on the other hand related with reserved pride how he “got out” from Romania the oppositional historian Vlad Georgescu, who later became the director of RFE’s Romanian section.1 Deák was indeed very much interested in politics. I don’t know whether he was in some way connected with the White House; it was my impression that he did not fall under the spell of the new émigré ambition of the 1970s—a kind of “Brzezinski complex”—in which the bolder ones quietly aspired to the powerful post of presidential advisor, as did Stephen Fisher-Galati, Rudolf Tőkés, or especially Iván Völgyes, among those I knew.2Politics faintly infiltrated the essays, disguised as book reviews, that he wrote for The New York Review of Books, which aimed at the popularization of Hungarian history, as well as in part at the reinterpretation of recent decisive questions, naturally with accentuated consideration of the larger international context. Here he also had more room for free association.In the pages of this distinguished journal he got involved in debates with the similarly excellent William O. McCagg—who the authorities here likewise surveilled—about Hungary’s opportunities for avoiding the final catastrophe of the second worldwide conflagration, about a perhaps more favorable variation of the outcome, which at the same time could have offered a chance at escape for Hungarian Jews.3 But he also couldn’t keep out of his reviews one of his older favorite themes: the “guardedly admired” multinational officer corps of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire. To what extent could it have been the bearer of the monarchy’s chances of survival? We saw this set of questions again in his internationally renowned 1990 monograph Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918. He proudly and repeatedly referred to the fact that he lived near Kossuth’s statue and was writing a book about him. (This was his Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849, which became famous by its mere title.)He loved his enormous city. He was fond of quoting the ironic bon mot, previously unknown to me: “It’s not possible to live in New York City, but it’s not worth living anwhere else.” Was he Hungarian? Was he American? For me he was from the beginning just how I would have liked to imagine US Americans, and Hungarian Americans.In January 1978 one of our colleagues burst into the room at the institute, saying “Pista Deák is coming, and he’s bringing the [Hungarian] crown.” We rejoiced for him too and were a bit proud of him. Later he explained how the negotiations about the return of the crown in the Congress in Washington had taken place, and why it was of key importance that the first-called Hungarian witness was Béla Király.4 But he also related how as he was descending the wide staircase on his way out, a Hungarian father pointed at the aged Király from close proximity and said to his small son, “Look! This is what a traitor looks like.” It hurt him too.

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