Showing posts with label M. W. Fodor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label M. W. Fodor. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Remembering the Life of Denis John Fodor (1927 - 2020)

When I learned of the recent death of Denis Fodor, I immediately recalled my conversation with him in June 2012 that evoked a past I had previously explored only through old newspaper articles, biographies, and history books. I had been researching the life of Denis’s father, M. W. Fodor, a Vienna-based correspondent who had covered middle Europe and the Balkans during the inter-war period for the Manchester Guardian, and Denis knew more about his father’s life than anyone else alive. Plus, he had memories of living as a child in Vienna during the early 1930s, and many adventures after that. I spent more than two pleasurable hours listening to Denis tell about his life and that of his father, seeing the past through the eyes of a witness.

The conversation with Fodor has been arranged and was also attended by Fabienne Gouverneur, who at the time was a doctoral student at Andrássy University in Budapest doing research for a dissertation that centered on M.W. Fodor and his correspondence over the years with important people, especially Sen. J. W. Fulbright. She had interviewed Denis Fodor once before and would have subsequent meetings with him, becoming well acquainted with him and his family. Information gathered from her talks with Fodor helped inform her dissertation and related book, both titled Personal, Confidential: Mike W. Fodor als Netwerker und Kulturmittler. Both include a comprehensive biography of M.W. Fodor. 

We met with Denis Fodor at his apartment on a quiet street in Munich and our conversation was accompanied by a modest lunch that he served. He answered our many questions with eloquence, intelligence, and some sharp edges. He remembered some things that occurred more than seven decades ago with great clarity, but some memories were elusive and, frustratingly, some things, such as the circumstances of the deaths of his grandparents, he did not know. He later replied to many other questions in e-mail exchanges. 

Denis was still residing in Munich when the end came in late July 2020. He was 93 years old. His death was not (as far as I can tell) reported by any newspaper or memorialized in any obituary.  In his honor, I will tell here some of his life's narrative and a few of the memories that he shared with Fabienne and me. 


M. W. Fodor

The story of Denis Fodor’s life must begin by introducing his father and describing the circumstances of Denis’s early life in Vienna.  M. W. Fodor, Denis’s father, was named Marcel Vilmos Fodor at birth and was later known by his friends as “Mike.” He was born to a wealthy family in Budapest in 1890, and he trod an improbable path to a distinguished career in journalism; from that perch, he observed, commented on, interpreted, and swam in the tide of events in Europe that changed the world after World War I.  After earning a degree in 1911 from the University of Budapest in chemical engineering, M. W. went to Great Britain in 1912 to work for the Frodingham Iron and Steel Company in Scunthorpe.  When World War I began, he was initially interned as an “enemy alien,” but was released in March 1917 to live on the estate of Lord Mowbray at Allerton to do “important war work.” As the war ended, he -- implausibly -- got a job as a Manchester Guardian correspondent reporting from Vienna.[1] Although he lacked experience as a journalist, M.W. Fodor spoke several languages of countries in middle Europe and the Balkans, and he had traveled extensively in the areas he was to cover for his newspaper. He soon developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the leaders and politics of the European countries on this beat and he made good friends of other Anglo-American correspondents stationed in Vienna during the inter-war years, most of whom hung out at the Café Louvre, where M.W. was often at the center of conversations about current events.     

Photograph from Ken Cuthbertson,
Inside: The Biography of 
John Gunther. 
  

In 1925, M.W. Fodor married Martha Roob, whom he had met in Vienna. She had been born in Slovakia.  Her mother was Slovakian, and her father, from Vienna, was a professional soldier in the Austrian army. She lived for many years with her parents in Hungary after her father was posted there. 

Denis entered the world on June 27, 1927. He was M.W. and Martha Fodor’s first and only child. Their  celebration of his birth was interrupted a couple of weeks later when M. W. had to cover Vienna’s “Days of Horror” (July 15-17), during which Vienna’s police killed 85 demonstrators who were protesting a court’s acquittal of three right-wing militia members who had murdered a child and an invalid war veteran in January. They had shot into a crowd of Social Democrats who were parading in Schattendorf, a village near the Hungarian border. The July eruption of violence, during which demonstrators set the Ministry of Justice building on fire, propelled Austria toward the end of its democracy.[2] 

A year later, a more pleasant event occurred in the lives of the Fodors:  J.W. Fulbright of Fayetteville, Arkansas, came to Vienna. The future senator’s study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar had ended, and after a tour of Europe with his mother, he decided to hang out in Vienna. While there, he found the Café Louvre and M. W. Fodor, who became a mentor. Later, M. W. Fodor and Fulbright exchanged correspondence for more than two decades. 

As Denis was growing up, he met his father’s famous friends, sometimes with his parents at the Café Louvre and sometimes at their home on Börsegasse, near the Maria am Gestade Church. These friends included Dorothy Thompson, who arrived in Vienna as a young woman in 1921 with hopes of breaking into journalism; John Gunther who moved in 1930 to Vienna to cover events for the Chicago Daily News, and William Shirer, a journalist who stumbled into Vienna in 1929 as an insecure leftist reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a paper owned by reactionary capitalist. Thompson later became the second most famous woman in the U.S., eclipsed only Elinor Roosevelt, through the newspaper column she wrote from the later 1930s into the 1950s; Gunther’s fame came from his series of “Inside,” books, the first of which was Inside Europe, published in 1936; and Shirer – who was fired by his newspaper not long after he arrived in Vienna became a household name when he made regular radio reports from Berlin in the latter part of the 1930s and his books Berlin Diary and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich became best sellers. 

Picture was taken in about 1932. Published in M.W. Fodor. 1939. South of Hitler.

Another of Fodor’s friends was Robert Best, whom Denis also liked, a reporter for the United Press news service, who later became infamous when he stayed in Germany during World War II and made propaganda broadcasts back to the U.S.  After the war, Best was convicted of treason for his actions and died while still in prison.[3]  

Robert Best (left) with his
brother and sister as his treason trial ended.
AP press photograph

Surrounded by these and other talented journalists, Denis Fodor grew up in turbulent times. In February 1934, a few months before his seventh birthday, Vienna had a brief civil war instigated by Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss and the Christian Socialist Party, with its militia and the country’s army routing the supporters of the Social Democrats. The victors installed the one-party Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front), an Austro-fascist government, as the country’s regime. A few months later, at the end of July, Dollfus was murdered by Austrian Nazis as they attempted to take over the government. In March 1938, when Denis was ten years old, Hitler sent the German Army to annex Austria.[4]

During his early school years, Denis was enrolled in the Schottenschule (now Schottengymnasium), a private Catholic school located a short walk from his home. At the time, he attended a Catholic Church with his mother, a Catholic. His father did not go to church but embraced Quaker beliefs. Nevertheless, both M. W. and Denis Fodor would have been classified under Nazi racial laws as Jewish because M. W. Fodor’s mother, Berta von Auspitz, came from a Jewish family. (M. W.’s father, Janos Fodor, was not Jewish.) 

As Vienna’s Nazis became more brazen in their behavior and anti-Semitism grew in Vienna, Denis’ parents sent him to England in 1936 to study at Abinger Hill School, a progressive and prestigious private school in Surrey. He was studying there on March 12, 1938, when German troops marched into Vienna. His parents fled Austria a week later after selling their apartment at a fraction of its value, leaving behind furniture, books, and papers. 

Soon after the Anschluss, the Fodor family made a trip to the United States and began the process of obtaining U.S. citizenship. With their citizenship clock ticking and permission granted to be absent from the U.S., the Fodors departed for England in June 1938 so that M. W. could resume reporting from Europe for the Chicago Daily News and the New Republic and Denis could prepare to return to his school. 

Two years later, following Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, Denis and his mother hurriedly left England to travel to the United States, arriving aboard the M.V. Britannic on June 21, 1940. They were joined there by M.W. Fodor on the following day. He had been in Belgium in May when the Germans attacked, had made his way to Portugal via Paris, and had flown to New York City on a Pan Am “Atlantic Clipper” flight. 

The Fodor family spent the summer of 1940 at Dorothy Thompson’s expansive farm in Vermont. There, Denis spent time with his good friend Michael Lewis (1930-1975), Dorothy’s son, whom he had met earlier while living in Vienna. When summer ended, the Fodors settled in Chicago, where M. W. taught for a while at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later became a columnist for the Chicago Sun.  In 1943, M. W. was granted citizenship and Denis received “derivative citizenship.” 

Initial Citizenship Application, 1938

Denis attended Chicago’s Francis W. Parker High School, a private school with a progressive college-prep curriculum, graduating in May 1944.  One episode in his life during his high school years was documented in the Chicago Sun:  Living with his family at the Sherwin-on-the-Lake Apartments, 1205 Sherwin Ave., a few hundred feet from Lake Michigan, Denis had tried to rescue occupants of an airplane that had crashed into Lake Michigan within view of his apartment. According to the Chicago Sun, “Dennis Fodor, 15, … saw the plane crash, ran downstairs from his apartment…and began swimming out to the plane. His mother said, ‘Dennis tried at first to launch his sailboat, but he couldn’t; the water was too choppy. He then kicked off his shoes and began swimming but the rescue boat had already reached the pilot.’”[5] 

Between Fall 1944 and March 1949, Denis earned an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard College, taking time out to serve in the U.S. Army, with a stint as an army translator in Vienna. At Harvard, he played club football and basketball, and he had several stories published in the college’s literary magazines. He lived with two roommates in the apartment inhabited by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he studied at Harvard. After graduating, Denis moved to Germany – the front line of the Cold War -- where he took a job reporting for the United Press. His parents were living in Berlin at the time. His father edited the Berlin edition of Die Neue Zeitung, a daily newspaper published by the occupying U.S. forces.  

1947 Harvard Yearbook 

In about 1953, Denis Fodor began reporting for Time and Life magazines. He covered the 1956 uprising in Hungary and soon after that was sent to Beirut to write about events in the volatile Middle East. Not long after finishing that assignment, he switched from reporting to editing for Time and Life magazines. He spent the rest of his life working as an editor, first for Time/Life, then the Encyclopedia Britannica, and finally Reader’s Digest. He lived during much of the 1960s in New York; several years during the 1970s in Paris, where Reader’s Digest had its European office; and most of the rest of his life in Munich. In 1981, he co-wrote a book, The Neutrals, about the history of the European countries that remained neutral – or tried to – during World War II. Published by Time/Life, it was positively reviewed. 

Cover of The Neutrals by
Denis J. Fodor

When I had the chance to ask him questions in June 2012, most of my inquiries had to do with his memories of his early years in Vienna and of his father. Below are the summaries of some of the questions I asked and his responses to those questions, plus some of his other recollections that the illustrated the richness of his life. 

The Stammtisch for Anglo-American Journalists at the Café Louvre

As I read about the lives of Fodor, Thompson, Gunther, Shirer, and other English-speaking journalists stationed in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, I was struck by the Café Louvre's role in their lives.[6] It was a regular meeting place for them as they did their work, and it provided a comfortable locale for socializing. At the Café Louvre, the journalists had a Stammtisch – a table or tables at the café reserved for them because they were regular customers. The café’s first-district location was perfect: it was a few steps from the Central Telegraph office from which the journalists could send their stories by telegraph. Also, it was across the street from Radio Austria, which could transmit urgent stories to their newspapers by wireless communications. 

Cafe Louvre in about 1940
From Der Spiegel

I was eager to hear what Denis remembered about Café Louvre, where he spent time as a kid. In the interview and some email exchanges, I learned the following from him: 

The café, located at the corner of Wipplinger and Renngasse, was in a neo-baroque or gothic building that “had eyebrows." The building had a dog-leg design. It was about five stories tall. 

In the middle of the L-shaped room of the cafe were marble top tables with cane chairs. On the sides were booths, upholstered in cloth. The waiters carried silver trays. The head waiter wore tails. The others wore smoking jackets with butterfly ties. Patrons called the head waiter by his last name. They called the other waiters by their first names. The usual order was one of several types of coffee -- melange, kleiner braune. You could also get a simple meal such as goulash or soup such as leberknödel. The dessert trays had cake and strudel of various kinds.” 

Robert Best at the Café Louvre 

One journalist used the Café Louvre as his office, even receiving telephone calls and his mail there. That man was Robert Best, who had, over time, made the café the central meeting point for most English-speaking foreign journalists in Vienna. He had done so by running a side business at the café that helped other journalists stay informed about breaking stories, covered for them when they were absent from the city, and provided other small services that made their jobs easier. The many journalists who worked with Best during his time in Vienna, most of whom considered him a friend, were shocked when he stayed in Europe after the start of World War II and made anti-Semitic propaganda broadcasts back to the U.S.[7] 

Best was a well-liked, but strange character. Elements of his life and personality were captured in two books written by journalists who knew him well. The first book, The Lost City, was written by John Gunther in the last half of the 1930s, but the publication of this roman a clef was delayed for nearly thirty years because of fears that some of its characters, who were clearly based on journalists and others living in Vienna in the early 1930s, would sue the publisher for libel. Foremost among those who might have claimed defamation was Robert Best, whose character in the novel was James N. Drew. According to the novel, Drew was “at once bashful, boyish, and portentous… a stout man in his middle thirties, with a heavy long face and an extraordinarily sweet – that was the only word for it – smile…. He was a mess, but, God damn it, he did have that sweetness.” In the novel, Drew – as apparently in real life --did some sleazy and even dishonest things.[8] 


Best was also the inspiration for the main character of William Shirer’s novel, The Traitor, which was set in Berlin. The character, Oliver Knight, according to the cover blurb, had “to choose…between returning to the land of his birth or staying in wartime Germany to satisfy his hunger for lust and power.” He made the wrong choice.[9] 

I asked Denis of his memory of Robert Best, and he gave a surprising answer. According to my notes, he observed that Robert Best was among his father’s best friends. Denis remembered Best as a "very nice man" and a "poor slob" who was deeply Southern, not too bright, and a bit uncouth. Illustrating the last point, Denis noted that Best spooned goulash sauce onto his Sachertorte. He also mentioned the Romanian "Princess" that Best supported (the “princess” was also an unsavory character in the novels written by Gunther and Shirer), saying that she was on drugs and he had to scramble to pay her costs. 

Denis recalled that Best often would loan his father money at the end of the month to help him make ends meet. He stated his opinion that his father would have testified in favor of Best as his trial for treason. He said that neither he nor his father blamed Best for what happened. According to Denis, Best was forced into his actions by specific circumstances, and we do not know what we would do if we were in those circumstances. 

The Fodors in John Gunther’s Novel, The Lost City

Among the sympathetic characters in Gunther’s The Lost City are three who were clearly based on the Fodors, whom Gunther obviously liked.  Laszlo Sandor was the name given to M. W. Fodor, Martha Fodor was Erji Sandor, and Denis was Albrecht, nicknamed “Putzi,” which was Denis’s nickname when he was a boy. Here are some short descriptions from the book: 


Like Balkan kings, [Laszlo] Sandor spoke no language perfectly, not even his own. His English had a Hungarian accent, his Hungarian a French accent, his French a German accent, his German an Italian accent, his Italian an English accent and so on around. His voice carried a friendly chuckle, and his eyes, beyond heavy owl-like spectacles, held a friendly gleam. He loved to elucidate, to share his wisdom; he would say, “Now, it is something inter-est-ing that will happen. Let me tell you about. He seldom conceded the necessity of using pronouns at the end of sentences. 

Erji was a Slovak and probably had gypsy blood. Her father, of the most respectable class, had been an officer….She asked nothing better of life than that she should run the household while he worked, sit quietly with him when he wrote his dispatches, and then go to a coffeehouse by his side in the evening. Laszlo asked for nothing more than what he had. She must always be close by [and] she could sing the old gypsy songs when they had a party.  

Albrecht, nicknamed Putzi, their six-year old son, came in with Fräulein. He paid little attention to his parents, but casually sat on the floor of the room where Sandor worked and pulled a pile of toys from a bottom shelf. Laszlo beamed and Erji dropped on her knees beside him, worshiping him with her eyes, adoring him. The child yanked at a tin locomotive. 

“For my name day I want a new locomotive. This locomotive has only one smokestack. I want a locomotive with two, three, six smokestacks! 

         “Locomotives do not come with six smokestacks.”

         “Oh, yes, they do. My locomotives do.” 

When I went to talk Denis Fodor in 2012, I took along a paperback edition of The Lost City to give to him in case he did not have a copy, had not read it recently, and might want to reread it.  A few days after the meeting, I received an e-mail from Denis in which he mentioned that he had re-read the book and concluded that “the characters in it are either more or less composites. My mother, for instance, is more composite than mother. I am Gunther’s Putzi and was called that, but don’t remember myself as acting Gunther-like.” 

Dorothy Thompson’s and Sinclair Lewis’s 1933 Christmas Celebration at Semmering

Denis was present as a child at a famous Christmas party hosted in 1932 by Dorothy Thompson and her husband Sinclair Lewis. The ten-day party was held at Semmering, a small Alpine ski resort town in Lower Austria about fifty miles from Vienna, and was attended by about forty of Dorothy’s friends, both journalists and others.[10] 

Accounts of this party can be found in the biographies of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis and in a book titled Dorothy and Red by her friend Vincent Sheehan. Opinions about the party varied. M. W. Fodor is quoted in one of Thompson’s biographies as describing it as “a week of unadulterated pleasure enlivened by witty companions and his lovely Martha’s gypsy songs performed nightly to her own guitar accompaniment.”[10]  Other accounts, such as that given by Lilian Mowrer, had less generous assessments of the party.[11]  Amid ten days of fun, boredom, and drinking, two things happened to change the life of Dorothy Thompson: her deepening estrangement from her husband Sinclair Lewis and the feelings that she developed for one of her guests, Baroness Christa Hatvay (also known as Christa Winsloe), author of a book titled Mädchen in Uniform, which developed into a love affair.[12] 

Photos from this holiday party can be found in Sheean’s book and in Dorothy Thompson’s papers housed at Syracuse University. Included among them are those of the five young children at the party, including Denis. On December 24, 2012, the day before the eightieth anniversary of the party, I sent an email to Denis to ask him if he had any recollections of it. He replied that he had some, but they were vague: “The Fodors put up at our accustomed hostelry, the burgherly Hotel St. Johann. The others stayed at the Panhans, a modern (for the times) luxury hotel. One or others may even have stayed at the very conservative and luxurious Südbahn Grand Hotel. For skiers there was one slope that had a rope-lift, a novelty at the time, and another slope that had none. I used the slope that had none (neither my father nor mother skied). Meetings were over meals and cocktails. Buses, belonging to the postal service, had skis attached to their front wheels and chains at the rear, took care of the to-ing and fro-ing.” He later added, “I seem to remember a large Christmas tree, very silvery, and boxes etc…..people… and Red Lewis sitting there smiling benignly…It was in a house, not a hotel or hotel room. No Dorothy, no Michael.”

Children at Semmering, 1932
Denis Fodor is standing. Sitting by him is Michael Lewis.


Later I sent him two photos of the five young children at the event and asked him to point himself out in the photos. He confirmed that he is the only kid standing in the first picture, and the young boy near him was Michael Lewis. In the second picture, he is sitting, and Michael Lewis is standing. Denis commented, “I used to dress well back then.”

Children at Semmering, 1932
Denis Fodor is sitting. Michael Lewis is standing.


Fodor and Fulbright

Denis was only one year old when J. W. Fulbright showed up in Vienna, so he had no memories of him. However, he heard his father talk about Fulbright. I asked him what he recalled his father saying, and he replied that M. W. Fodor had liked Fulbright from the start. He was impressed and amused by him. Then he repeated a story about Fulbright that he heard from his father: 

In Vienna, it was custom before Christmas for different charities to collect donations from people for "Winterhilfe" -- literally winter help. One day, he and Fodor were together at a place selling dairy products and were chatting when a person soliciting contributions for the Nazi Winterhilfe campaign came into the room and walked up to Fulbright to ask for a donation. Fulbright looked at the guy then turned to Fodor for help figuring out who was soliciting the donation, asking, "What domination is this?"

Denis Fodor and Kim Philby

Denis lived in Beirut for more than a year in 1958 and 1959, and he recalled that his residence was an apartment had an angled view of the campus of the American University of Beirut and another angled view of Beirut`s main lighthouse. Among Denis’s acquaintances in Beirut was Kim Philby, who was a journalist working for the Economist. According to Denis, Philby used to hang out at the Hotel Normandie, just off the Corniche, and “after stealing the wife of Sam Pope Brewer, the Beirut bureau chief of the New York Times,” he took an apartment not far from there. Denis saw him daily and went to his house many times. In fact, according to Denis, Philby was good friends with all the Americans there. Philby stayed in Lebanon until January 1963, when he flew to Moscow as evidence was mounting that he had been an important spy for the Soviet Union. Before then, according to Denis, he and Philby’s other past and present colleagues did not know that he was a spy.[13]

Denis recalled that his father had known Philby when, as a young man, he “pitched up in Vienna in female company.” Philby connected with the Anglo-American press corps in Vienna because of his connections with a member of the British press corps there.[14] During his time in Vienna, according to Denis, “He seems to have been an overt far-leftist… and only turned surreptitious later.” Denis also noted that “ingenues of the Liberal flavor” who were visiting Vienna, as well as other visitors with suitable recommendations, often ended up “being hand-held by my father.” 

M.W. Fodor From His Son’s Perspective

When you read about someone’s life, it is important not only to find out about what they did but also get a sense of what they were like and what motivated them. We know that many of Fodor’s friends thought highly of him, but it is also valuable to see him through his son's eyes. Here are some of Denis’s observations about his father:

         My father was gregarious. Before and during World War I, he had the money to circulate among the haute monde. 

My father was never a writer as such. He was a Central European intellectual of a liberal orientation and had the kind of gregarious personality that could land him all kinds of interesting jobs. He was a wonderful moderate man and a pacifist. 

[My father] deserved to be rated an intellectual…He had a higher education not only in engineering but also in the humanities. 

The significance of John Hamilton [whom M.W. Fodor said was his mentor] to my father was as a teacher of the craft, not of the flow of history. My father was anything but a journalist by education (though my grandfather (part-) owned two newspapers, one in Budapest the other in Vienna). It was Hamilton, something of an intellectual, but mainly just a Manchester Guardian hand, who showed my father how to make his special kind of savvy of use to the editorial desks in Manchester. My father was grateful to him for this, but he also respected him for the acuity of his judgment of the situation as it developed in Berlin in the twenties.”  

As the only correspondent on the Guardian’s staff who was not Anglophone, the copy-desk editing that my father required was done in Manchester….My father filed daily by dictation over the telephone and did so from our apartment’s library, not from a separate office. His daily beat consisted of meeting a circle of local personalities – officeholders, diplomats, scientists, musicians, artists, and so on. 

   My father:

*never wore a wedding ring.    

*never raised his voice, even when he was angry; in fact, he was seldom angry.  

*was not docile but was quiet, even-tempered.

*had a strong sense of history.

*understood and wrote about leaders as people.

*was not a monarchist but thought the breakup of the empire was a mistake. 

*did not like Dollfuss very much. (Contrary to my impression based on his book, South of Hitler)

 

In one email, Denis told me, “I always enjoy opportunities to talk about my father, who remains to me dearly memorable.”  I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet Denis Fodor, not only to learn more about his father and but also to learn more about his remarkable life.   

--------------------------

Footnotes:

[1] Fran Baker. 2016. South of Hitler: Marcel W. Fodor and the Manchester Guardian, August 12, The John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog, accessed at https://rylandscollections.com/2016/08/12/south-of-hitler-marcel-w-fodor-and-the-manchester-guardian/

Fabienne Gouverneur. 2019. Personal, Confidential: Mike W. Fodor als Netzwerker und Kulturmittler. New Academic Press, Vienna.   The dissertation on which the book is based can be accessed at this web site: https://www.andrassyuni.eu/pubfile/de-213-dissertationfabiennegouverneur2016-doi.pdf

Dan Durning. 2011. Marcel W. Fodor, Foreign Correspondent  

https://www.scribd.com/document/65502558/Marcel-W-Fodor-Foreign-Correspondent 

[2] See July 15-17, 1927: Days of Horror in Vienna, Austria (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/01/july-15-17-1927-days-of-horror-in.html 

[3] Finding M. W. Fodor: Fulbright, Vienna, and Me (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/09/finding-m-w-fodor-fulbright-vienna-and.html 

[4] See Austria’s Fatherland Front, 1933-1938 (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/08/austrias-fatherland-front-1933-1938.html 

The Assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, July 25, 1934 (blog entry).  https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/08/assassination-of-engelbert-dollfuss.html 

[5] “Lake Crash Kills Flier in Snow Storm.” 1943. Chicago Sun, April 14, p. 1.

[6] A Great Night at the Café Louvre in Vienna (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/02/great-night-at-cafe-louvre-in-vienna.html 

[7] Edwards, John Carver. 1982. “Bob Best Considered: An Expatriate's Long Road to Treason.” North Dakota Quarterly, Winter, 50 (1): 73-90 and “Worst Best.” 1943. Time, February 15. [About journalist Robert Best]  

[8] John Gunther. 1964. The Lost City. Harper & Row. 

[9] William L. Shirer. 1950. The Traitor. Farrar, Straus, & Co. 

[10] Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis Celebrate Christman in Semmering (Austria), 1932 (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/12/dorothy-thompson-and-sinclair-lewis.html 

[11] Marion Sander. 1973. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 179. 

[11] Vincent Sheean. 1963. Dorothy and Red. Houghton Mifflin Co., p. 213. 

[12] See Peter Kurth. 1990. American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Little, Brown and Company. 

[13] Robert Littell. 2012. Young Philby. Thomas Dunn Books. (Philby’s time in Vienna is included in the roman a clef.)

[14] The reporter was G.E.R. Geyde. His powerful account of the 1934 civil war is in chapter 9 of his book (p. 104), Betrayal in Central Europe in which he mentions, but not by name, a young Englishman who was helping some threatened social democrats escape capture. The young man was Philby, who had recently signed on with Moscow as a spy. G.E.R. Geyde. 1939. Betrayal in Central Europe, Harper & Brothers Publishers. Also, see Littell 2012, p. 53.

 

Friday, October 18, 2013

ANDOR AND ERZSÉBET PÜNKÖSTI: Fragments of Two Lives in Inter-War Budapest

Andor de Pünkösti (October 31, 1892 – July 12, 1944) was a Hungarian born to a noble inheritance; rejecting it, he earned greatness elsewhere. Later, he ended his own life rather than hand over his fate to Hungarian fascists.

His story is of a man whose father headed a Transylvanian family that had achieved nobility through seven generations of distinguished military service in the Austro-Hungarian army. In World War I, Andor fought bravely and sustained a severe facial wound, but after the war he refused to continue the family tradition of career military service. Breaking with the family, he instead he pursued his deepest passion: theater.

Pünkösti in 1942 in front of the Madách Theater
In the years between the two world wars, he gained fame in Hungary as a theater critic, scholar, educator, playwright, and director. From 1941 to 1944, he managed the Madách Theater at which he staged productions that were covertly anti-fascist. In the last few years of his life, Pünkösti extended his work into movies, writing scripts for three films and directing one. After Germany took control of the Hungarian government in March 1944, he became deeply depressed by events and committed suicide in July.

Part of the reason for Andor’s break with his family was his marriage to Erzsébet Fodor, whose mother was Jewish. Such marriages were not permissible for noble military officers. Erzsébet's father, Janos, had been a wealthy industrialist, banker, and newspaper owner who had changed his family name from Fischer to Fodor during Hungary's Magyarization drive. He had married Berta von Auspitz, who came from a wealthy and prominent Jewish family in Brünn (now Brno in the Czech Republic).

Like Andor, Erzsébet was a highly educated intellectual who spoke many languages and worked as a journalist. Most notably, in the late 1920s through much of the 1930s, she was a special correspondent for the New York Times, whose by-line was “Elizabeth de Punkosti.” The couple lived in a large apartment in downtown Budapest that she had inherited from her father.

Recalling Andor and Erzsébet: The Thompson-Fodor Discussion
My interest in Andor and Erzsébet Pünkösti was stimulated by mention of them in the written notes of a discussion on March 12, 1960 by retired journalists M.W. Fodor and Dorothy Thompson. These two long-time friends got together during five weekends in March and May, 1960, to help Dorothy with her planned memoir by recalling stories from their long careers. 

M.W. and Dorothy had met each other on March 1, 1921 in Budapest, soon after Dorothy had arrived to cover Central Europe and the Balkans for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Fodor, a Hungarian citizen, had been the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in the region for just over two years.

With both of them based in Vienna, covering the same territory for different papers, M.W. had assisted Dorothy with her first full-time job as a foreign correspondent; some suggest he was her mentor, at the least he was her guide as she began a career that would make her one of the most famous women in the United States. They became good friends and remained so for the almost forty years that had followed their first meeting.[1]

A 1925 painting of Pünkösti by Hugo Scheiber  http://www.irodalmiradio.hu/femis/muveszetek
/4muveszek/s_menu/scheiber/06hugo.htm

In their March 12th discussion, they recalled many different people and events in their Vienna years. Among them were Andor de Pünkösti (whom they called Andrew von Pünkösti) and his wife Erzsébet, whom they called Erzi: [2]

In Hungary Andrew von Pünkösti of [illegible] is a CP [communist party] patron saint! He was in a counter-revolutionary organ during the Bela Kun regime. Commies were after him and Erzi until the regime was brought down by Horthy. He was a Hortheyist. But he was also an anti-Nazi and when 4 arrow crossers came to search his house he shot them and himself (Fall of 1944). Erzi who could have been brought out [of Hungary] until 1948 refused and died of heart attack in 1953. She still had her old cook who found her dead in her sleep. She was 57. She died in Budapest with communists in all rooms but hers and her maid’s. Pünkösti was “martyr.” Lived in country – everybody loved her.

Although not stated in this paragraph, M.W. had reason to know the story of Andrew and Erzi: She was M.W.’s younger sister.[3]

Andor de Pünkösti’s Story
A capsule version of Andor Pünkösti’s story was told in a recent e-mail sent to me by his nephew-by-marriage, Denis Fodor, the son of M.W. Fodor. He wrote:

Now, as to Pünkösti Andor:[4]  My uncle-by-marriage was a Transylvanian noble born in Slovakia (there you have the empire in a goulash).  His assimilated title was baron (the Transylvanians had another name for it). He started as a career soldier, an officer in the K&K Hussars (the most elite of Hungarian regiments). In World War I he was highly decorated and gravely wounded, leaving him with a scar that transited from his left ear across the mouth to the right lower chin. Sword. 

In the postwar turmoil, he joined one of the rebel militias that opposed the communist regime of Bela Kun. After these groups succeeded in hoisting Horthy into power my uncle, who by then had become a leading figure in the, let us say, society intelligentsia of Budapest, drifted into the world of serious theater. In time he became director of what I understand to have been the city`s leading progressive house. His marriage to my aunt, who represented the New York Times in Budapest, betokens that his life had turned into an archly modernized version of his beginnings.

When Horthy finally gave in to the Germans and a Hungarian Nazi took over, my uncle made no move to square himself with the new regime. When a team of secret police knocked on the door of my aunt`s house --on a very swank street -- they were received by shots from his revolver. The number of agents involved is to me unclear along with the actual final head count. But it is accepted that my uncle succeeded in killing himself; he did not deign to be shot by the intruding rabble.[5]

This lively version of a high achieving and tragically abbreviated life is fleshed out in several on-line documents and in a book written about him. The best on-line source is a lengthy biographical sketch available on a website devoted to the history of theater in Hungary: the link is http://www.szineszkonyvtar.hu/contents/p-z/punkostielet.htm . This website is in Hungarian, and although the Google translation to English is, at best, cryptic, information on most of the important elements of his life can be extracted.
Pünkösti with actresses in front of the Madach Theater   

In addition to the websites, a Hungarian-language book has been written about his years as manager of the Madách Theater. Its title is A Madach Színház Pünkösti Andor igazgatása idején by Zsuzsanna Borsos, published in 1979. No English translation of the book is available. Drawing from the on-line biographical sketch and other Hungarian-language websites, the following is additional elements of the story of Andor Pünkösti.

He was born an Uzonyi-Pünkösti, described as “an ancient Transylvanian family,” in 1892. His birthplace was Koŝice, which is now in Slovakia, because his father, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, was stationed there. While Andor was still a youngster, his father was transferred to Debrecen.

The direction of Andor’s life was foreshadowed by an event that occurred when he was nine. His parents took him to see a play, Shakespeare’s Richard III. He was hugely excited by it and, trying to figure out a way to enhance its presentation, he and a friend set a fire that burned down a wide swath of the Great Forest of Debrecen.

Andor went to high school in Budapest, but rebelled against his parent’s wish for him to study at Budapest University. Instead he went to Munich to study law. When the war broke out, he returned to take a commission in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the front lines with an elite Cavalry unit.

As Denis Fodor wrote, he was wounded in 1915, a sword slashed his face and the cut required multiple surgeries, leaving his face with a deep scar. Also, according to the on-line biographical sketch, his injury inflicted deep psychological scars that made him subject to deep depressions. The experience might also have contributed to his later anti-war writings and leftist, anti-fascist, leanings.

Even as he had studied law and served in the military, Andor had kept up his interest in the theater, going when possible to plays and attending lectures. As he recovered from his wounds, he started writing about the theater and by 1918 had a job as a journalist for “Az újság” (“The Newspaper). By 1923, he was a well-known in Hungary as a leading theater critic.

The on-line biographical materials contain no information on his role in the opposition to Bela Kun and his short-lived communist regime in Hungary. However it is clear that near the end of the 1910s, he declined to become head of the noble Uzonyi-Punkosti family, which would have required that he have a career as a military officer. With this decision and his marriage to Erzsébet, whose mother who – as previously noted – was a Jew, he broke with his family to pursue a different direction in life.
Picture of the cover of a book about
Pünkösti and the Madách Theater   http://www.antikvarkonyv.hu/szinhaz_
filmmuveszet/borsos_zsuzsanna_a_
madach_szinhaz_punkosti_andor_igazgatasa_idejen.html

Leaving behind the family’s military legacy, he succeeded within a few year to become a highly respected critic. According to the biographical sketch, he was perceived as being “erudite, well-read, and well-informed”… “with a thorough knowledge of people,” plus a knowledge of many foreign languages. He wrote “unique, readable critiques” of theater productions that were witty and focused, but not demeaning. Also, he encouraged younger and novice playwrights. An opponent of kitsch in the theater, Andor supported modern, even avant-garde productions.

In the late 1920s, after a nearly decade as a theater critic, theorist, and educator, he was offered the opportunity to put his ideas about theater into practice as the dramaturg for a play by Ferenc Milnar. In 1929, he was for a half year the artistic director of both the Hungarian Theater and the National Chamber Theater. From then on, he took leading positions with prestigious theaters in Budapest, including director of the National Theater (1935), artistic director of the National Theater (1939), and from 1941 to 1944, director of the Madách Theater.

In addition to his newspaper journalism and theater work, Andor published a book of poetry titled Isten elzullot gyermeke. Versek (Elzullot God’s Child, Poetry), two anti-war novels (Bús Péter csodàlotos Kardja [Sad Peter, Beautiful Sword] and Bárczay Bella, a szeretőm [Bella Barczay, Love], plus numerous book chapters and magazine articles on theater. He also worked on films and is credited with writing screenplays for three films: Bünös vagyok! (I'm guilty!), 1942; Elkésett levél (Belated Letter), 1941; and Álomsárkány (Dragon's Dream), 1939. The last mentioned film, Álomsárkány (Dragon’s Dream), he also directed. For film credits, see: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0702559/?ref_=fn_al_nm_2

During his years as director of Madách Theater, Pünkösti offered modern plays and innovative productions. Also, he courageously – and probably foolhardily – staged plays that were understood to be anti-fascist or even anti-Hitler. One of the favorite productions at the theater was a play about Nero, written by Francis Felkei. It focused on the murderous rein of Nero, and audiences immediately understood it to be a historical parable about Hitler. For more information on this production, go to these website (and used Google translate): http://www.orkenyszinhaz.hu/index.php/2012-09-05-14-32-58/toertenet/2-magyar/szinhazunkrol/715-nero and http://www.orkenyszinhaz.hu/index.php/2012-09-05-14-32-58/toertenet/2-magyar/szinhazunkrol/714-a-madach-szinhaz-tortenete-1940-1944

Pünkösti at his desk   http://tbeck.beckground.hu/szinhaz/img/img/kepek_nagy/muller_3.jpg

After the 100th performance of the play, Pünkösti was hauled into a Budapest police station to answer charges that Nero, the play, was in fact about Hitler. He replied something to the effect that the people who had suggested that Hitler was like Nero were the ones they should be investigating.

Andor’s life took a severely bad turn when Germany, fearing that Hungary would make a separate peace treaty with the Allies, invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944 and installed a Hungarian Nazi supporter to be prime minister. Pünkösti was removed as head of the theater in April. And even worse things were happening around him: from the middle of May until early July, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary (one-third of them were Hungarian citizens). All but 15,000 were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and 90 percent were immediately killed.
Andor and Crew Work on the Play "Nero"
http://www.orkenyszinhaz.hu/index.php/2012-09-05-
14-32-58/toertenet/2-magyar/szinhazunkrol/715-nero

These events, and others, left Pünkösti deeply depressed, and he decided to commit suicide. Two different stories are told about his suicide. One is the story of the Fodors, who likely heard it from Erzi. In this version, Pünkösti shot Arrow Cross secret agents who came for him, then shot himself.[6]

Another version of the suicide, told in the on-line biographical sketch, is that on the night of July 9, he poisoned and gassed himself; his housekeeper found him unconscious the next morning. He died three days later, on July 12, in the hospital.

His will left everything to his wife. He requested that no one speak at his funeral, and his wish was honored. Andor was buried in an unmarked grave in the Farkasréti Cemetery. In 1957, the city erected a sculpture at the head of a tombstone to mark his burial place.
Andor Pünkösti's Grave, Budapest   http://www.agt.bme.hu/varga/foto/farkasreti/punkosti-a.html

With the information I could access, I found no evidence that Pünkösti was or was not viewed -- as suggested by M.W. Fodor -- as a “patron saint” by the Communist Party of Hungary. This observation has credibility because it was made by a man who was not only Andor's brother-in-law but also was a close observer of Hungary as the editor of the Berlin edition of Die Neue Zeitung (America’s newspaper in Germany) from 1948 to 1955 and, after that, a Voice of America analyst based in Munich.

One thing is clear, Pünkösti was not forgotten after his death. As mentioned, his unmarked grave was provided with an elaborate headstone, and his memory is honored with a plaque in the Örkény István Theatre, which is the building that housed the Madách Theater from 1941 to 1944. Also, he left behind a substantial body of written work that keeps his memory alive among scholars of Hungarian theater.

Erzsébet Fodor (or Fischer) Pünkösti
Much less is known about the life of Erzsébet than about the life of her husband Andor. As mentioned previously, she was raised in a wealthy family and was a highly educated intellectual. Her English was good enough that she could work as a special correspondent for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the United States, The New York Times. A search of its archives shows that she had eight by-lines in that paper, the first on February 3, 1929 when she wrote about Hapsburg Archduke Joseph, who was living in Budapest. The last was July 16, 1935, with the headline, “Nazi Propaganda Splits Hungary.” In between these two are several articles she wrote about theater productions in Budapest. No doubt, she contributed many more articles to the New York Times that were published without her byline. 

Apparently, Erzsébet inherited her parent’s house in Budapest after their deaths in 1918 or 1919, which the family attribute to Bela Kun’s communist supporters. (Kun's Soviet Republic held power in Hungary from March 21 to August 1, 1919.)  The house, located at 29 Eötvös Utca, is where Andor was living when he committed suicide and is the one referred to in both the Fodor-Thompson paragraph and Denis Fodor’s account of the lives of his aunt and uncle.

Likely, she and her husband had stimulating and intellectually rich lives between the two world wars and were, as Denis Fodor described, prominent along the Budapest intelligentsia. However, the rise of anti-Semitism had to have dampened the pleasures of journalism and theater as the 1930s progressed. And her life was in grave danger after the Germans invaded Hungary in March, 1944, and Adoph Eichmann came to Budapest to manage the murder of Jews. According to the on-line biographical sketch of Andor, Erzi hid out in Gödöllö under an assumed name and was able to escape deportation.

            Denis Fodor in his e-mail wrote about her life:
As for my aunt, she fell dangerously ill during the siege of Budapest by the Red Army. Somehow she recovered -- the regime may have helped, as her husband`s heroic gesture received high credit from the Russian occupation. Accordingly, she was allowed to live out her days in a country house the couple owned at Gödöllö, a tony resort that under the monarchy & Horthy regency was favored by the nobility and old money.

Perhaps this favorable treatment by the new Communist regime is what convinced her to stay in Hungary after it became part of the Communist bloc. The Fodor-Thompson paragraph indicates that he offered to help her leave Hungary, but she declined though until 1948 she could have. Erzsébet's relatively benign situation could have been related to her husband’s armed resistance to the Arrow Cross agents, the reputation he earned by staging anti-fascist plays, or both. Whatever the reason, her life in Soviet Budapest was apparently not too uncomfortable, though she died at the relatively young age of 57.

Stories to be Told
The life stories of Andor and Erzsébet remain largely untold, especially in English. This brief account of their lives suggests that they would be rich subjects for a researcher seeking to add texture to the history of Budapest’s inter-war period and to learn more about two prominent Hungarian families.

******************************************
Footnotes
1.       For more about the life and career of M.W. Fodor see the following biographical sketch. http://www.scribd.com/doc/65502558/Marcel-W-Fodor-Foreign-Correspondent

Information about the life of Dorothy Thompson is available in two autobiographies:  Peter Kurth, American Cassandra (1990) amd Marion Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (1973).n

2.      This quotation is taken from a document in the Dorothy Thompson Papers at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University. The SPRC retains all rights for use of the paper and requires written consent for publication of quotes or pictures in the collection.

3.      M.W. Fodor had another younger sister, named Margit, who was a few years older than Erzsebet. She married a fur trader named Ferenc Weiss. They left Hungary for England in the early 1930s.

4.      The Fodor-Thompson paragraph refers to Andrew von Punkosit. Denis Fodor pointed out the following in his email:  “Please note that for international purposes Pünkösti let himself be known as Andor de Pünkösti. Only the Austrians, under the empire, would have addressed him as von Pünkösti.”

5.      E-mail communication from Denis Fodor to Dan Durning, dated September 29, 2013.


6.    The Arrow Cross Party was Hungary’s strongly anti-Semitic national socialist party. Its leader was appointed Prime Minister after the German invasion.