Fulbright Student Conference Papers III. by Fulbright Hungary

MY FULBRIGHT EXPERIENCE

The Mutual Educational Exchange Program or the Fulbright Program, named in honor of Senator J. William Fulbright, was established by the U.S. Congress on August 1, 1946. It is now administered under the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, as amended by Public Law 87256. This Act provides the legislative authority for the Program. The main objective of this Act is “to enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries ... and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations, between the United States and other countries of the world.” The program operates in more than 155 countries. Binational commissions were established by executive agreements in 51 countries. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB) in Washington, DC, comprises 12 educational and public leaders appointed by the President of the United States. It has statutory responsibility for the selection of all academic exchange grantees, the establishment of policies and procedures, and the supervision of the Fulbright Program worldwide. Motivated by the need to change the U.S.’s traditional isolationist policy, the Fulbright Program developed into an indispensable resource for scholars and institutions all over the world. Today, international expertise is even more vital than ever as the realities of the postCold war era become far more complex and the emerging international system increases political and economic linkages throughout the world. Since its inception, the Fulbright Program has welcomed more than 294,000 researchers, lecturers, high school teachers and students from the United States and the rest of the world. Many have assumed leadership roles, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, heads of state and prime ministers, artists and ambassadors, governors and senators, professors and physicians, supreme court justices and CEOs. These Fulbrighters, past and present, have enabled the Fulbright Program to become the world’s largest and most prestigious scholarly exchange program. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Program offers opportunities for recent graduates, postgraduate candidates, and developing professionals and artists to conduct career-launching study and research abroad as well as for researchers and lecturers in any fields of arts and sciences. Since the establishment of the Program, about 100,000 grantees from the United States and 194,000 grantees from other countries have benefited from the Fulbright experience. The Program awards approximately 3,000 grants for U.S. and 4,000 for non-U.S. applicants annually and currently operates in over 155 countries worldwide. The Fulbright Commission in Hungary was established in January 1992, after a binational agreement was signed between the governments of Hungary and the United States in December, 1990. The Agreement was renewed in March, 2007 for unlimited time. The Hungarian government has acknowledged the importance of the Fulbright Program and also helps financially. The Ministry of Education and Culture provides the office space for the Commission and significantly contributes toward the program costs.

FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE PAPERS Academic Years

2007/2008, 2008/2009 Hungarian - American Commission for Educational Exchange Budapest 2010

ISBN 963 216 798 8 Edited by: Csanád Nagypál Designed by: Miklós Szalay Printed by: Korrekt Nyomda Published by: Dr. Huba Brückner Executive Director Hungarian - American Commission for Educational Exchange 1082 Budapest, Baross utca 62. HUNGARY Tel.: (36-1) 462-8040, Fax: (36-1) 252-0266 E-mail: info@fulbright.hu Website address: www.fulbright.hu Budapest, 2010

Foreword U.S. students compose a vital part of the Fulbright Educational Exchange Program between the United States of America and the Republic of Hungary. Members of the student group are typically for one year in Hungary. Like the Program in general, its student component covers a very wide variety of subject fields and types of activities. There are many who take part in different university programs, others concentrate on their individual research project. According to the tradition of the Fulbright Program in Hungary each year close to the end of the grant period students are invited to present a paper on their professional activities during their grant period in Hungary. The Student Conference gives an opportunity to grantees to summarize the results of their grant period presented to an audience which is composed by the fellow US grantees (including scholars, distinguished chairs, teachers, fellow

students) as well as members of the Board of Directors, members of the Alumni Association, the mentors and other invited guests, (in many cases among them visiting family members) too. As the director of the program, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m always impressed by the professional progress of our U.S. students, by the wide variety of subject fields covered, by the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; deep interest toward and knowledge of their topic. The event gives the student grantees an opportunity to speak about their projects in a real conference setting, which gives a chance to gain experience in presenting the results of their work in a professional environment. The papers of the student conference in AY 2004/2005, AY 2005/2006, and AY 2006/2007 can be found in this second volume of the serial. (The papers are arranged in a certain thematic order, which does not necessarily follows the original order of the presentations.) I do hope that the readers will like and value the papers as much as I do. The spirit of the Fulbright Exchange program is to build bridges among nations. I believe that these young people can do and will do a lot for fulfilling the mission of the program. They will be real bridge builders. We need them.

February 18, 2010 Dr. Huba BrĂźckner executive director

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2 007/2 00 8 13

2008/2009 151

Roderick Salisbury

Rejection of Urban Sedentism:

Westley Miller

Spectroscopic Investigation of Parsamian 21

Settlement Transitions in Southeast Hungarian Prehistory

and Development of Infrared Data Reduction

155

Craig Webster

The Legacy of Paul Erdős

Expected Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph

Jeannette Estruth

169

Classroom Politics:

Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education

Eric Lopez

Natalie Bowlus

Consumer Basket Analysis and

197

Marcell Jankovics and Ferenc Rofusz:

Randall Scotting

Hungarian Animation

The Social and Cultural Implications of Hungarian Modern Classical Composers and Their Music

211

Damian Stamer

The Grand Master and the Enfant Terrible of

Romani Education in Hungary:

Observances and Experiences

Paul Morton

An Artist in Budapest:

Sarah Lynch

Italian Influence on the Hungarian Renaissance

Building a Docent Program and Connecting Museums, Galleries, Artists and Viewers

229

Barbara Lanciers

Robyn Russo

Teaching Across Cultures as a Fulbright ETA

Contact and Collaboration:

An Investigation into the Recent Relationship between the Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US Hakan Seyalioglu

Number Theory and Educational Exchange in Hungary

141

Matthew Smith

Egy amerikai az Amerikai Kuckóban

241

Maxwell Staley

The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady

131

The Challenges and Opportunities of

253

Shandor Hassan

Photographic Journey Through Time and Space

Fulbright Grantees

2007-2008

Rejection of Urban Sedentism: Settlement Transitions in Southeast Hungarian Prehistory Roderick B. Salisbury

............................................................................................... Department of Anthropology University at Buffalo 380 MFAC, Ellicott Complex Buffalo, NY 14261 USA www.buffalo.edu rbs3@buffalo.edu

Múnkacsy Mihály Museum 5600 Békéscsaba Szechenyi u. 9 Hungary www.bmmi.hu/mmm/munkacsy Advisor: Gyucha Attila, MA

............................................................................................... The Great Hungarian Plain provides a unique opportunity for exploring the many variables of social, economic and environmental change over time. My project focuses on one of these variables; the changes in settlement organisation circa 4800-4500 BC. During this period, people appear to have shifted from living in large, densely-packed villages to smaller dispersed farmsteads, and my research examines this phenomenon through geochemistry. My time in Hungary not only allowed me to pursue my research. Through collaboration with Hungarian prehistorians, I gained a new perspective on the difficulties facing my colleagues here. I also gained new friends and colleagues, and I look forward to continuing research projects here. Introduction During our time here in Hungary, the 2007-2008 Fulbright fellows have heard much about Hungarian history, and the role that Hungary has played in the political, social and economic development of Central Europe. Many of us may also recall that

AY 2007-2008 this history typically begins with the Hungarian Conquest, circa AD 900. The importance of this region, however, goes back to at least 6000 BC. During prehistory, the Carpathian Basin – that is Greater Hungary – formed a sort of funnel through which most of the cultural and economic developments of European prehistory first moved from Anatolia and the Aegean into Central and later Western Europe. This cultural package is what we call the Neolithic Revolution; the process that we can think of as the “domestication of Europe” (Hodder 1990), which included agriculture, pottery making and permanent houses. During this process, these cultural traits were filtered through the specific environmental and social contexts of people living in the Carpathian Basin, and different developmental trajectories arose on the eastern and western sides of Hungary. In this essay, I will first briefly introduce some very interesting and significant changes and cycles that occurred throughout this period in prehistory. These are important because they represent the reactions of society to environmental and social stresses, as well as providing the context of my research. That is, they represent the ways that people dealt with stress, in some cases by altering their environment and in all cases by restructuring their society. I also describe the role of my research in explaining some of these processes. Before going any further, I need to mention other factors that brought me to Hungary as a Fulbright fellow; factors

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism that also make this region especially useful for archaeological research. I have already alluded to the fact that the long-term processes of domestication occurred here. More specifically, all aspects of urbanisation, agriculture, and state formation took place here, and the archaeology is replete with examples from every major period in European prehistory. There is a long history of research in Hungary, starting from the late 19th century (Tompa 1929; Banner 1942; Bognár-Kutzián 1963, 1966, 1972; Kalicz and Makkay 1977; Raczky 1987; Bökönyi 1992, to list but a few examples). During the 1970s and 1980s, large-scale surveys of archaeological sites were conducted. The results of these were compiled and published as the Magyarország Régészeti Topográfiája (Archaeological Topography of Hungary), or MRTS (Ecsedy et al. 1982; Jankovich et al. 1998). In addition, every community of any size has a museum housing materials collected by professional archaeologists and antiquarians, although as I write this these museums are suffering from lack of resources, and some are being forced to close their doors. And finally, there is a long history of international collaboration. Greatly interested in working with scholars who can bring other ideas and new analytical methods, Hungarian prehistorians are quick to adopt and adapt new technologies and ideas. Three of the more recent of these collaborations include the Körös Regional Archaeological Project (Gyucha et al. 2006; Parkinson et al. 2004), the Upper Tisza Project (Chapman et al. 2003)

and the Százhalombatta Archaeological Expedition (Proszlai and Vicze 2005). These resources – the archaeological and the human – combine to provide a unique opportunity to explore social and environmental questions.

The Culture History of the Great Hungarian Plain My Fulbright research proposal was to examine prehistoric social transitions on the Great Hungarian Plain in eastern Hungary (Figure 1), focusing on the period from about 4800 to 4500 BC; the end of the Late Neolithic period. The Neolithic was a time of especially profound transformations in human history. This period saw the rise of urbanization, or at least of relatively permanent settlements with solid houses at locales that were reoccupied for centuries or even millennia; construction of structures for ritual/ religious purposes; an economy based on agriculture and animal husbandry; trade networks that spanned enormous areas; and the beginnings of metal working. These changes are particularly marked in south-eastern Europe during the 6th – 4th millennia BC. The initial diffusion of pottery and agriculture into the Carpathian Basin was from the Aegean and Anatolia through the Balkans (Childe 1939; Tringham 1971), a model supported by archaeozoological data (Bökönyi 1974). As a brief example of what is meant by the filtration of ideas and materials through the Carpathian

Basin, by the Late Neolithic period the original agro-pastoral system of raising sheep and goats combined with growing Near Eastern grains had shifted to grains better suited to this climate and greater reliance on cattle and pigs (although sheep remained important throughout prehistory). The shift from reliance on sheep and goats to domestication of cattle and pigs is a widespread phenomenon, and faunal assemblages from northeast Romania, the northern Balkans and western Hungary both favour cattle over sheep, with some wild game included (Bailey 2000:182; Bökönyi 1988:431; Milisauskas 2002:210-211). Preliminary analysis of samples from the Early Copper Age site of Vésztő-Bikeri (Kasper 2003) suggests that the soils of the Hungarian Plain do not preserve botanical remains well. However, seeds of emmer wheat, einkorn, bread-wheat, barley, wild strawberry and cornelian cherry were recovered at the site, indicating a reliance on cultivated grains and wild fruit (ibid.). Based on the presence of high-purity samples of grains like einkorn, emmer wheat and barley at Balkan sites, Bailey (2000:178-180) hypothesizes a shift from small-scale mixed farming and foraging during the Early Neolithic to large-scale agriculture by the end of the Middle Neolithic. By the Late Neolithic, agriculture and herding was a well-entrenched subsistence system and people were beginning to experiment with working with metals, especially copper and gold.

AY 2007-2008 Settlement locations favoured by Neolithic groups were generally along waterways, and distribution maps of Neolithic settlements usually show clusters along the rivers and streams. These include the Sava, Morava, and Danube in Serbia, Lake Balaton in Transdanubia, and the Maros, Tisza, and the several branches of the Körös and Berettyó in eastern Hungary (Chapman 1990b; Sherratt 1982; Sümegi 2003). Especially favoured locations were natural levees formed during the Pleistocene. In Hungary, these places were the highest points on the Alföld, and were typically covered with aeolian loess (Sümegi 2003:56). Modern drainage and canalization across the Hungarian Plain has resulted in much straighter channels and far fewer marshy areas than would have existed in the past. Recently, the ancient waterways have been analysed by Gyucha and Duffy (2008). The results of their work are used here as base-maps for displaying the distribution of settlements in the region. At around 4500 BC the specific set of social transformations that I am focusing on occurred. I first became aware of the significance of these transitions when I came to Hungary in the summer of 2005 to participate in a large, multi-national research project called the Körös Regional Archaeological Project, directed by Attila Gyucha of the Múnkacsy Mihály Museum in Békéscsaba Hungary, and William Parkinson, then of Florida State University and now at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. At this time I also became

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism aware of the unparalleled density of prehistoric archaeological sites in eastern Hungary. In Békés County alone there are over 400 sites from the Late Neolithic and Copper Age, a period spanning less than 1000 years. This is aside from sites from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Early and Middle Neolithic, Bronze Age, etc. The number and kinds of questions that we can address with a data set of this magnitude and time depth makes it one of the best places in the world to practice social archaeology. All of this caused me to get deeply interested in the region, and I returned to the project in 2006. During that summer I began to develop a research proposal that forms the core of my dissertation research, as well as my Fulbright project. My project aims to understand the reasons and results of people rejecting crowded, closely-packed nucleated settlements. To understand this phenomenon, we must begin by looking at the Carpathian Basin as a whole. The Late Neolithic was a period of population nucleation, as people began to live in larger villages. There were at least three distinct culture groups in eastern Hungary (Late Neolithic Tisza-Herpály-Csőszhalom complex), plus another stretching from Transdanubia (Lower Austria and western Hungry) across what is now the Czech Republic into Slovakia and southern Poland (Lengyel Culture), and yet another south of the Danube in what is now Serbia and western Croatia (Vinča Culture). In eastern Hungary, the Great Hungarian Plain saw the northernmost

dispersal of tell settlements, most of which developed during the late Middle Neolithic Szakáhlát phase. Tells are large settlement mounds created through the successive rebuilding of houses made of mud. This rebuilding occurs over multiple generations, and such settlements typically are occupied for several centuries. Houses on these sites are generally large, rectangular, multi-roomed, and on occasion have two floors (Kalicz and Raczky 1987a). The largest Late Neolithic tell in Hungary, Vésztő-Magor, is located in Békés County. The settlement pattern, shown in Figure 2, is one of small to medium sized settlements clustered along small creeks and waterways. It is worth noting that each cluster contains a large “super site”, usually a tell, and that there are empty areas between the clusters. The empty spaces have been interpreted as boundary areas. Settlement location, distribution and type changed at the end of the Late Neolithic. General trends are observed, but not all areas within the region experienced the same phenomena. Since the research represented here focuses on eastern Hungary, the remainder of this discussion will be restricted to general changes seen on the Great Hungarian Plain, and more specifically changes within the area surrounding the Berettyó-Körös River system. During the Hungarian Early Copper Age, settlement patterns in eastern Hungary shifted from the three distinct areas of the Late Neolithic to smaller settlements of the Early Copper

Age Tiszapolgár culture. The settlement pattern, as shown in Figure 3 is now more dispersed across the landscape, and there is a substantial increase in the number of sites, but the sites themselves cover approximately the same territory as the preceding Tisza-Herpály-Csőszalhom complex. This pattern largely continued through the succeeding Middle Copper Age Bodrogkeresztur phase (Parkinson et al. 2004; Sherratt 1983). During the Hungarian Early Copper Age (c. 4500-4000 BC), settlements are composed of small, single room dwellings without an interior hearth or oven, without obvious internal storage containers, and without any internal religious/ritual location (Horvath 1989). These settlements are smaller than Late Neolithic settlements and represent shorter occupation, possibly associated with increased settlement mobility as part of a pastoral lifestyle (Parkinson 2002:430). Another possibility is that the dispersal is part of a reaction against incipient social stratification, with households or factions within the communities asserting their independence, as suggested by Sahlins (1972) for tribal groups faced with developing social inequality. It was thought that this change in settlement patterns represented a major and abrupt change in social organisation, with the total dissolution of tell occupation and the sudden flood of small settlements across the landscape (BognárKutzián 1972). However, a variety of sites types existed during the Neolithic, with two or more types co-existing in several

AY 2007-2008 areas. Kalicz and Raczky (1987a:15-16) identify three basic site types during the Hungarian Neolithic; tells, tell-like mounds, and small to moderate sized flat sites enclosed by ditches. Larger sites predominate during the Late Neolithic and smaller sites are more common in the Early Copper Age, although all three types exist for both periods. In addition, many tells have Copper Age occupation levels following a period of hiatus. This time away is typically indicated by a sterile soil horizon, as seen at Vésztő-Mágor (Hegedűs and Makkay 1987) and Berettyóújfalu-Herpály (Kalicz and Raczky 1987b). Archaeologists do not have much information about the Late Neolithic small, flat sites. Few Late Neolithic flat sites have been investigated, and those few that have were only tested with narrow trenches (Kalicz and Raczky 1987a), so that the interior layout of these sites cannot be compared to larger Late Neolithic sites or to succeeding Early Copper Age settlements. In large part this is due to the research focus on tells and the large open settlements. In addition, many of the smaller, flat sites have been damaged by extensive ploughing, making them less attractive for large-scale research. Still, two important points can be draw from this discussion. The first is that the shift to small, dispersed settlements may have been a continuation of one part of the typical settlement pattern at the expense of large, nucleated villages. Secondly, we will not understand how these changes were acted out until we examine all levels of the settlement system.

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism Until very recently, the lack of excavation data was also a problem for understanding the Early Copper Age settlements. Only a very few had been intensively excavated and recorded, and knowledge of this period came primarily from cemetery data (Bognár-Kutzián 1963, 1972). Beginning in 1997, the Körös Regional Archaeological Project conducted survey, soil chemistry, magnetic resistivity analysis and excavation in Békés County. Excavations at two sites from the Early Copper Age, Vésztő-20 and Körösladány-14, provide some of the data needed to understand this transitional period. Now the small Late Neolithic settlements are being subjected to similar analyses through the Neolithic Archaeological Settlements of the Berettyó-Körös project.

The Neolithic Archaeological Settlements of the Berettyó-Körös (NASBeK) Project My research examines the changes in the way settlements were constructed and how the space within them was organised, with special focus on the small Late Neolithic settlements. I see these changes as a reflection of the general decision to move away from crowded tell-settlements. I am also curious to see what the effects of human decisions about their settlement space had on the archaeological record that we see today. The conceptual approach follows from the idea that all of what we see is

the result of human practices, and that these practices have both intentional and unintended consequences that are visible archaeologically (following the social theories of Bourdieu 1977 and Giddens 1984). The ways that house and settlement construction changed through this period, for example, will show up in differences in house styles, cooking areas, storage pits, workshops, etc. Further, some of these changes will be visible through non-intrusive techniques; that is, they can be identified without excavation. I am also hypothesising that some of these changes will be visible even on sites that have been severely damaged by ploughing. My specific goal is to clarify the differences and similarities between the small, flat settlement sites during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age. As mentioned above, these sites, especially those dating to the Late Neolithic, have not been intensively examined. A working hypothesis is that the settlement pattern changed only slightly; that small flat sites with small houses were present during the Late Neolithic, although they only formed a small part of the total settlement system. During the Early Copper Age, this site type became more common, at the expense of the larger sites and tells. We do know that the tells were occasionally reoccupied during the Early Copper Age, although for very short periods, and that there is a lot of variability in settlement size, just as during the Late Neolithic. So I thought that perhaps the things that we learned about the small Early Copper Age settlements might have their origins

in the Late Neolithic. Since we have excavation and geophysical data from Early Copper Age settlements, we should be able to correlate that with geochemical data, and then compare that directly to geochemical data from Late Neolithic settlements. Through these steps, we can form an image of how Late Neolithic settlements were structured, how space was used, without destroying them. The ability to examine artefacts or archaeological sites without destroying them is an important development. Non-intrusive techniques provide archaeologists with good data without being destructive. Unlike excavation, which removes the excavated portion of a site forever, the techniques I am applying leave all, or nearly all, of the site undisturbed. These techniques can be broken down into three groups; geophysical, geochemical and aerial methods. Geophysical techniques are those that give an image of what is under the ground surface, and include groundpenetrating radar and magnetometry. Geochemical methods involve collecting sample of site sediments and testing them for various chemical elements that are associated with human activity, as will be discussed in more detail below. Aerial methods include aerial photos and satellite images, which show vegetation, waterways and sometimes the outlines of sites. Soil chemistry and magnetic resistivity have been used in the Körös Basin with good results, giving indications of site structure (Sarris et al. 2004; Yerkes et al. 2007). This early phase of the NASBeK project applies geochemical

AY 2007-2008 methods to several Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age settlements in the Berettyó-Körös region. To accomplish the research goals, I selected representative settlements from each period and went out and cored these sites. During October and November of 2007 I carried out reconnaissance surveys at nine Late Neolithic sites and eight Early Copper Age sites. The final selection of sites was based upon access, integrity, size, comparability, and the presence of only one archaeological period. Access quite simply means the ability to get to the site, which is not as simple as one might think on the dirt farm tracks of rural eastern Hungary. Integrity refers to whether or not the whole site is available for examination. One thing that I discovered early on is that many of the sites recoded in the 1970s and 1980s have since been destroyed. For example, a site near the town of Gyoma is now occupied by a drainage pond that removed over half of the site – permanently. This bit of cultural heritage is gone forever. Sites of similar size and location are comparable within the conceptual framework for this project. All of the sites selected fall within agricultural fields, and are visible on the ground surface as concentrations of pottery, burnt daub and occasionally bone or stone fragments. These characterisations also apply to the sites excavated by the Körös Regional Archaeological Project (Parkinson et al. 2002, 2004). The sites selected were either Late Neolithic or Early Copper Age, without other occupations or cultures present within the site boundaries. From the Late

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism Neolithic I selected Csárdaszallás-8 and -26 and Szeghalom-108. Early Copper Age sites selected include Békés-90, Mezőberény-68 and Okány-16. Mezőberény-68, Békés-90 and Csárdaszallás-26 all look topographically similar, forming small but obvious mounds of approximately 50 square meters on linear levees along relict channels, with core-areas of about 15 square meters. Csárdaszallás -8, Sarvas-131 and Okány-16 share a slightly different appearance. Again situated along relict channels, and averaging 100 square meters, these three sites do not look as mound-like and have larger or perhaps multiple core-areas. All of these sites lie in the Berettyó-Triple Körös river system in the Hungarian Great Plain geomorphological macro-region. This plain is flat and poorly drained, formed through gradual filling since the Pleistocene (Pécsi 1970). Prior to modern water controls, the rivers meandered and flooded regularly, forming oxbows and swamps and re-depositing sediments. The basic surface deposits here are wind-blown sand on hills; loess on flat surfaces above floodplains; and sands and silty clays on flat alluvial areas. Once the sites were selected, I sampled the sites using a method called coring. What I mean by ‘coring’ is that I used a tool called an Oakfield soil auger to push down into the soil, ‘trapping’ the soil inside a hollow tube. The Oakfield has a hollow head on it that is 25cm long and 1.5cm in diameter. One side of this head is cut away, allowing access to the sediments that collect inside. You push it down, pull it out, collect

samples or discard the contents, push it back down another 25cm; push, sample, repeat. This component of my fieldwork was conducted during November 2007 and February-March 2008. Cores were taken at regular 10 meter intervals using a rectilinear grid system for continuous and systematic sampling across whole sites. A 5m interval in the site centers will provide greater resolution, and off-site samples will be taken to establish culturally sterile geochemical signatures. I have done 892 cores at 6 sites, and collected 2,750 samples. Fieldwork included documenting house locations and the distribution of material culture on the surface, and recording stratigraphic data and presence/absence of material culture from the cores. The analytical framework for this project is based on two parts. One is the examination of the vertical layering of sediments and soils at these sites, along with identification of ditches, pits and houses (ditches, pits, wells, walls, and houses are categorised as ‘features’ in archaeology). Layers observed in the cores indicate both the depth of habitation layers and the distribution of features within the sites. I also have conducted limited excavation at two of the Late Neolithic sites so that I can directly observe the different natural and cultural layers within the soil profiles. To do this I have excavated 1m x 1m test pits, two within Late Neolithic settlements and two in off-site areas. The other major aspect of the project has been to collect small samples of soil from natural and cultural layers within

each site for geochemical analysis. For the immediate project, I am testing small sub-samples of sediments for pH and relative levels of phosphate. Phosphate is an element that remains fixed in the soil and is not removed through day-today processes of ploughing or erosion (Eidt 1977; Lorch 1940; Sjoberg 1976). This chemical is deposited in the soil though human and animal remains and/or waste, and high levels are a strong indicator of human activity. Presence and absence of phosphate is a good indicator of relative horizontal limits of the settlement. Patterns of high and low of phosphate readings may vary between LNA and ECA settlements, or give indications of activity areas within the sites. The results of the chemical analysis are slowly coming together, but are unfortunately not available for this publication.

Results of the researchRejection of urban sedentism? Results of the stratigraphic analysis indicate no significant differences between Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age settlements. Natural soil profiles in the region vary depending on whether one is on a loess ridge or not. Natural layers on the loess ridges include a ploughzone (Ap-horizon) of dark greyish-brown dense silty clay with a subangular blocky structure and a subsoil of light olive brown loess with sodium or calcium carbonate concretions. On the lower surrounding areas one typically encounters meadow clay deposits, formed in standing water,

AY 2007-2008 like marshlands. These soils are denser, and the ploughzone is underlain by dark grey clay or silty-clay. Deposits observed on sites also contain a ploughzone. Cultural layers under the ploughzone were typically composed of dark brown to dark yellowish brown silty clay or loam, and contained ceramics, daub, charcoal, bone and shell. Fill deposits in pits and ditches included brown and dark grey brown silts and silty clay, often mottled with dark yellowish-brown silt, and containing lenses of friable burned daub and ashy sediment. Sterile layers found under cultural deposits typically consist of dark grey silty clay containing fragments of calcium carbonate concretions, occasionally mottled with light olive brown silt, overlying light olive brown loess subsoil which also may include carbonate concretions. Figure 4 depicts the distribution of the cultural layer across the site of Mezőberény-68. Stratigraphic data in this case is mapped using presence or absence of cultural material and sediments associated with the cultural layer. The darkest areas of the map depict a definite cultural layer based on soil colour/texture and the presence of artefacts. Mid-range colours indicate the soil associated with the cultural layer but without any artefacts, while the lightest shade of grey indicates natural soils. White areas surrounding the site were not tested. Houses construction and location also play a role in our understanding. A hallmark of Neolithic settlements in south-eastern Europe is the use

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism of mud, usually for wattle and daub construction (Sherratt 1982; Stevanović 1997; Tringham 1971). Deliberate house destruction by fire is also recognized as a common feature of Neolithic life here (Stevanović 1997; Tringham 1971), and the remains of this practice are evident on the surface of Neolithic and Copper Age settlements as very visible concentrations of burned daub. Burned daub concentrations were found to correlate with house structures at Vésztő-20 (Parkinson et al. 2004), and are routinely interpreted as indicative of houses during surveys. I have been able to demarcate houses at Szeghalom-108, Okány-16 and Csárdaszallás-8 and -26 based on roughly rectangular concentrations of burnt daub on the ground surface. The use of mud for construction of houses and the subsequent deliberate burning of these houses indicates the continuation of long-standing traditions. While the extent of the daub concentrations at Szeghalom-108 implies rather large houses, the structures at the other sites appear to be somewhat smaller. However, the size of the houses cannot be determined simply from surface analysis; the results mentioned here only hint at possibilities. Although the geochemical analysis are not complete, preliminary results suggest that the spatial patterning and occupational intensity among small Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age sites are quite similar. There are also indications that house size and spacing within the settlements is variable, suggesting a flexible approach to

demographic and spatial needs. Complete multi-element geochemical workup of samples will be completed over the next year, and should give an indication of specific activity areas within the sites. Work in other regions has indicated that food preparation results in high levels of phosphorus (P), magnesium (Mg), and potassium (K) as well as elevated pH. A stabling area for livestock would be high in P and manganese (Mn), while an area high in P but low in Mn could indicate a human latrine. Areas high in all elements and containing cultural material were likely used as trash repositories (‘middens’), while areas low in all elements and materials were probably pathways. My analysis of the results will refine interpretations of such patterning, and apply these techniques to the loess soils of Central Europe. It appears that the changes in the patterns of settlement distribution were the result of populations from nucleated villages splitting apart and moving away to form small, independent farmsteads. Moreover, this process appears to have begun during the Late Neolithic, although the Early Copper Age sees the culmination of this dispersal. Preliminary results of this project tentatively suggest that this is not a reorganisation of the settlements so much as a reorganisation of the society in response to some stress. If settlement dispersal was part of a reaction against something particular to closely packed tell-communities, for example a rejection of attempts at control over lithic and ore resources by some community members, then the pattern would be expected,

and would offer insight into efforts to maintain an egalitarian lifestyle. For example, we could postulate that outdoor cooking or communal storage of food were ways of preventing hoarding of food by community members. Additional and perhaps alternative models will be developed as the analysis of data continues.

Experiences, archaeological and otherwise Some of the more amusing interactions I have had here in Hungary are with farmers. All of my field research involves walking about on someone’s field. Very few of the farmers I met understood any English, yet we were able to communicate through a combination of my poor Hungarian and sign language. In a striking difference from their American counterparts, the farmers I met were not overly concerned that I was on their land. They were obviously aware of the archaeological remains in their fields, accepted my scientific interest in these remains, and were content to know that I did not intend to dig up the entire field. There was one gentleman who made it clear to me that he thought my making small holes every ten metres was indicative of insanity, but he said it with a smile. I am not the only insane archaeologist running about in Hungary. What I have presented here is but a small portion of the work that is being done, by me and by others. I fully expect other dissertation

AY 2007-2008 researchers affiliated with the Körös Regional Archaeological Project to apply for Fulbright fellowships in the coming years. In my case, sub-samples of the sediments I collected will be sent to the Laboratory for Archaeological Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for multi-element analysis. Results of the multi-element analysis should give specifics about kitchen areas, workshops, latrines, butchering areas and other task areas. These combined data will suggest whether the organisation and structure of small settlements changed dramatically during the transition. In addition, a new collaborative project is in the very early planning stages, as Gabor Bacsmegi and I are just beginning to develop a proposal to excavate one of the small Late Neolithic sites that I tested, so that the physical layout of one of these settlements will finally be available. The Fulbright has enabled me to work personally with Hungarian researchers, live in my research area for an extended period of time, and access museum collection. Living in the research area for several months rather than the four to six weeks of a typical field season provided me with the opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with the physical and human geography. Affiliation with the Békés County Museum and contacts with the Morá Ferenc Museum and the archaeology department at the University at Szeged have given me access to collections and archives that I do not have in the United States.

Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism In addition to conducting my research, I have benefited from this experience through the breadth of Hungarian culture and archaeology I have been exposed to. Although I came grounded in Hungarian prehistory, personal one-on-one interactions broadened my knowledge. Exposure to new ideas, development of new professional contacts, and experience with techniques used by Hungarian archaeologists expanded my dissertation project in new directions. I also have gained a new appreciation of the particular problems facing my Hungarian colleagues in their own research. I have benefited. I hope that Hungarian archaeology will also benefit from my work, which has not only generated new data and additional interpretations of Hungarian prehistory, but also has involved Hungarian archaeologists in collaboration, thus fostering increased awareness of the objectives, methods, difficulties, and possibilities between scholars in our two countries.

Special thanks go to Gergely Bóka and Pál Medgyesi from the archaeology division for putting up with the American in their office. My PhD supervisor Ezra Zubrow, along with Bill Parkinson of the Field Museum in Chicago and Rick Yerkes of the Ohio State University deserve credit for mentoring and for encouraging me to pursue my own ideas. Paul Duffy of the University of Michigan helped me get set up when I first arrived in Békéscsaba, and invited me to participate in his Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology (BAKOTA) project. Gabor “Baxi” Bacsmegi has reminded me to look in more than one geographical direction for prehistoric influences and interactions, and is

collaborating with me in the development of future research in the Berettyó-Körös. Katharina Rebay, Darren Poltarek and Chris Pultz helped in the field. Finally, my most heartfelt thanks must go to my Fulbright advisor in Hungary, Attila Gyucha, without whom this work may not have been a success, or even possible. Hungarian hospitality is personified in Attila. More than a colleague, he is a friend who translated for me, gave me a place to sleep, trained me in Hungarian excavation methods and Hungarian perspectives on prehistory, tramped through ankle-high mud to check sites with me, and taught me how to make Hungarian stew. My debt to him is immense.

Figures FIGURE 1. LOCATION OF THE NEOLITHIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL SETTLEMENTS OF THE BERETTYÓ-KÖRÖS PROJECT AREA IN EASTERN HUNGARY.

Acknowledgements I would like to formally thank the many people who made this project possible. First thanks must go to Huba Brückner and the Hungarian Fulbright Commission. Huba’s ability to remember the most minute details about my work and life, along with efforts by his staff to create a real Fulbright family, made living abroad for nine months a joy. Thanks must also be extended to Imre Szatmári and the staff at the Múnkacsy Mihály Museum in Békéscsaba, who extended an invitation of affiliation and gave me office space.

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Roderick Salisbury: Rejection of Urban Sedentism

FIGURE 2. DISTRIBUTION OF LATE NEOLITHIC SITES IN BÉKÉS COUNTY, HUNGARY. PALAEOHYDROLOGY

FIGURE 3. DISTRIBUTION OF EARLY COPPER AGE SITES IN BÉKÉS COUNTY, HUNGARY. PALAEOHYDROLOGY USED BY

USED BY PERMISSION OF GYUCHA AND DUFFY.

PERMISSION OF GYUCHA AND DUFFY.

FIGURE 4. – DISTRIBUTION MAP OF THE CULTURAL LAYER AT MEZO“BERÉNY-68.

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The Legacy of Paul Erdős

Craig Matthew Webster

............................................................................................... Willamette University 900 State St. Salem, OR 97301 United States www.willamette.edu webstc@gmail.com

Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem 1062 Budapest Andrássy út 69-71 Hungary www.mke.hu Adviser: Allan Siegel

...............................................................................................

Abstract Paul Erdős (Erdős Pál, 1913-1996) was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. Erdős’ generation exhibited great talent due in part to the social and cultural changes between 1870 and 1930. In the 1930s, the Jewish Erdős left Hungary due to the worsening political climate, and eventually began a nomadic lifestyle in which he traveled across four continents collaborating with students, teachers, and professors. In popular books, he was described as a wandering ascetic searching only for mathematical truth. Those who knew him best, however, describe him as a compassionate, warm-hearted man. He was addicted to mathematics, but was also aware of current political events and cared deeply for his community of friends. In this paper, I describe the development of mathematical talent in Hungary near the turn of the century, give a biographical sketch of Erdős, and consider his collaborators’ perception of him in light of popular books. Finally, I describe how Hungary continues to nurture mathematical talent, through specialized programs such as the one at Fazekas Gymnasium (Fazekas High School). I also describe the filmmaking projects that I undertook to document these subjects during the past year.

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1. Introduction In the summer of 2006, I learned about the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-1996) through the popular biographies My Brain is Open, by Bruce Schechter, and The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman. These books, along with the film N is a Number, were the only sources about Erdős’ life that were readily available. The books taught me that Erdős was arguably the most prolific mathematician in history, but that he was unable to hold a driver’s license or make a sandwich. He was a man who devoted his entire life to mathematics; who took amphetamines in order to work twenty hours a day; who carried all his belongings in a suit case; who whimsically believed that all the best proofs are written in the Book, which the almighty Supreme Fascist keeps from humans; who called children epsilons and music noise. In these books, Erdős’ eccentricities are accentuated through stories that he and others tell about his life. Yet, this year I have spoken to some of his closest friends and read accounts by his collaborators, and they emphasize different aspects of his character. His warm-hearted nature, social capabilities, and thoughtful presence were characteristics that they talked about more than his quirky mannerisms. To understand Erdős’ life, it is helpful to recognize the larger historical and cultural framework preceding it. A burst of mathematical and scientific talent occurred between 1870 and 1930 in

Budapest. In section 2.1, I draw from Tibor Frank’s “The Social Construction of Genius” to describe factors that may have caused this phenomenon. I pay special attention to those factors which were part of Erdős’ development. In section 2.2, I offer a brief biographical account of Erdős’ life, drawing primarily from his colleagues and friends as sources. In section 2.3, I consider this portrait in light of popular literature about him. While in Hungary, I learned that there is a Hungarian film about Erdős that has not been translated into English. I discuss why it is important for this film to be translated and distributed. In his youth, Erdős was influenced by the high school math journal called Kőmal. Kőmal and other math competitions were developed in 1894 to excite and reward young talent. Many similar programs exist today. Bright students at Fazekas Gymnasium (Fazekas High School) attend specialized programs and prepare for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO). During this past school year, I visited classes and competitions related to these programs. In section 3, I share my observations and describe the reasons why Hungarian mathematical education for talented students is successful. The strength of these programs suggests that Hungary will continue to produce outstanding mathematicians and scientists.

2.1 The Development of Genius During the turn of the twentieth century, Hungary produced some of the great minds in mathematics, science, music, and art. These include scientists Leo Szilard, Ed Teller, Michael Polányi, and George Szekeres; mathematicians Johnny (János) von Neumann, George Pólya, Gábor Szegő, Paul Erdős, and Paul Turán; and many other musicians, composers, filmmakers, film producers, photographers, and social scientists (see Frank, p. 6 for a detailed list). Since Hungary is a relatively small country, how did it produce this large number of influential figures? This phenomenon, which was most pronounced between 1870 and 1930, was a result of technological innovation, cultural transfer from Germany, the assimilation of the Jewish community, and emergence of the newly-developed capital from the domination of the Habsburg Empire. Hungary has spent one third of its existence under the control of the Habsburg Empire, and has been occupied by the Mongols, the Turks, the Germans, and the Soviets. As a consequence, it has been necessary for both the nation and the individual to adapt and assimilate in order to survive. Moreover, Hungary has been surrounded on all sides by a diversity of ethnic groups, and therefore has experienced cultural interaction from the Germans, Slavs, Croats, Romas, and many others. This mix has created rich lingual environments, in which it

might be necessary to know a bit of a few languages to communicate. Routinely battered by invaders and surrounded by many other languages, Hungary’s geographical and political situation has encouraged creative problem solving within the culture. Ultimately, this may have benefited the development of some of Hungary’s most influential scientists, mathematicians, artists, musicians, and filmmakers (Frank 5-19). When Hungary emerged from the direct control of the Habsburg empire in 1867, the economy was quickly modernized. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, occupational status became a source of prestige in Budapest. Ethnic groups (most significantly the Jews) who had been marginalized previously, became an integral part of society, especially in academia. In the 1920s, many Jews converted to Christianity in order to create social and economic opportunities for themselves. This assimilation was encouraged by the government, which wanted to increase the number of people who were self-identified Hungarians. In the business world, this conversion was often seen as social climbing, but the academic world was less suspicious. Many great mathematicians and scientists from that period were Jewish, including Johnny (János) von Neumann, Paul Erdős, E.P. Wigner, and Paul Turán (Frank 24-30). The close connection between Hungarian and German education systems contributed to the development of young talent in Budapest. Both innovative and traditional ways of teaching were

Craig Webster: The Legacy of Paul Erdo“s

AY 2007-2008 imported through the Gymnasium program. Progressive schools encouraged personal relationships between students and teachers and experimented with new ways of teaching. Prodigies such as Johnny von Neumann encountered the great math educator László Rátz when he was only ten years old. Immediately, Rátz asked Johnny’s father, Max, if he could tutor Johnny privately. Max agreed, and Rátz provided one-on-one tutoring free of charge. By the time Johnny was 17, he had been at the university for a few years, and many of the professors considered him their peer. The encouragement that Rátz gave was paramount to von Neumann’s early success. The informal relationship between von Neumann and Rátz exemplifies the degree to which accelerated learning can help bright students. Rote learning was still common in literature and language, but the emergence of industrialization provided impetus for innovation in the sciences (Frank 39-50). In 1894, the secondary school journal Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Kömal) and the Eötvös math competitions began. The journal and the competitions intended to stimulate young students of mathematics and physics. Each issue of the journal contained problems that students were encouraged to solve. They would send in their answers, and correct solutions were published, sometimes with a picture of the solver. Indeed, many great Hungarian mathematicians and scientists had their photos printed in Kömal, including Erdős, von Neumann,

Szegő, Pólya, Wigner, Teller, Szekeres, Lovász, Sós, and Bollabas - to name the most well-known. When asked in 1985 about the “great flowering of Hungarian mathematics,” Erdős cited Kömal as an interface between experienced professors and young students. He said that, “It is where you learned how to solve problems,” but added that “such things have more than one reason” (Oláh 3-29). The intersection of social and cultural changes in Budapest helped to create a burst of talent in the emerging capital. Hungary’s history of foreign domination gradually produced the side effect of a creative problem solving ability in Hungarian culture. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Hungary assimilated the Jewish community. Jews were drawn to academic circles, where conversion to Christianity was less often seen as a social maneuver. New forms of education imported from Germany propelled talented students. Kömal and the Eötvös competitions stimulated great young minds, while increased cultural value was placed on scientific achievement due to industrialization. The result was a flourishing of mathematical and scientific talent. Yet as Miklós Dezső, the current head of the Rényi Institute points out, it could be argued that many famous “Hungarian” scientists owe their achievements as much to the United States or England as to Hungary. For instance, Edward Teller left Hungary at the age of 18 and lived most of his life in the United States.

He gained experience and recognition for his part in developing the hydrogen bomb in the Manhattan project, alongside von Neumann. He is considered a Hungarian-born American, since he lived more of his life in the U.S. than he did in Hungary. But both countries take credit for his achievements. Erdős, as always, is much more difficult to pin down. He left Hungary when he was 21, but returned often to his best friends in Budapest – even during the Cold War. Erdős seemed to return to Hungary more than any other place, especially toward the end of his life. Therefore, he would be considered Hungarian. It might be argued that Hungary claims certain famous scientists who lived abroad much of their life. Nevertheless, the development of their talent is unambiguous: Kömal, the Eötvös competitions, and personal instruction nurtured top students. Nowhere were these talents developed more acutely than in Paul Erdős, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century.

2.2 Biographical Sketch of Paul Erdős Paul Erdős was born in 1913. The early death of his sisters had a great effect on his parents, who home-schooled young Paul. Both parents were mathematics and physics teachers, and they recognized his talents immediately. Before the age of five, he could multiply three digit numbers in his head and tell you how many seconds you had lived. During World War I, Paul’s father was captured as a prisoner

of war in Russia for six years. During that time, Paul’s mother brought him up. She was extraordinarily proud of his abilities in mathematics, languages, and history. He grew close to his mother, and they remained uncommonly close throughout his adult life (Sós 205-207, Simonovits and Sós ix-xii). In his late teens, Erdős developed his mathematical talent by solving problems from Kőmal. Through the journal, many of the best mathematicians got to know each other by face and name from a distance. When these young students moved to Budapest to study at Pázmány Péter University (now Eötvös Loránd University), they created an informal and wandering group. The group, consisting of Erdős, Gallai, Grünwald, Klein, Szekeres, Turán, Vázsonyi, and others, would take excursions through the city and trips through the park, discussing mathematics, politics, and personal gossip. Many in this tight knit group would become influential figures in mathematics. A few of the bonds would last for years. Erdős and Turán worked together regularly and kept in close correspondence. George Szekeres and Eszter Klein worked on a problem in geometry that had great significance in understanding random systems. Eventually, they married. Erdős dubbed the problem, “the Happy Ending Problem” (Sós 207-208). Erdős made his name in mathematics early. By 18, he had gained recognition for solving a graph theoretical problem

Craig Webster: The Legacy of Paul Erdo“s

AY 2007-2008 of the Hungarian Dénes Kőnig. A few years later he gave an elementary proof of Chebeychev’s theorem: that there is always a prime between n and 2n (Aigner and Ziegner 7-13). He finished his Ph.D. at 21 and moved to Manchester where he studied for four years. He kept in good contact with friends and family in Budapest, visiting three times a year and continuing to collaborate with Turán. Their feverish correspondence between 1934 and 1940 gives a sense of Erdős’ style in mathematics and life. His conjectures, proofs, and problems are interspersed with his political and personal concerns about the growing anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe (Halász et. al. 85-147). Erdős returned to Hungary in 1938. The political climate was so bad that it forced Erdős to leave to the United States. He researched at the prestigious Institute of Advanced Study, but in 1939 his fellowship was not renewed. This is when he began his “nomadic” lifestyle. During the next fifty years, he traveled all across the world, giving lectures, participating in conferences and workshops, and collaborating with other mathematicians (Sós 208-209). When Erdős was 50 (in 1963), Turán published a celebratory paper that surveyed some of Erdős’ accomplishments. A striking fact about his work was that he could make significant progress in many areas: number theory, probability theory, graph theory and asymptotical combinatorics, constructive theory of functions, set theory, and set-theoretical topology, theory of series, and geometry. Rarely in the twentieth

century does one mathematician work seriously in so many fields (Halász et. al. 55-60). His success was partially due to his ability to remain open to others’ ideas and problems. He could strike up mathematical friendships where ever he went with students, teachers, and professors. Rather than build theorems, he attacked problems, searching for their underlying structure. He was renowned for posing problems suited to the individual with whom he worked. In his lectures, he announced general problems and offered cash rewards for solutions. The real reward, however, lay in discovery of the groundbreaking results that solutions often elicited. During his lifetime, he worked with more than 400 collaborators and produce nearly 1500 papers.

2.3 Remembering His Legacy Popular accounts of Erdős concentrate on his quirky anecdotes and witty remarks. He would recall funny stories in interviews, so much that they became canonized. For instance, in almost every detailed account of him, he describes the situation of when he was 21 in England and was faced for the first time to make his own sandwich. This anecdote illustrates his mother’s early pampering, but perhaps misleads the public to believe that his eccentricities were his most exceptional attribute. There is no doubt that Erdős’ life was much different than the norm, but popular accounts tend to exaggerate these details. His collaborator, Paul Bateman has said, “Some writers give the

impression that Erdős was some sort of surreal genius, but in fact he was a solid person, with likes and dislikes, human frailties, and many lovable qualities.” Much of the biographical information available to the public is written by outsiders to his life. Paul Erdős and his Mathematics, however, is written by those who knew him best, although the two volume set is hard to obtain and is steeped in mathematical jargon. The first 100 pages of volume one fill out the existing impression of Erdős by adding the stories and opinions of his collaborators. The common theme is that the caring nature and generous attitude of Erdős stood out more than his unique lifestyle. The construction of Erdős’ popular image has not relied on a combination of perspectives from people that knew him well. The books My Brain is Open and The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, and the film, N is a Number, were created by non-mathematicians outside of his community. These works determine how the public perceives Erdős. In many ways, these accounts do well. They excite the public about mathematics and entertain the reader with stories about Erdős’ character. They describe his amazing mathematical ability in a way that the layperson can understand. These works also recount the events of Erdős’ life, exploring the difficulties that he encourntered. However, there are certain points that could be represented more clearly. In The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Hoffman explains that Erdős devoted his entire life to math and was oblivious

to anything else. He writes, “[Erdős] renounced physical pleasure and material possessions for an ascetic contemplative life, a life devoted to a single narrow mission: uncovering mathematical truth” (Hoffman 25). In talking with Professor Miklós Simonovits, a collaborator of Erdős and graph theorist at the mathematical research center in Budapest (called the Rényi Institute), I learned that Erdős enjoyed fine dining, and would go out with his friends when he had the chance. In Simonovits’ estimation, he was not an ascetic. In fact, he was well-connected to the world around him. Erdős kept up with current political events and was well-versed in world history. The American mathematician P.T. Bateman recalls that “[he] had an abiding interest in political issues in countries all over the world.” In 1980, while at a conference in Europe, Erdős stayed up all night to watch the U.S. Presidential election, while Bateman – the American – went to bed. The next morning, Erdős knocked on Bateman’s door and said, “Reagan is your president” (Halász et. al. 9-13). Erdős was also devoted to his friends. Both RK Guy and Joel Spencer mention that he paid attention to the names of their family members and cared about them on a personal level. During the time of Soviet rule in Hungary, János Surányi recalls how Erdős would bring back special medications from the West to friends and their families behind the Iron Curtain (Halasz et. al. 21-25, 47-51) Indeed, Erdős took special care of those close to him.

Craig Webster: The Legacy of Paul Erdo“s

AY 2007-2008 In N is a Number, Erdős talks about his aversion to sexual stimulation and explains that he never had a serious relationship with a woman. This raises an ethical question. Is it appropriate to discuss the sex-life of a mathematician in a documentary film? What if he talks about it on camera? Naturally, humans want to know the intimate details of others’ lives. But it seems that this detail may distract from his accomplishments. During Erdős’ life, he used coffee, caffeine pills, and Benzedrine to stay awake. In The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Hoffman introduces this by writing, “At five foot six, 130 pounds, Erdős had the wizened, cadaverous face of a drug addict, but friends insist that he was frail and gaunt before he started taking amphetamines” (Hoffman 7). Erdős took pills on and off throughout his life, and it was not something that he flaunted. Consequently, the discussion may deserve more sensitivity when introduced. When Hoffman asked him, Erdős said, “You shouldn’t have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It’s not that you got it wrong. It’s just that I don’t want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed” (Hoffman 268). In N is a Number, his use of Benzedrine is not included and in My Brain is Open, it is mentioned in a more discreet way. The way in which Erdős’ use of Benzedrine is discussed can shade the perception of his character. There is a fine line between telling the complete truth and exploiting the details of a subject’s life.

Once I learned about the views of Erdős’ collaborators, I wanted to create a documentary to explain the situation. But after speaking with some of his former colleagues at the Rényi Institute, I experienced resistance. Sós, Erdős’ closest living friend, told me that in her writings she had said everything that she wanted to say about Paul. Twelve years after his death, this story did not need to be revisited by another foreigner who didn’t know him personally. Upon reflection, I understood the wisdom of this attitude and decided that in fact creating my documentary might not help the situation. While talking to Miklós Simonovits, he told me about an interview of Erdős shot by a Hungarian filmmaker named Kardos István (1942-2006). I had not heard of it. Did this interview exist in English? After speaking with the Magyar Television archive and the National Széchenyi Library, I learned that the 50 minute piece on Erdős was not in English. Moreover, Kardos István had created 70 similar pieces about influential Hungarian mathematicians and scientists, including 13 Nobel prize winners. Professor Simonovits gave me a copy of this compilation of interviews of Erdős – one shot in 1978, the other in 1988. In the film, Kardos and another reporter ask Erdős questions about his life and mathematics. He recounts his experience as a young man, reflects upon the meaning of his work, discusses his philosophy on collaborating, and gives his perspective on the future of computers. The austere set, long pauses, and slow pacing reflect the

formal aspect of Hungarian culture. Most of the film is a close up of Erdős as he talks and tells stories. It is a sit down discussion, and there is little attempt to spice it up. Consequently, the film may require some patience, but in return we see Erdős responding to questions spontaneously. While many accounts of him focus on what happened in his life, this account also focuses on what is happening. It depends less on Erdős retelling stories and more on Erdős expressing his opinion. In one instance, Erdős discusses the possibilities for the new technology of computers. This topic is relevant since we are living in the future that Erdős talks about. The film is also unique because it features Erdős speaking in his mother tongue. It is the only documentation that I am aware in which Erdős speaks Hungarian. Despite its cultural and historical interest, the film could be criticized in a few ways. For instance, the questions asked are at times general or speculative. Some may argue that it is not “new” enough, since some information in the film could be found in existing materials. But the Hungarian nature of the production adds a candid portrait of Uncle Paul that cannot be reached in American works. During my time in Hungary, I have been working to make this film available to English speakers. The most effective translation, I believe, is subtitles. Subtitles are less intrusive than dubbing: they would allow the viewer to hear Erdős’ voice as he speaks. Two Hungarian students are working with me to create an English subtitle track. With the help of the Fulbright commission, I am working to gain copyright permission

from Magyar Television. Ultimately, I would like to make the film available for distribution. Since the film is only 50 minutes, there would need to be more material on the DVD. Kardos created 70 other films that would be new to the English-speaking world. Vera Sós also indicated that there are other Hungarian interviews of Erdős yet to be translated. Thus, there are many possibilities to fill out this DVD, and even create a series about Hungarian-born mathematicians or based on Kardos’ work. The project would require backing to distribute. I have written the NSF with regard to their Informal Science Education program. This program provided partial funding for N is a Number and its values seem closely aligned to the benefits of releasing Kardos’ films. The Templeton Foundation held a conference in October of 2007 about Hungarian mathematical talent around the turn of the century. I have seen the video documentation of lectures from the conference via webcast. Perhaps this footage could be combined to create a documentary about mathematical education, and then released with some of Kardos’ films. This work would provide a Hungarian perspective to the existing material on Erdős, and therefore has significant cultural value.

Craig Webster: The Legacy of Paul Erdo“s

AY 2007-2008

3. Math in the Secondary School In the 1950s, the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) was introduced, bringing together the top talent from six Soviet countries including Hungary. Now, more than ninety countries participate. Students from each country take two exams. They have four and a half hours to solve three difficult problems. Hungary faces giants such as Russia, China, India, and the U.S. Nevertheless, Hungary repeatedly placed within the top ranks of the competition and many Hungarian students walk away with silver medals. Fazekas Gymnasium, located in the 8th District in Budapest, is one of the secondary school which has specialized math programs for talented students. Toward the end of February, I began to attend the informal preparations for the IMO. I could understand only bits of Hungarian, but could see how comfortable these 17 and 18 year-olds were when they solved problems at the chalkboard. I had rarely seen such confidence at my high school in the U.S., even when we solved much easier problems. Of course, the Hungarian math students who participated in the voluntary Friday afternoon preparation were no ordinary students. They were some of the best in Hungary. After giving a few problems to the students, the teacher (and deputy coach of the Hungarian IMO team), Dobos

Sándor, sat patiently at the front of the room. The class was silent – the only noise was the scratching of pencil on paper and the low buzz of the street through the window. Twenty minutes later, Sándor strolled the room quietly, peeking at his students’ work and helping when necessary. Sándor’s style is to allow his students to grapple with the problems, in order to encourage independent thinking. This practice is designed to prepare them for working independently at the IMO. They need to develop a self-driven, critical thinking capacity. Eventually, Sándor would ask his students to share their solutions on the chalkboard. The students explained their discoveries, frequently looking to him for approval. Hungarian mathematics education is a century old tradition, which continues today. More than 15,000 students each year participate in the competitions hosted by the Bolyai Society (including the former Eötvös competition). Many students still greet the new publication of Kőmal with excitement and send answers each month. The Fazekas program is especially active, and similar programs exist throughout Hungary. I am currently creating a documentary film about secondary school math education, paying particular attention to the development of bright students. I interviewed Dobos Sándor and some of his students, and filmed both advanced and regular-track classes that he teaches. I also spoke with László Lovász, a world-renowned researcher in combinatorics and a member of the first ever specialized math program at Fazekas in 1962. He has lived

in the U.S. for significant periods of time, and he talked about the differences between Hungary and the U.S. in math education. In Hungary, there is a sense of community spirit, and talented students are encouraged to go deeper into mathematics, instead of speed ahead. Whereas in the U.S., the community is larger and less closely connected, and the math teachers are not trained especially for their job. I hope that the documentary will bring out these points, so that the U.S. can learn from Hungary’s example. The sense of a small, active community was evident in the “Fazekas Napok” (Fazekas Days), an informal math competition involving over 100 students. Teams of seven are given 21 questions, and they have 90 minutes to solve as many problems as they can. A correct answer wins the team between 20 to 40 points. The team loses 10 points for an incorrect answer. Pastries and soft drinks are given to the teams, who sit at circular tables and work intensely on the problems. Once a team has a solution, the team’s runner delivers it to a cadre of judges, mostly first or second year students from the university (many of whom went to Fazekas the year before). Each answer is a single integer between 0 and 10,000 written on a small slip of paper. The judges grade them on the spot. The scoreboard changes in real-time, as teams turn in answers, and the teams battle each other until the very last minute. The competition encourages collaboration and cross-checking between students. Regardless of whether they win, they have a good time.

On April 4th, 2008, this year’s competition took place, and I was there to film the event. The beginning was relaxed and full of playful excitement. As time ran out, the pressure and tension increased. Frantic participants speed walked to the judges, delivering their solutions. The event brought with it a real sense of enjoyment. Fazekas brought the NYU computer scientist Joel Spencer, as a guest lecturer. He gave his lecture in Hungarian to a crowd of over 90. Most of the audience were young students, who watched attentively as Spencer talked about several problems involving asymptotes and graph theory. It seemed that everyone in the audience wanted to attend the two hour session, as classes had been cancelled for the occasion. I may have stumbled upon yet another reason that high level mathematics is so good in Hungary. Not only is the community small, but its members are friendly and helpful. Professor Simonovits introduced me to the head coach of Hungary’s IMO team – József Pelikán – who then introduced me to Sándor Dobos. Teachers such as Sándor are relentless in their generosity. He has introduced me to other teachers and educators, who in turn have invited me for an interview or into their classrooms to observe and film. Each person that I talk to speaks highly of another, and this friendly spirit is conducive to collaboration. As the Fazekas teacher Pátaki János told me, the United States may be good at creating strong mathematical institutions and organizations, but Hungary knows

Craig Webster: The Legacy of Paul Erdo“s

AY 2007-2008 how to create a community spirit, where the best students are exposed to their peers so that they can learn and develop together. Given this trend, the legacy of developing talented youth in mathematics will continue, independent of political problems or lack of funding. The Hungarian math community remains strong and healthy despite the radical changes of the past century, and appears that it will continue in this way.

4. Conclusion During this past year I learned about the golden age of Hungary. The sharp increase of talent in math and science was in large part due to a confluence of cultural and social developments linked to the newly emerging capital Budapest, innovative educational practices imported from Germany, and the assimilation of the Jewish community. The Kömal journal and the Eötvös competitions encouraged students to solve challenging questions and rewarded young talent. Due to the political climate in Hungary around World War II, many of these scientists were forced to leave for the United States. It could be said that some of the great scientists are as much American as they are Hungarian, since their most celebrated work occurred in the U.S. But the debt they owe to Hungary is undeniable. It is clear that the innovative education and exciting competitions in Hungary helped to develop the talent of many young students, some of which went on to do great works. This legacy continues today through specialized secondary school programs such as Fazekas.

Paul Erdős was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. His character has been recorded in popular biographies by American authors who accentuate funny stories about him more than his genuine kindness. While he was addicted to math, he also cared about the people around him and paid attention to history and politics. When I spoke with his former collaborators, many approved pieces of Erdős’ popular image, but explained how other parts could be more accurate. The portrait film by Kardos István shows Erdős talking in Hungarian about his life. I hope that a translation of the film would provide a fresh, new perspective that is less adulterated than the books about him. This film is the only documentation (that I am aware of) in which Erdős speaks in his mother tongue. The style of the film expresses the calm and formal nature of Hungarian culture. Moreover, the Kardos interview is less retrospective than other works, giving a chance for Erdős to express his opinion about modern issues such as how computers should be used in education. I am working on gaining copyright permission to add English subtitles, while I create a subtitle track. I am also finding a way for the film to be distributed. Simultaneously, I am creating a documentary about mathematics secondary school education in Hungary that should be finished in May. I have observed classes, interviewed students, teachers, and professors, and filmed competitions. The end product will show some of the keys to Hungary’s

success in educating young talented math students. The tight-knit math community and tradition of Kőmal and other competitions bring bright students together throughout their development. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the imbalanced ratio of men to women in mathematics. Teachers such as Sándor Dobos encourage women to participate, although the larger culture may not see mathematics as a very “womanly” subject. These social morays may change, but the legacy of outstanding mathematical talent of Erdős and his contemporaries will continue.

Bibliography I have used quotes and ideas from interviews with Laszlo Lozász, Miklos Simonovits, and Joel Spencer, which were conducted in 2008 at Eötvös Loránd University, the Rényi Insitute and Fazekas Gymnasium.

Albers, DJ and Alexanderson, GJ. “Interview with P. Erdős.” Mathematical People, Birkhauser, Boston: 1985.

Aigner, Martin and Ziegler, Günter. Proofs from the Book. Springer, New York: 2004.

Csicery, George. N is a Number. Zala Films, 1993.

Frank, Tibor. “The Social Construction of Genius,” from the Conference “Budapest: the Golden Years,” Princeton, 2007.

Halász, G., Lovász, L., Simonovits, M. and Sós, V.T. (Eds.) Paul Erdős and his Mathematics, Springer: Budapest, 2002.

Hoffman, Paul. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. New York, 1998

Oláh,

“Centennial

Issue

Kömal,”

János

Bolyai

Mathematical Society. August, 1994.

Schechter, Bruce. My Brain is Open. Touchstone, New York: 1998

Simonovits, M. and Sós, V. T. Recent Trends in Combinatorics. Forward. “Paul Erdős: The Man and the Mathematician,” CUP, 2001.

Sós, V. T. “Paul Erdős”, Aequationes Math. 54 (1997) 205 – 220.

Classroom Politics: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education

Jeannette A. Estruth ............................................................................................... Vassar College 124 Raymond Avenue Poughskeepise, NY 12604 www.vassar.edu JeannetteEstruth@gmail.com

Karoli Gaspar University 1088 Budapest Reviczky Utca 4/a www.kre.hu/english/ Beretsky Agnes and Kallay Katalin

...............................................................................................

Abstract In my capacity as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant, I have taught Master of Arts classes at Karoli Gaspar University and worked at the Fulbright Academic Advising center in Budapest, Hungary. Upon encountering a different culture, and a different educational climate, I became very interested in and attuned to how gender informed the relationships and opportunities within Hungarian higher education. With this study, I aim only to open a discursive space for conversations about gender and Hungarian higher education. This study and these survey responses cannot be read as typical or emblematic of Hungary. I can provide examples, but they are in no way exemplary. Nevertheless, insofar as it is possible to draw conclusions, I have found that the world of Hungarian higher education, like most other higher education systems around the globe, is a gender-biased environment.

AY 2007-2008

1. Introduction This study is the result of research I undertook and surveys I collected in my efforts to better understand the role of gender in Hungarian higher education. My interest in the topic began early in the academic year. From the beginning of my time in Hungary, I observed that there existed a large discrepancy between the numbers of women in academia as a whole versus the numbers of women at high levels in academia. Most of the instructors I met in my department at Karoli were female, and at least 90% of my students are female. Conversely, it was immediately very clear that many Hungarian experts on academic topics were male, and many of the people interviewed for political and international topics in the press were male. Moreover, the vast majority of the Hungarians I encountered at United States Embassy academic and cultural functions, like lectures, were male. These discrepancies piqued my interest in exploring the role of gender in Hungarian higher education. I decided to seize the unique opportunity presented to me as an American university instructor living in Budapest to do research that relies not only on books and online resources, but also on the words of Hungarian students themselves.

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education

2. Brief Background on Women and Hungary At first glance, the country of Hungary stands out as a stellar women’s educator. According to the CIA World Factbook, the adult female literacy rate as of 2003 was a near-universal 99.3%.1 On average, females stay in school for about 14 years.2 Upon closer inspection, however, the situation appears more complex. This complexity seems to stem from Hungarian women’s inequality outside the classroom. Technically, the Constitution of Hungary includes several provisions that “prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender.”3 For example, “Article 66 guarantees equality between men and women, and Article 70(A) prohibits discrimination on a number of grounds, including gender.”4 However, the legal mechanisms for enforcing these laws are ineffective and thus perpetuate the social inequality of females.5 Complaints based on these Articles can be taken to the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner for Civil Rights only after all other options have been exhausted. There are few other options, as there are no workplace sexual harassment 1

CIA World Factbook, Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence

Based on a few informal interviews and private discussions, I am under the impression that the societal perception of feminism is overwhelmingly negative and widely unsupported. Despite these attitudes towards feminism as such, many women have cited that their historically recent freedom to move into full-time careers outside of the home grants them feelings of independence and fulfillment. At the same time, these same conversations have demonstrated that most Hungarian women not only work full-time jobs outside of the home, but are also usually the sole managers of household labor and child-rearing responsibilities. Gender diversity in the workplace, then, has not been matched by a re-distribution of the physical and emotional labor in the home. Far from equal, most women now work a double day. In addition to women’s unequal domestic labor burden, the home is also an unsafe place for many women. Hungary is not 6

Sexual Harassment In Central And Eastern Europe, New York, NY:

immune from the global problem of male violence against women. In its 2003 Country Report on Human Rights and Practices, the U.S. Department of State reported that men committing violence against women in Hungarian homes is common.8 The cumulative effect of larger social discrimination, workplace discrimination, and the prevalence of male violence against women combine to make Hungarian women less-than-equal citizens. However, with Hungary’s admittance to the European Union in 2004, many hope to see changes in the social and legal attention paid to issues of women’s equality, rights to safety, and gender discrimination.9

3. Gender Discrimination in Higher Education 3.1. Definition of Terms A 2000 American College of Physicians article defines gender discrimination as “gender-based behaviors, policies, and actions that adversely affect work by leading to disparate treatment or creation

Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Hungary,

The New York Times, 9 January 2000, http://findarticles.com/p/arti-

Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,

world-factbook/geos/hu.html [Accessed February 2 2008.]

cles/mi_m2872/is_2_26/ai_62140815/pg_1 [Accessed February

2003,

2008.]

[Accessed February 2008.]

Rights: Regional Laws and Standards, http://www.stopvaw.org/

Regional_Law_and_Standards5.html [Accessed February 2008.]

Undergraduate Students: A Question of Method? (Columbus, OH: Journal

Union’s Online Publication. http://europa.eu/abc/european_coun-

Ibid.

of Higher Education, 2006), 2. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/

tries/eu_members/hungary/index_en.htm [Accessed February

Ibid.

coms2/summary_0286-17330974_ITM

2008.]

Ibid.

2008.]

Agency,

4 5

laws on the books in Hungary.6 Moreover, much subtle yet significant gender discrimination goes unnoticed, because often these discriminatory behaviors “reflect taken-for-granted patterns of communication in a gendered society.”7

2008,

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-

Stop Violence Against Women, Minnesota Advocates for Human

Elizabeth J. Allan and Mary Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female

[Accessed

February

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27841.htm, Hungary: Country Profile. Europa: Gateway to the European

AY 2007-2008 of an intimidating environment.”10 Academic writing often uses the terms “gender discrimination” and “gender bias” to discuss educational environments that disadvantage females in any way.11 My study, as do other academic articles, defines a biased classroom environment as “‘a psychological climate in which students of one sex are valued differently and therefore treated differently than are students of the opposite sex.’”12

3.2. Why does Gender Bias in the Classroom Matter? Examining gender bias in the classroom is supremely important because educational spaces can either reinforce wider societal sexism, or instead can be a tool of change. Furthermore, oftentimes neither instructors nor students intentionally foster gender bias, or even notice it in the classroom.13 Indeed, gender-biased behaviors are often difficult for instructors and students to identify because “many of the behaviors characteristic of ‘chilly climates’ reflect socially accepted patterns of communication.”14 At the same time, even though this tendency to “overvalue men and undervalue women” might 10

Dr. Phyllis Carr, et. al. Faculty Perception of Gender Discrimination

and Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine (Philadelphia, PA: Journal of American College of Physicians- American Society of Internal Medicine, 2000), 889. http://www.annals.org/cgi/reprint/132/11/889.pdf. [Accessed February 2008.] 11

Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

Students: A Question of Method?, 2. 12

Ibid., 3.

Ibid., 2.

Ibid., 14.

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education be based in “nonconscious hypotheses about sex differences,” the way that people in the classroom act on these nonconscious beliefs still creates a gender biased learning environment.15 Neither instructors nor students leave their preconceptions about gender at the door of the classroom. Rather, the relationship between the classroom and the world outside it is porous. Therefore, studying gender discrimination in education is very important because the classroom is one of the few social spaces devoted explicitly to learning. As such, the classroom provides an invaluable opportunity to break cycles of sexism through discussion, education, reform, and behavior modification.

4. Student Surveys 4.1. Survey Methodology I began a conversation with my students by conducting a survey that asked them a variety of questions concerning gender and their experience in and outside the Hungarian university classroom. I carried out this survey carefully, but rather informally. After doing a great deal of research about similar surveys taken in the United States, I formulated a series of thirty- four questions that would potentially offer insight into classroom environments. As I do not speak Hungarian, my survey sample was limited to English-speakers, and my sample size was thus relatively small. The surveys were distributed to my students during a class period, and the students were allowed as much time as 15

they needed to complete the survey. I carefully explained that this information would be kept entirely private and confidential, and I disclosed that I would use this information to write a paper on Hungarian higher education. Most of the students completed the survey in about an hour, and upon reading the surveys, I was very impressed with their level of openness and earnestness. At the end of the survey process, I had 22 surveys with which to work.

4.2. Mediating Factors Despite my efforts to present the surveys in as a controlled and comfortable an environment as possible, the very act of conducting a survey is fraught with complications. First, the conductor of the survey is always producing results simply by asking questions. So, while many of my survey respondents described discriminatory practices in Hungarian higher education, many of them also reported that the issue of gender inequities rarely crossed their mind. In short, the subjects otherwise would not have identified their classroom environments as sexist, but my survey, just by asking questions, created a topic of study. In addition, the results of the survey could have been further mediated by my relationship to my students and by my “outsider” status. As an instructor, I am in a position of authority. In addition, students may have felt that they had to “defend” Hungary from the judgments of

a foreign scholar. At the time I undertook this study, I had lived in Hungary for only seven months and thus lacked a grasp on the nuances of Hungarian culture from an “insider’s” perspective. Also, my language limitations prevent me from accessing Hungarian scholarship on the topic. Moreover, because of the English language’s preeminence as the language of business and diplomacy, I have been offered an educational and professional opportunity that my students simply could not access. My students’ relationship to me, and to the language in which we interacted, could have influenced the survey results. While the survey questions were very complete and exhaustive, my students answered them in their non-native language. As such, perhaps the respondents could not be as specific as they would have liked. I also feel that this language barrier very much highlighted my status as an outsider collecting information about a culture of which I am not a part. The survey results also could have been shaped because, as a sample group, my students are far from typical. These respondents cannot be taken as representative of “Hungarians,” as they represent only one university in Hungary, and are disproportionately from Budapest and its environs. In addition, they attend a small, private, religiously affiliated university that is heavily focused on the humanities. Perhaps for this reason, far more females attend Karoli than

Ibid., 2.

AY 2007-2008 do males. On these grounds and many more, it would be severely reductionist to take these surveys as characteristic of the entirety of the Hungarian higher education experience. Despite these flaws in methodology, and the complications associated with producing knowledge about a foreign culture, assuredly some reflections may be shared from my teaching experience and from the surveys. “‘Focus groups,”” E. Madriz asserts, “‘can be an important element in the advancement of an agenda for social justice for women, because they can serve to expose and validate experiences of subjugation and their individual and collective survival and resistance strategies.’”16 I hope that my survey, although flawed, might in some way contribute to the validation of women’s experiences, and precipitate a conversation that pushes for greater social justice for Hungarian women.

5. Biased Classroom Environments: Survey Results In this vein, I believe the best way to start a conversation that validates my students’ experiences is to present those experiences in their own words. Not only is my sample size too small to draw conclusions that do not essentialize their responses, but also my status as a scholaroutsider makes me uncomfortable with producing knowledge from and about this survey group. Writing about gender bias in a culture to which you do not belong 16

Ibid., 15.

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education is a delicate exercise on a sensitive topic. I believe I can better honor the students’ answers by not mediating their responses. In view of this, I will present the survey respondents’ own words without any significant mediation on my part in confidence that they alone will reveal that Hungarian higher education takes place in a gender-biased environment. Though I tried to keep my mediation to a minimum, I have selected specific responses and organized those answers thematically in order to make reading easier and more effective. Female students provided all responses, unless otherwise noted. Please note that many respondents left fields blank.

5.1. Student Behaviors Have you ever been harassed, touched, or teased by male classmates? “Yes, but after that be [sic] excused. I was angry, but he was a good friend, so there’s no further problems.”17 “Yes, but he was my boyfriend. Otherwise not.”18 “When I was at primary school and we became teenagers, the boys would tease us very often because of the changes that we underwent.”19 “Yes, in primary school there were a few [unreadable], bad experiences. Not today.”20

“Yes, because I was fat.”21 (Male) Have you ever heard male classmates make sexually suggestive jokes or remarks, or tell sexual stories in school? “Of course! For me, these jokes are a matter of fun, they are made but don’t intend to offend me personally… a friend told me that ‘we cannot resist to talk about sex, if you leave us alone, in 2 minutes the main topic will be this.’ He was a boy.”22 “Less intelligent people may talk about less intelligent people’s mistakes.”23 (Male) “Not at university but at high school definitely.”24 “Of course yes. In a different way than men but they do more jokes in connection with sex.”25 “Yes, they do it always but girls do this too. Maybe less harshly but still.”26 “Yes, this is frequent, general.”27 “Yes, several times. Boys like to do this.”28 (Male.) Have you observed that men interrupt women frequently? “Yes, but not just in school! That’s quite common in the everyday life.”29 (Male) “It depends on one’s personality.”30

Ibid., #22.

Ibid., #1.

“Sure. That’s correct.”31 (Male) “Yes, usually this happens.”32 “Yes, there are [unreadable] and boys/ men, who do this.”33 Are you more comfortable without male students in your class? “Actually, yes. I guess it’s because I don’t have self-confidence and I’m afraid of the critical eyes of boys.”34 “Today I do not really care any more. Earlier [in my life] I was more comfortable it there weren’t any boys in the class.”35 “Males are joking more frequently, I’m sure that they made me feel uncomfortable several times. But these were not that serious.”36 (Male)

5.2. Instructor Behaviors Have you ever received unwanted sexual attention in class? “I could not say it was 100% sexual attention, but I’ve got certain nicknames from male teachers (like eg: Primadonna, etc.). These are not real ’sexual’ attention, but after a while they could become disturbing.”37 “Once a teacher asked each girl about their weight in order to do some statistics and I found it pretty uncomfortable and disturbing.”38 “Not really, sometimes my male

Ibid., #22.

Jeannette Estruth, Surveys: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher

Ibid., #6.

Ibid., #11.

Education (Budapest, Hungary: Karoli Gaspar University, 2008), Survey

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #12.

#7.

Ibid., #10.

Ibid., #6.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #6.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #13.

Ibid., #3.

Ibid., #6.

AY 2007-2008 teachers made comments in grammar school, it was not serious. In the university, especially here at the reformed university, I didn’t have bad experiences.”39 “Once I was the only male in class and the teacher asked me whether it’s true that girls are either clever or beautiful.”40 (Male) “Yes. At high school. It wasn’t serious, but luckily enough the teacher was fired in a year’s time.”41 “I don’t remember but perhaps I have [received unwanted sexual attention in class.] Sorry for not being exact about this but to be honest I’m not really sensitive to this issue… This might be a problem of the balance of the sexes. When I gave English lessons at the Technical University, where 90% of students are men, almost everyone was watching me, which was quite strange, probably annoying.”42 Do you feel like your instructors view you on the basis of your appearance? “I have a friend (a girl) who really feels this with one of our instructors and upsets her a little bit. Honestly, I really don’t care what my teachers might think about my appearance. (Well, until I am evaluated according to my results!)”43 “Some male teachers pay more attention to nice [pretty] girls.”44 Have your instructors ever made

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education comments about your personal appearance? “Only at primary school. My P.E. teacher- a women, would always tell us if we’d lost or gained weight which was pretty embarrassing sometimes.”45 “Never (here in the university), but sometimes I just feel that.”46 “There was a female instructor who made funny remarks on [sic] one of my female classmates [sic] clothes. It was really humiliating. I would say she ridiculed her!”47

Do you feel that instructors pay more attention to male students when they speak than to female students? “In certain situations.”51 “Sometimes I feel that teachers, esp. [sic] men think that women are less smart than men.”52

Have your instructors ever made generalizations about women? “Well, yes. Interestingly enough, one instructor, who is a female, had remarked on males and females of a ‘special type.’ I mean women who are concerned only with clothes and make-up and men who are concerned with cars and football.”53 “Not on women, but on blondes. But that was just a joke! Most of our teachers are female.”54 “Seriously not. Just because of a nice joke it may happen.”55 “Yes! They were both female and male instructors. But it was only a kind of fun they did not think it seriously! I had only one male instructor who believed women are inferior- he made serious overgeneralizations about women. He was the only one whose remarks made me angry!”56 “An old teacher (over 60) of pedagogy has made some, but not very serious ones.”57 (Male) “At my previous university male instructors often told jokes about women.”58 “Yes, there were lectures where I experienced this. But I did not take them very serious as I did know if the teacher was joking or not.”59

Ibid., #6.

Do you you feel that stereotypes about women are reinforced by the curriculum? “In literature… we discussed a lot of

Ibid., #7.

Have instructors ever made you feel uncomfortable in the classroom because of your sex? “I neglect all remarks based on my appearance/sex by my instructors.”48 “Probably not willfully, but it happened, that they made hints.”49 “When a ‘manly topic’ was on due in class the instructor explained it to the male rather than to the females.”50

female authors. However I feel that their ‘femaleness’ was regarded as more important that men’s ‘maleness.’ In history courses we didn’t deal with too many historic female figures. At my other major, communication, this issue doesn’t raise, which is a bit unfortunate.”60 “Some instructors, 1 out of 10, happens to dislike women. Female instructors usually take female students less seriously.”61 (Male) “I think stereotypes are only used as jokes (blond women, etc.)”62 (Male) “Very often we learn about positive women roles and positive stereotypes (more often than negative ones.) However in some cases women are praised for values that were defined by male critics and value systems.”63 (Male)

5.3. Representation of Females in the Curriculum Do you feel that women’s work and contributions are represented and reflected in the content of the courses you take? “I was glad that we had plenty of female authors in literature courses. At history courses there aren’t many.”64 “I think it depends on the teacher and his/her liking. In general, women teachers are more likely to teach women’s work.”65

Ibid., #7.

Ibid., #10.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #22.

Ibid., #3.

Ibid., #10.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #22.

41 42

Ibid., #9. Ibid., #1.

49 50

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #3.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #7.

Ibid., #13.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #6.

AY 2007-2008 “In the case of literature courses male writers are a bit overrepresented.”66 (Male) “Well yes, especially if the teacher is a female.”67 “Yes. This semester I have a special course discussing only 3 female writers and two years ago I had one with Canadian women writers. And also in other classes on literature there are women writers included.”68 “Yes. There are some courses where we discuss only female authors, but of course it is indicated in the title of the course. In each course we mention the male and female leaders as well. For example, we learn about Emiline [sic] Pankhurst and so on.”69 “Yes, there are many topics related to women’s work! And there are some courses which concern feminist views, too.”70 “No, I don’t think so.”71 “Yes, there are several topics/courses dealing with the topic of women.”72 “In some of the cases.”73 Do your instructors encourage discussion about women’s issues? “Gender-specific discussion isn’t even taking place in class.”74 (Male)

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education “No, and I’m not even interested for example in feminist topics. I think my field of study is not really gender related there are no topics which could be girl or boy topics in it.”75 “At some history seminars and if the discussion about women is relevant in a literature lesson. But in my view, teachers are more concerned with their subjects/topics etc so they don’t care much about this… they are not really willing to change the syllabus.”76 “Sometimes”77 “Some of then definitely. Mostly women.”78 “Some yes, but most of them not.”79 “There were only one or two occasions.”80 “Sometimes yes. There are times when you have to discuss women’s issues. They appear in literature, history, biology.”81 “Yes, some of them.”82 Have your ideas in class ever been attributed to your sex? “Once, at an exam my teacher (man) ignored all of my ideas just because of my sex.”83 “Yes, I usually think like a woman.”84 75

Ibid., #10.

Ibid., #22.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #7.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #8.

Ibid., #6.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #7.

Ibid., #10.

Ibid., #15.

Ibid., #13.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #13.

Ibid., #3.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #4.

Ibid., #11.

“A couple of times, but I think it was not serious.”85 “In literature lessons, when we were talking about female authors/ feminism/problems of the situation of women in a certain area, [my responses] might have been [attributed to my sex.]”86 “It could have happened.”87 “Maybe, but not in a pejorative way.”88 “They have not ignored my ideas but I’ve already met some guys who thought/think of themselves as ‘standing on a higher level of society’ than women. To be honest this made me very upset!”89

6. Larger Societal Attitudes and Gendered Potentials: Survey Results Have you ever felt encouraged to pursue certain areas of study because of your sex? “First, my parents wanted me to be an engineer. However, this was not because of my sex. Being an engineer is fashionable and engineers earn a lot of money.”90 “Yes, I usually like to attend classes more related to women, or more women-like. For example, I find history rather hard, I think it is for men.”91 “Sometimes it is said that a girl should

do some presentation because of the feminine topic.”92 (Male) “Yes. There are lots of stereotypes about women’s job or profession. Some might say that you have to be a beautician or a hairdresser, because you are a woman.”93 “No. The opportunities are quite the same.”94 (Male) “Men usually have more interest in history and sciences. That alone led me.”95 (Male) Have you ever felt discouraged from pursuing certain areas of study because of your sex? “Not by my teachers or professors, but by some of my fellow students (boys).”96 “Well, maybe, I myself felt that mathematics, physics, chemistry is rather an area for men, not women. But nobody discouraged me.”97 “Yes. Some teachers of mine advised me not to be a teacher because at first sight I seem to be a bit fragile. Of course, here, at the university it does not matter.”98 “Yes, there are courses (mainly dealing with history- wars, war politics, etc.) where there are not many female students are present, [sic] so sometimes I had the feeling that it is for boys only.”99 “I was never discouraged only 92

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #12.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #1.

Ibid., #2.

Ibid., #3.

Ibid., #22.

Ibid., #6.

Ibid., #15.

Ibid., #7.

Ibid., #13.

Ibid., #9.

Ibid., #11.

Ibid., #12.

AY 2007-2008 because I’m a girl. But people tried to discourage me (especially my father). I think usually men think that girls are not enough clever to be an engineer or something in connection with this. But I have not experienced anything like this at my university.”100 “Not at all. I think I don’t want to be a nursery school teacher.”101 (Male) Have you ever been left out of opportunities for academic advancement based on sex? “No, but I read/heard stories about that.”102 (Male) “No, nope, never.”103 (Male) “There may be differences in the opportunities, but not as many as decades ago, so I don’t really feel differences.”104

7. Extra-Curricular Factors that Contribute to a Gender-Unequal Classroom 7. 1. Post Graduation Opportunities and Children

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education she had children. One student even voiced that women face blatant discrimination as job applicants. “Yes,” she shared, my post-graduate opportunities are different from men, “because most women are likely to have babies later and this fact can be an obstacle in choosing them for certain positions.”105 “Certainly,” post-graduate opportunities are made more difficult, stated another female student, “because companies, workplaces etc. don’t prefer family, growing up children, etc., it’s hard to go back to work after 2-3 years at home.”106 Perhaps for this reason, most respondents upheld that it is “a woman’s choice” to have children or not. Survey 13 asserted, “there are certain social expectations towards women. (e.g.: have a baby) I think it is women’s right to decide.”107 One woman agreed, “yes, because after a while I[‘m] supposed to have children and a family and there is no opportunity or no time to do both.”108 Another female student remarked, “if a woman wants to study further she can. Of course having a baby might be an ‘obstacle,’ but you always have to decide what is the most important thing for you. Family or career.”109

Many of the student surveys reported that women’s post-graduation opportunities were curtailed by the social expectation that they have children. There was consensus that a woman’s career was made significantly more complex and difficult if

Despite this emphasis on a woman’s right to choose to have a family or a career, no other alternatives were volunteered. None of the surveys suggested that men take up more responsibility for child rearing, or that the government step in to help working mothers. Therefore, it is clear that

100 Ibid., #10.

105 Ibid., #3.

101 Ibid., #22.

106 Ibid., #7.

102 Ibid., #12.

107 Ibid., #13.

103 Ibid., #2.

108 Ibid., #10.

104 Ibid., #12.

109 Ibid., #2.

ingrained social expectations about family are informing female students perceptions of their post-graduation careers. In and of itself, these differing gender expectations shape the classroom climate.

7.2 Violence Against Women While it usually does not occur directly inside the classroom, male violence establishes and maintains negative and pervasive social power dynamics that students bring to bear on the classroom climate. Most surveys reported that female students felt safe walking to and from school, but the majority of survey respondents also had either been hurt by a man, or knew someone who had been hurt.110 For example, Survey 1 expressed that a man had hurt her friend, but that she did not “know much about it. She didn’t want to talk about it. And there was another girl who had such an experience… She was terrified and feared to go anywhere alone.” Another respondent reported a vicious beating on the street. “It happened [to my sister] few months ago. She was walking home, about 4 AM, and a man hit her coming from her back, and just hit her and hit. In the end she escaped, because a lady woke up for the noise, and cried she would call the police.”111 She was not the only survey respondent to face danger on the street. Another student detailed “it happened to me twice that a male tried to harass [sic] tease me in the streets but fortunately none of them turned out to be serious.

It was rather scary, though.” 112 A male respondent stated that “Once a friend of mine was grabbed on her arm by a man, but she kicked him and ran away. Actually, this was not real violence.”113 Clearly, however, the female friend felt threatened to the point where she had to physically defend herself, and the encounter was undeniably violence. Nonetheless, the male respondent interpreted this encounter by writing, “actually, this was not real violence.”114 The fact that this male respondent downplays a physical and intimidating act of violence as “not real violence” points to the lack of gravity with which this very harmful and very important subject is treated. Based on the survey answers, most of the survey respondents had been shaken by acts of male violence at one point or another. Women who have been hurt, or know someone who has, bring the effects of that violence to their classroom experiences. For example, students may miss class to care for their physical or emotional pain, or because they are embarrassed by bruises or scars. They may also be too tired from this abuse to attend class or to do their reading and homework. Moreover, men who physically abuse also often emotionally abuse, and they may limit female students from coming to class. For those female students who do not directly experience abuse, they may have friends or family members who are abused. These students might spend study time or class time instead emotionally or 112 Ibid., #6.

110 Ibid., #1 and #10. Many students left the question blank.

113 Ibid., #2.

111 Ibid., #7.

114 Ibid., #2.

AY 2007-2008 physically caring for their hurting loved ones. Equally as important, the prevalence of male violence also serves as a constant reminder to women of their physical vulnerability to men. A study on the classroom effects of male violence toward women states “the presence of sexual violence can circumscribe women’s lives by creating a climate in which they are regularly reminded of the potential to experience such violence directly and adjust their daily lives accordingly.”115 This violent form of social intimidation may cause female students to subconsciously socially withdraw or curtail their physical movement or verbal engagement.

8. Do these Responses Reflect a Feminist Consciousness? Despite all of these very real problems, many female students in my sample group either denied that there was gender bias in higher education, or did not place an importance on the gender bias they had witnessed. This throws into question whether there is a lack of a conscious, articulated feminism among the survey respondents. Indeed, not a single respondent mentioned activism or identified themselves as feminists. Conversely, many declared themselves uninterested in, or even opposed to, feminism. “I’m not really interested in [women’s issues],” Survey 10 stated, “I think it is difficult to find a balance between a normal topics on women’s rights and

Jeannette Estruth: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education some kind of exaggerated feminist world view.” Another remarked “I’m not really a feminist,” and Survey 8 reported “I would hardly ever make a feminist argument.”116 One student expressed “[my] ideas are not feminist.”117 Although I cannot go so far as to assert that they lack a feminist consciousness, not one of the respondents defined themselves as feminists in a way that I would recognize.

This mind-set that discards structural and systematic discrimination in favor of an individualistic approach to success is defined as a “substantial impediment to acknowledging a wide range of discriminatory practices.”121 This mindset might be an obstacle to the cultivation of a feminist or activist consciousness, without which the gender inequality within Hungarian higher education cannot be addressed.

Instead, it appears that these students believe in what has been dubbed the cultural “myth of meritocracy.” 118 This belief in meritocracy holds that “individuals are firmly rooted in seeing social life as fair and equitable, with one’s station in life primarily a measure of the individual’s work ethic rather than of race, class, gender/sex (and other types of) privilege, and discrimination in society.” 119 The survey respondents repeatedly hoped that they were judged on their results or their talent, and implied that women could attain the same advantages as men through hard work. When asked “have you ever been left out of opportunities for academic advancement based on sex,” Survey 1 responded “I think I’m mostly judged by my results …” To the question “do you feel that your post graduate opportunities for study differ from the opportunities of the opposite sex?,” she replied “Actually, I don’t know. Hopefully my future opportunities will depend on my results.”120

9. Positive Aspects of Female Academic Life in Hungarian Higher Education

116 Ibid., #1 and #10.

121 Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

117 Ibid., #6.

Students: A Question of Method?, 14.

Ultimately, obtaining a university education is a highly empowering action by and for young women. Education offers them opportunities for greater financial, social, and occupational freedom in the future, and thus more agency in their lives. This significance is not lost on the students I was honored to have taught; despite the larger gender inequities in Hungarian higher education and society as a whole, as one of the respondents said so eloquently “there are lots of stereotypes about women’s job or profession… but I decided to do something more interesting. That’s why I am here.”127

10. Conclusion: Women as talented and ambitious as this student have the right to not have to face gender bias in their education. To return to the definition of a biased classroom environment once again, “‘a psychological climate in which students of one sex are

118 Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

122 Ibid., #1-#22.

125 Ibid., #10.

Students: A Question of Method?, 13-14.

123 Ibid., #3, #2, #7, #9, #10, #13, and #12.

126 Ibid., #11.

124 Ibid., #9.

127 Ibid., #9.

115 Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

119 Ibid., 14.

Students: A Question of Method?, 13-14.

120 Ibid., #1.

While much remains to be done to make the Hungarian higher education classroom more gender equal, there is a great deal to be said about the positive nature of classroom life for many female students. While the classroom environment might be gendered, the vast majority of respondents did report that their instructors appreciated their contributions in class.122 Furthermore, about 50% of the surveys answered that they could turn to people at school when facing conflict in their lives outside the classroom.123 Many students said that they could turn to their professors or classmates. One affirmed “ We have several teachers who are there for us in each and every situations. [sic]”124 Another commented, “I think there are many people who I can talk to. I have very

good teachers and classmates. My teachers are not only good instructors but also good people as far as I knew [sic] them. So I think I could find support in them, too.”125 One student even likened Karoli to a “family environment.” She wrote, “I think all my instructors would be there to help me. We have a very family-like environment, I usually feel as if I were going home. We are a big family with really nice and helping [sic] people. (I refer to the instructors and students as well.)”126

valued differently and therefore treated differently than are students of the opposite sex.’”128 Clearly, in the case of my university, students widely reported that both males and female students were valued differently and treated differently from each other based on their sex.129 I hope that in some small way, the very presence of my survey provoked thoughts in and conversations among my students. Awareness, indeed, often catalyzes greater change.

Bibliography Allan, Elizabeth J. and Mary Madden. Chilly Classrooms for

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2008.] Carr, Dr. Phyllis, et. al. Faculty Perception of Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine. Philadelphia, PA: Journal of American College of Physicians- American Society of Internal

Marcell Jankovics and Ferenc Rofusz: The Grand Master and the Enfant Terrible of Hungarian Animation

Medicine,2000.http://www.annals.org/cgi/reprint/132/11/889.

Still, changing gender bias in Hungarian higher education will ultimately be most effective if and when taken up by scholars and activists who study these problems in the Hungarian language. Perhaps future scholarship in Magyar will not only validate these equality issues and gendered experiences, but will start a wider public conversation about the need for greater gender equality both inside and outside the Hungarian classroom. Truly, “acknowledging the reality of sexism can be deeply troubling, as it requires reframing one’s worldview.”130 In Hungary, as in every country around the globe, wide re-negotiation and re-framing of sexist worldviews is required to realize a more gender-equal society. Perhaps with further scholarship, public conversation, and time, my students, the future leaders of Hungary, can help re-shape those worldviews.

pdf. [Accessed February 2008.] CIA

World Central

Factbook.

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2008. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/hu.html [Accessed February 2008.]

Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Hungary. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2003. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/ hrrpt/2003/27841.htm, [Accessed February 2008.] Estruth, Jeannette. Surveys: Gender Bias in Hungarian Higher Education. Budapest, Hungary: Karoli Gaspar

Students: A Question of Method?, 3.

Union’s Online Publication. http://europa.eu/abc/european_countries/eu_members/ hungary/index_en.htm [Accessed February 2008.] Sexual Harassment In Central And Eastern Europe. New York, NY: The New York Times, 9 January 2000.

ai_62140815/pg_1 [Accessed February 2008.] Stop Violence Against Women. Minnesota Advocates for Human

129 Ibid., #1-#22.

Rights: Regional Laws and Standards.

130 Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

http://www.stopvaw.org/Regional_Law_and_Standards5.

Students: A Question of Method?, 14.

html [Accessed February 2008.]

............................................................................................... Columbia University Eötvös Loránd University 2960 Broadway New York, NY 10027-6902 H-1088 Budapest Rákóczi út. 5 www.columbia.edu pwmorton1980@yahoo.com Advisor: Tibor Frank

...............................................................................................

University. (Administered 20 February 2008): Surveys #1-22. Hungary: Country Profile. Europa: Gateway to the European

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2872/is_2_26/

128 Allan and Madden, Chilly Classrooms for Female Undergraduate

Paul Morton

Agency,

This paper draws biographical sketches of two major figures of Hungarian animation. Marcell Jankovics began working at Pannonia Studio in Budapest in the early 1960s and established himself as a multi-faceted talent. He has been a naïve slapstick artist (in his Gustav shorts), an eerie interpreter of Hungarian myths (in his adaptations of Johnny Corncob and Son of the White Mare) and an angry anti-communist jester (in “Inauguration.”) Ferenc Rofusz had a comparatively unprolific career, making only three major shorts at Pannonia in the early 1980s: “The Fly,” “Gravity,” and “Deadlock.” The three short films are, in their way, the work of a dissident. Each tells the story of a doomed bid for freedom and individuality within three very different Kafkaesque landscapes. This paper examines both artists’ changing concerns through the communist and post-communist eras up to their most recent projects.. Jankovics’ The Tragedy of Man is an indictment of Hungary’s current political troubles. Rofusz’s “Ticket” is his first major non-political art film.

AY 2007-2008

Marcell Jankovics During the 2008 Super Bowl, GMC aired an ad for its new hybrid SUV featuring, as incongruously as any car commercial, a black-and-white ink drawing of a pulsating muscular Sisyphus pushing a giant boulder up a mountain. At the beginning of the clip the faceless Sisyphus is a well-defined Michelangelo muscleman, containing more weight than any real human being could possibly possess and he moves a small boulder. Gradually, as the boulder gets too large to remain on the screen, the Sisyphus becomes less defined, his muscles disappear, he becomes a skinny figure made up of little more than a few black lines, more like a being of us than above us. The ink lines of his form alternately become thicker and thinner with each step, giving the impression of an entire body consumed in a struggle. At one point, for the length of two seconds, the entire figure dissolves into a single line – one can almost see the hand of the artist making a quick dash across the page – as the figure musters his strength. The camera which at first shoots Sisyphus and the bottom part of the boulder from a medium shot, subtly zooms back to reveal the full weight of the rock and to, by the end of the commercial, reduce Sisyphus to a tiny black figure on the mountain. With the comforting backdrop of a New Age piano a radio-quality voice intones, “Why push? Why change? Why grow? Why dream? Questions you don’t have to ask yourself if you never say, ‘It’s good enough.’ If you never say, ‘It can’t be done.’” To those who have

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation seen the original incarnation of this cartoon, Marcell Jankovics’ 1974 short “Sisyphus,” that narration and that music is a terrible bastardization, as awful as any of Microsoft’s co-optations of rock standards. The original soundtrack of “Sisyphus” was spare, nothing more than the sound of heavy breathing that grew increasingly more desperate and more primal; in the last few seconds before Sisyphus rests the boulder atop the mountain and the sound goes quiet, his desperate breathing almost reaches into an infantile scream. “Sisyphus” is the work of someone who sees himself, in the words of GMC, pushing, changing, growing and dreaming. It’s also the work of someone who is constantly aware of himself fighting, aging and dying. Jankovics provided those sounds himself. “I wanted people to feel hard work,” 1 he says. There are two other films with which, “Sisyphus” forms a trilogy: “Deep Water / Mélyviz”2 (1970) and “Fight / Küzdök” (1977). He’s not resistant to political interpretations of any of them. But they are more personal than political. The stories are more about man in conflict with himself than with society. “Deep Water” depicts a drowning man who makes at least several dozen grotesque facial expressions in the course of one minute. His face becomes huge and then small. Large eyes, then no eyes, devilish teeth, and then nothing at all. And all we hear are the screams, which, as with the heavy breathing in “Sisyphus,”

Jankovics also provided himself. The film ends with a long shot of the cave in which the drowning man is fighting for his life. In “Fight,” for the first time in his career, Jankovics depicts heavily detailed and subtle facial expressions. The two-minute short is about a sculptor at war with the sculpture of a beautiful youth he is trying to carve out of a block of stone with a chisel. As the statue starts to take form, it also takes on a life of its own and fights back, using its own chisel. The statue chips wrinkles into the sculptor’s face, grinds off his hair, and then systematically knocks out each of his teeth. The soundtrack is spare, unmusical, nothing more than the sound of chipping rock. Jankovics shoots the scene intimately. The film was made three years before Raging Bull, but it has a weirdly similar approach to depicting two bodies entangled in conflict. It’s as if Jankovics were resting a camera right over the shoulder of one fighter while staring at his opponent’s face. In a departure from his previous work, the facial expressions are organic, the wrinkles on the statue’s forehead are focused and his mouth is pursed into a state of frustration and rage. The sculptor’s eyes look bewildered, and then old and defeated. “Fight” ends with a long-shot of the sculptor, now a defeated old man sitting down before his masterwork – a clean white, serene statue, that looks like a David - that has aged him in a short two minutes. He falls off his stool and dies. It was an odd film for a 36-year-old man to make.3

“The realistic style helped the idea in this film,” he says. “There was a colleague who asked me why I didn’t make it in a humorous cartoon style. I wanted to cry at the end of the film.” Of the three films in the trilogy, though, it is the one most likely to engender laughter. The image of an artwork at war with the artist is inherently humorous. The moment the statue makes his first chip into the sculptor’s forehead carries the firm beat of a surprise joke. Jankovics doesn’t take the reaction very well. “Of course it’s funny if I have no teeth,” he says. “People can laugh at me. It’s a real drama, but always, [every time it’s played] they laugh at me.”

The Dissident Jester Marcell Jankovics was born in Budapest in 1941. As a child, his family was sent to the countryside after his father, an official in the Hungarian National Bank was sent to prison by the communist government. “There was one cinema in town and every week I could go there to see Russian films, Eisenstein for instance, and Italian opera films.” The first cartoon he remembers seeing is Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s The Hunchbacked Horse (1947)4, a major example of Walt Disney-inspired Russian animation. But cartoons were not a big part of his youth. He poured through ogy. It depicts a Promethus bringing the flame of knowledge from the top of a mountain and running downhill. As the flame slowly dies out and the scenery goes darker, Prometheus appears older and more decrepit. “‘Sisyphus’ was about going up the mountain,” Jankovics says.

All quotes are taken from an interview with Marcell Jankovics con-

ducted in Budapest on February 5, 2008. 2

A fourth film, “Promethus” was made in 1992. It completes the

series, making what was originally planned as a trilogy into a tetral-

“‘Promethus’ was about coming down.” 4

The original Russian title is Konyok-gorbunok.

The film was originally released in English with the title “SOS.”

AY 2007-2008 his aunt’s large collection of art books and read his great-uncle’s translations of Russian literature, learning French so he could read the parts of Tolstoy his great-uncle failed to translate. His uncle worked in the applied arts and his aunt was a teacher in an industrial arts high school. His family’s background meant that he would be denied any further formal schooling after graduating from the Benedictine high school which he loved, and this made his dream career as an architect “I couldn’t imagine myself as an artist. I wanted to be useful.” - unlikely. He was a constant drawer and a friend suggested that he take an exam for a job at Pannonia. He did, starting working there in the early 1960s. Given his background, it’s not surprising that in so many of his films he takes on the persona of an angry anti-communist jester. One of his shorts in the Gustavus / Gusztáv series, “Gustavus and alienation / Gusztáv elidegenedik” (1976)5 depicts a hilariously depressed Gustavus, a low-level bureaucrat, bumbling his way through a failed suicide attempt and then seeking refuge from the ant farm of a mundane society inside an iron tube at a construction site. “Inauguration / Hídavatás” (1969) was an even stranger, sadder and funnier film. Using what was then a relatively-new technology that allowed animation cameras to ape the movements of live-action cameras, “Inauguration” opens with a majestic, loving depiction of a suspension bridge similar to the new Elizabeth Bridge that had been completed 5

Co-directed with Ildikó Sz. Szilágyi

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation just five years before in 1964. For the first few minutes of the 9-minute piece, Jankovics’ camera lovingly runs along the lines of the bridge’s suspension and the soundtrack is consumed by the blowing of an empty wind. We see a crowd of stationary spectators form, first from a bird’s-eye long shot as dots, then, closer to the ground as immobile figures making the indistinct white noise of a crowd. A band plays and an official appears to cut the ribbon for the new bridge. Cutting the ribbon proves to be a difficult task, and the official becomes trapped in a slapstick routine trying everything possible to cut the ribbon, going so far as to use a blow torch and then a jackhammer. There’s no smooth transition to mark the changes in his expression. For a couple of frames the official appears as an angry berserk devil and then, for another couple of frames, he’s a pleading pathetic man with a big nose. It is an effect Jankovics would use again and again even in his more serious films. “In films you need to have actors act for you. In cartoons, you don’t need that.” Accordingly, Jankovics’ characters are rarely natural actors. “Fellini wrote that he wanted to be an animator originally, because [animators] could imagine everything and could draw everything and that he was tied down to reality,” he says. “It’s not true because [Fellini] could change reality. All the directors I love the most - Eisenstein, Fellini, Ken Russell - they are fantastic people. I didn’t like Antonioni and Bergman because [in their films] only the actors are important, nothing else.” The crowd erupts in laughter and eventually the official sets up a pile of

dynamite by the ribbon, presses down on the lever to make it explode, and ends up with a fitting accomplishment: the destruction of the bridge. Jankovics ends the film with a long shot of the bridge now cut in two, leaving an enormous valley impassable, again with nothing more on the soundtrack than the empty sound of wind. “Inauguration” is essentially a Looney Tunes routine stuck between two near-religious architecture studies, first of a bridge in a construction phase and then in its tragic, destroyed state. It’s not quite clear where the comedy ends and the tragedy begins. “The message was that ideologies were more important than the forms and content and the real aim of…the bridge,” Jankovics says. He was thinking about the difficulty of connecting with the West, in particular of his visit to his sister, who had found her way to the US awhile back and was working in the American embassy in Switzerland. Jankovics got a visa to visit her in 1964 for what was his first time outside of Hungary and had ended up traveling Italy. The head of Pannonia studios, George Matolcsy, he said, helped mediate between the animators and the powers that funded the studio. “I was on the edge.” But about half of his ideas were rejected. Jankovics wanted to do another 13-episode season of Gusztav in which his low-level bureaucrat would be promoted to a chief. “I was fed up with the stories of the small man.” That was turned down. “They said they were too depressive, that there was no humor in them.” His favorite film that was never made was

about a statue that “could look into all the windows in a town. The story was that the statue was built up from the bricks of the houses of the town and in the end there were no houses, only the statue.” The statue then falls and ruins everything.

Reinterpreting Hungarian Myths Yellow Submarine (1968), George Dunning’s psychedelic Beatles musical was released in Hungary in 1970. Its influence is obvious in Jankovics’ Johnny Corncob / János Vitez (1973) 6, an adaptation of Sándor Petöfi’s epic poem and Hungary’s first animated feature film. Jankovics’ depiction of several of his film’s villains - a cruel landlord, a gang of bandits, Turkish soldiers – are modeled closely on Yellow Submarine’s Blue Meanies. “Yellow Submarine had a great affect on me,” he says. “The style of Yellow Submarine was based on popular [British] style of the end of the 19th century, the same time as when Hungarians were coming up in the great arts.” (It had a significant effect on some of his colleagues as well, most notably Sándor Reisenbüchler in his film “Capturing the Sun and Moon / A Nap és a Hold elrablása.” (1968)) It’s something of a strange and fun coincidence that in order for Jankovics to recreate one of Hungary’s 6

The literal translation of János Vitez is “John the Valiant.” But it

has appeared in English translation as “Johnny Corncob,” a reference to the hero’s nickname in the story, which may be better translated as “Johnny Grain O’Corn.”

AY 2007-2008 great national myths, he employed a style that had been built around the Beatles’ music. But there was one major difference between Dunning’s approach and Jankovics’. Both films depict figures with illogical proportions painted in solid colors. But Dunning, Jankovics says, did not consider how those leaps into illogic would inform his narrative. “[Dunning] had no idea why he gave a big foot to any of his characters. I knew why I wanted to give a great foot to János Vitez,” – he’s the only human character in the film to be so depicted, “because of the folk perspective. He was a great hero.” By shaping the figure with big feet, at every moment of the film we are forced to view him from below. Dunning apparently made no similar considerations. (One could, of course, argue that that very lack of explanation for Yellow Submarine’s disproportions was the very point of its aesthetic, the psychedelic and child-like embrace of complete illogic.) Jankovics is not as enamored of Yellow Submarine as he was in his youth. “Watch it without the music, you won’t like it. The Beatles music is better than the film.” And he never quite returned to the style in his own work partly because so many people told him he was only making a “copy.” That’s not entirely true. Stanza by stanza, Jankovics’ film is remarkably faithful to the original poem. It opens with a relatively chaste sex scene - “[H]e kissed her mouth: one time? a hundred? / Only He-Who-Knows-AllThings could get them numbered”7- for

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation which Jankovics artfully fades out into a series of cutouts of doves kissing amid sprouting flowers. The poem exists in a funky world where one must travel from Hungary through Italy, India and Poland to get to France which is suffering under the occupation of Turkish soldiers. Jankovics, like Petöfi, employs childish stereotypes of world cultures such as the French king, who is short, fat, and foppish, and is constantly followed by two angels holding a crown above his head. Petöfi either never visited Italy or was making a fun joke when he wrote, “Since Italy’s always in winter’s harsh vise; / Our soldiers were marching on sheer snow and ice,” and “when it got a bit colder, / Each dismounted and carried his horse on his shoulder.”8 Jankovics accordingly imagines a Venice filled with buildings leaning at odd angles whose canals have been completely frozen over. His soldiers carry their horses on their backs in an astonishingly orderly fashion and skate around the frozen canals for the beginning of a travel montage that uses some early ‘70s Hungarian folk-rock. During his soldiers’ march through India’s mountains, Petöfi writes, “And their drink was peculiar, it must be allowed, / When thirsty, they squeezed water out of cloud.”9 Jankovics’ soldiers reach out and grab long purple clouds with a cane, which they then wrap around their heads. Like the best comedies, the humor of both the poem and the film Johnny his introduction for his faithfulness to the original text with his verse translation. He also acknowledges his translation’s inferiority to the original.

Sándor Petöfi, John the Valiant: A Bilingual Edition. Tr. John

Ibid, 81.

Ridland. (Corvina: Budapest, 1999), 35. Ridland makes a good case in

Ibid, 81.

Corncob masks a grim, tragic sense of life. Jankovics and Petöfi are disturbingly light-hearted and easy-going in depicting cruelty. János Vitez cuts Turkish soldiers in half – their entrails are red and flat - with the same ease one would use in slicing salami. He burns bandits alive in their den, watching the flames reach out into the outer reaches of the forest. It’s a brutal film. The Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine get their comeuppance by turning into flowers. Son of the White Mare / Fehérlófia (1982), Jankovics’ other great adaptation of a Hungarian myth is a grim, nightmarish film. If János Vitez, dressed in bright red and yellow like John Lennon’s band leader in Yellow Submarine, seems to exist in a world of perpetual daytime. Fehérlófia, a sun-child built of simple geometric shapes suffers through a perpetual night. The dove’s kissing that formed such a lovable motif in Johnny Corncob is repeated here in a much grimmer landscape. Like János Vitez, Fehérlófia is also on a great quest, but his journey takes him into more brutal obstacles, of which Jankovics refrains from any sense of comedy. He fights dragons, one of which appears like a giant strange beast created out of parts of lines one would see in a digital clock. It’s the kind of demon that would have been created in an early ‘80s science-fiction movie about a nefarious computer. “There is the same problem in every civilization… In the original folk tale the biggest dragon is urban civilization. He has a big smile, and false teeth, dangerous and green.” The first version of his adaptation was turned down by the communist censor because he couldn’t provide a positive image of modernity. The computerized

dragon was a compromise. In the end credits of Son of the White Mare, which Jankovics calls the most important part of the film, the hero walks amid the skyline of a city at twilight as Liszt plays on the soundtrack. “America was somehow associated with smog…America is the vanguard of human civilization and the vanguard of smog too.” One important side note: Jankovics does not endow his János Vitez with any real expression in his film, an approach he would maintain in depicting Fehérlófia in Son of the White Mare. Essentially, his characters wear masks. “I have something in common with the primitive arts. If a Maori wants to express something on his face he does so with a tattoo, which is important because a tattoo is relatively constant. It couldn’t change. The heroes of these films are constant heroes. They have no real development. A child knows that this person cannot change in this story. They will be constant always.” There is no classic narrative development in these films, no real character development, anymore than there is one in a 90-minute dream. (There’s another reason for his decision to opt away from depicting detailed expressions except in his films “Fight” and “Promethus.” “In Pannonia, my colleagues were good drawers, but the in-betweeners, the lower level animators couldn’t draw.” When making features that required the presence of more assistants, Jankovics did everything he could to make his plans idiot-proof.)

AY 2007-2008

The Tragedy of Man

after 1989 Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man / Az ember tragédiája is a tragicomic epic that condenses the history of mankind into a single evening, without once directly mentioning Hungary or Hungarian culture. It is divided into 15 scenes stretching from the dawn of creation through the great epochs (the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Crusades, the Prague of Kepler, the French Revolution, Dickensian London), all the way to future dystopic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. There are three heroes of the play, Adam, Eve and Lucifer, and each scene provides a moment for Adam – a stand-in for mankind - to realize a great success. In Ancient Greece, mankind’s goal is defined as democracy. In Ancient Rome mankind makes earthly pleasure sacred. By the end of each scene, man suffers a great disillusion. Democracy in Ancient Greece is destroyed by demagoguery. Earthly pleasure proves incapable of sustaining a civilization in Ancient Rome and is replaced by Christianity. Madách was not a historian but a poet. And his conflicted views of British capitalism (“The flattery of mean things, pettiness; / The burned-out rake-hell cursing tenderness,”10) or the vanities of Egyptian pharaohs (“What is the point of glory / If it can only be achieved through torture?”11) were based more on the collective unconscious of the mid-19th century world intellectual.

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation The play, with its long complicated monologues and quick transitions between dreamy landscapes, defies staging, though it has been produced several times since 1883.12 Most recently, Jankovics has been adapting it for a planned animated feature, which has been appearing in pieces, out of sequence, on Hungarian television since 1993. To retell the story, he relies on the symbols and visual cues of our own millennial sense of human history. This means children’s history books, but also, in our video culture, movies and, fittingly enough for Jankovics, cartoons. Both he and his moment are perfectly suited to the material. Madách wrote his play a decade after the 1848 Revolution, and the play is a partly a Burkean exercise in reconsidering the definition of progress after a failed uprising. Jankovics started planning his adaptation of the play in 1983. His first completed scene aired four years after the 1989 revolution, the fruits of which he still remains skeptical: At the end of the century I was very optimistic. But in my heart I never believed in any positive change. The people [have a] very bad conscience, psychologically, mentally and physically. Then came this version of democracy. Democracy. Not real democracy. [We had] the KGB in the background… Because I am Hungarian I can’t be that optimistic, [though, the problems 12

George F. Cushing. “Introduction.” The Tragedy of Man by Imre

Madách (Budapest: Corvina, 1988). 18. Cushing notes that the play is 10

Imre Madách in The Tragedy of Man (Budapest: Corvina, 1988) Tr.

still part of the Hungarian theater’s repertoire and that it has been

George Szirtes, 175.

performed throughout the German-speaking world as well as Poland,

Slovakia, Croatia, Estonia and the former Soviet Union.

Ibid, 60.

of democracy are] generally a human problem. In different parts of the world it is expressed in a more spectacular way. In Eastern Europe it can be expressed better. [Eastern Europe] is a more dramatic part of the world now, at least in Europe. Accordingly, there’s nothing particularly Hungarian about the atmosphere of The Tragedy of Man,- it is The Tragedy of Man not The Tragedy of Hungary - though many of Jankovics’ contemporaries, in contrast, have employed Hungarian folk art in adapting both Hungarian and non-Hungarian literature for the screen. All but one scene ends with Mozart’s Requiem, which Jankovics was inspired to use after watching an All Saints’ Day television broadcast 20 years ago and with that music the uncompleted film constantly demands your mourning. He does not believe in art for the sake of art. As with “Sisyphus,” “I want people to cry at the end of my film. I am pessimistic because I want them to change something about themselves.” Any visitor of a major Western museum would be comfortable with his Ancient Egypt scene, in which two-dimensional hieroglyphics representing the masses come alive, moving in the stilted semi-disabled fashion one would expect from crude drawings. Giant three-dimensional statues – representing the powerful pharaohs – lord over them. At one point Jankovics balances the pharaoh as a statue on a scale against masses of small paper cut-outs of his slaves. The pharaoh weighs them down. At the end of the scene, Lucifer forces Adam as pharaoh to imagine his position

in another few millennia, when “your body stays intact / And perfectly preserved for curious schoolboys / To puzzle at your twisted face.”13 And Jankovics sets his camera from Adam’s point-of-view as he stares through the eyeholes of an Egyptian coffin into the sterile confines of a museum’s empty exhibit hall. For Jankovics’ audience, Ancient Egypt only exists in museums. The average visitor to any of these museums rarely comes away with any more specific information as to the nature of gods in Ancient Egypt, or the differences between statues in different dynasties. And, taking Madách as his cue, the scene is a witty, semi-juvenile joke on this very fact. The emperors may be great and have earned the right to be seen as three-dimensional. The slaves may be cursed to nameless two-dimensionality. Both are today collecting dust in our national museums. For his scene on Ancient Rome, Jankovics pays direct homage to his hero Fellini. He depicts a series of frozen statues out of Pompeii trapped in a spirited dialogue without moving their lips as the mosaics below them and paintings around them come alive in terribly beautiful episodes of sex and violence, most of which don’t last longer than a few seconds. The scene feels very similar to the transitory poly-erotic grotesqueries of Fellini Satyricon (1969). Jankovics’ camera jumps from one face to the next as they struggle to break out of their shell to experience the pleasures of the flesh. It’s a way of saying what most of us already know: that whatever pleasure these beings once experienced is 13

Madách, 64.

AY 2007-2008 now meaningless and won’t survive their death. At the end of the scene, St. Peter breaks through the walls, and exposes a light that destroys the paintings, a direct reference to Fellini’s Roma (1972)14 in which construction workers on the Roman subway inadvertently destroy Roman masterpieces they find in a cave by exposing them to sunlight. If Jankovics shares anything with Fellini it may be a Jungian sense of the human past, where our collective memory creates a vision that can be at once celebrated and enjoyed but also maligned. Fellini Satyricon has nothing to do with any Ancient Rome that ever existed, but to our dream of an Ancient Rome. Likewise, Jankovics and Madách live in an idea of the past not the past itself. At the moment, Jankovics is working on the longest and most expensive scene of The Tragedy of Man which retells a history of 150 years’ worth of British capitalism, from the glorious Victorian era to the present, through the changing styles of newspaper illustrations and graphics. The scene will complete the film, giving Jankovics more relief than elation. For with The Tragedy of Man Jankovics has gone from being an old man trapped in a young man’s body, to being a great ancient, at least 120 years old, filled with wild visions of the apocalypse trapped in the body of a happy bearded, professorial 66-year-old man. “My façade is very joyful. But my soul is very serious, depressive.” In one of the stranger scenes of the play, Madách imagines a futuristic phalanstery founded on the ideals of the socialist Charles 14

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation Fourier. Jankovics’ phalanstery is a sparse, thin-lined black-and-white vision of an empty emotionless world, a style he calls “East German Comics.” When asked if his own personal experiences under communism informed his decision to make the phalanstery grimmer than in Madách’s original, Jankovics says that he actually thinks things will get much worse for Hungary and the world in the future, worse than anything seen in the 20th century. “I am sure we are before 1984.”

Ferenc Rofusz Ferenc Rofusz’s “The Fly / A Légy,” which made him the first Hungarian to win an Academy Award, tells the story of an insect’s final three minutes of life from its own distorted perspective. As the film opens the fly of the film’s title is breaking through a backyard garden, as enormous and strange as a jungle, stopping only for a few seconds to study its shadow on a tree. It passes through a path and some tall grass and is then attracted by a light reflection on a window of a nice turn-ofthe-century house. It enters inside and wins the unamused attention of a human being who chases it through a living room and a den, then up the stairs. The fly’s world is depicted through a widened eye, which elongates and rounds every object it sees, making the clock and piano upon which it stops to rest just that much more menacing and Brobdingnagian. In the final seconds of the film, we see the world through the eye of the now-dead fly as it is pinned and mounted in an insect box collection, right next to a fat wasp.

“The Fly” was an example of so-called “background animation,” meaning that the animator aped the movement of a camera by drawing and slightly changing the entire background from one frame to the next. (In most cartoons, the background is set and static, like a stage. The only parts that are animated are the main figures.) In preparation for the film, Rofusz shot some 50 photographs of his mother’s and his friend’s houses with a fish-eye lens. There was no particular science to the way he managed to copy the perspective when he made the drawings for the film. After a month of making some drawings he just started naturally drawing his pictures accordingly. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is the fact that it is sepia-tinted in the style of old photographs. Such photographs, as we know them – through portraits of old families, firm Victorian houses, or strong Midwestern homesteads, are set, staged and unchaotic. Introducing the fly’s half-insane perspective into such old-fashioned scenery disrupts our sense of order. Still, the film has its own sense of realism. There is no music on the soundtrack. All we hear is the eerily incessant buzz of a fly (provided by a friend of Rofusz’s after Pannonia Studio refused to try to secure the rights to a fly buzz sound effect that appears on the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma) and the sparse sounds of the unseen giant human being’s steps and swats. In the final seconds before it is caught, the fly frantically beats against the window at a paranoid frantic pace, which Rofusz’s “camera” captures with

a few quick terrifying jolts. The political message of the film is and was obvious. With its drunken shifts in perspective and a massive unseen adversary, it’s a study in perfectly justified paranoia while living in an oppressive state. When the film was shown at the Ottawa Film Festival, Rofusz says, everyone understood the point: “An annoying fucking fly buzzing around refusing to shut up, getting shut down by the big guy.”15 Rofusz and his two assistants spent two years sketching 3,500 drawings to make those three minutes. Even by the slow-moving standards of high-art animation in the pre-computer age that is a strikingly high proportion of man-hours per minute of film. “They were very good assistants,” he says. “They never made another animated movie again. One became a painter. I asked one of them to work on [a later film] and she said no. ‘It’s a terrible job for you.’” His original idea to make “The Fly” in water colors was even more difficult; he settled on using black-and-white pencils which allowed him to be far more exacting. The three of them actually drew a total of 4,000 pictures, for, about a year-anda-half after gaining approval for the film from Pannonia, Rofusz decided to change the ending from the insect collection scene he originally presented. In his new version, the human swatting at the fly would slip and fall. The fly would turn around and stare for a few seconds at the 15

Unless otherwise stated, quotes from Ferenc Rofusz are taken

from two interviews conducted in Budapest on March 13 and 28, 2008. All the information in this article was taken from these two sittings.

The film was originally released in Italy as Roma.

AY 2007-2008 human, a man in a communist bureaucrat outfit, with ugly Russian shoes and a black suit, a kind of János Kádár, “the ugly fucker who has died.” It would then turn around and fly out of the house and into the sky. He didn’t talk to the studio president, George Matolscy to get approval for the new ending. During his first presentation with a storyboard to gain approval for the film, he remembers, “seven or eight people sitting together, looking at [my] idea, storyboard, design and script. This is seven or eight critics, abusing you. ‘Who’s that character?’” Still he thought that “two years is a long time and not everyone remembers my original idea.” After the presentation of his final product at Pannonia, he says Matolscy very quickly stood up and walked out of the room and closed the door behind him as his colleagues sat and said nothing. “And 10 minutes later I’m in his office. ‘Ferenc,’ he says. ‘This is not correct, this final section. Go back to the original idea.’” Within the next two hours, the final seconds of his new ending were cut from the film and destroyed, as were the 500 drawings that he and his assistants had spent about four months sketching. The only evidence of the alternative ending that remains are three small pictures from an old storyboard he managed to hold onto. Over the years, friends have suggested that he go back and re-sketch the other ending and then re-release the film. But he doesn’t see the point. In the long history of great works of art being destroyed in totalitarian societies, the loss of the final seconds of “The Fly” is not quite as tragic as the burning of Sergei

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part III. And 27 years later, Rofusz is not bitter about Matolscy’s decision. “I understand this position. Maybe his job is gone. It’s not a good position [to be in].” Also: “I go to festival, go to Oscars and be winner. I don’t know what would have happened with the [other ending]. Maybe I would have won. Maybe not.”

On Not Picking Up an Oscar Ferenc Rofusz was born in Budapest in 1946, the third of four brothers, the son of a businessman, “a very very rich guy,” who didn’t quite approve of his son’s chosen vocation (he died in 1978 three years before his son won an Oscar) and a history and art teacher who indulged his pursuits. One of his brothers became a diplomat. Another ended up as a chemical engineer. The family lost its house when the communists came to power, and his parents supported their four children on his mother’s meager teacher’s salary. In 1956, during the three-month window before the Russians put down the uprising, when the family could emigrate to Canada, his father forewent the opportunity. “He was a very strong Hungarian guy,” Rofusz says. In 1968, at the age of 22, he passed a drawing examination and started working at Pannonia Studio. He worked his way slowly up through the ranks, first as a cel painter. Then he became a camera assistant. He was a key position assistant on Marcell Jankovics’ János Vitez. But like everyone, he wanted to direct. József

Nepp let him choose from five scripts he had written and in 1973 he made his first film, “The Stone/A Kö.” Like every film written by Nepp, it contains his trademark black humor contained in a vaguely childish setting. It’s artful, but shows little of the style that would inform Rofusz’s major work. Rofusz admired his famous colleagues at the studio, particularly Jankovics, who, his senior by about six years, served as something of a mentor. But unlike his colleagues, he didn’t feel as a great a need to stay and work in Hungary. When he was nominated for an Academy Award for “The Fly,” the Hungarian government denied him a visa to allow him to attend the ceremony, sending Istvan Dosai, the head at the time of Hungarofilm instead. Dosai didn’t speak a word of English and at the ceremony, accepted the award on Rofusz’s behalf, leaving everyone present to assume he was Rofusz himself. The Academy Awards has a policy that demands that only the actual winners can accept their trophies at the ceremony. No proxies are allowed. And the Oscar, initially handed from Alan Arkin to Dosai was retrieved. Rofusz was furious and managed to make the Hungarian government as angry at him as possible by complaining to newspapers in Western Europe. “I’m a young guy. I’m stupid. I’m telling them all that [the Hungarian government] are fuckers.” After a few months, he was allowed to travel to Los Angeles to get his award. And while he was there he met Ralph Bakshi, the American animation icon of the ‘70s, who had then just made

his acidic history of rock n’ roll, American Pop. Rofusz keeps a picture of the two of them posing in front of Bakshi’s studio, two long-haired bearded enfants terrible at the height of their powers. Bakshi offered Rofusz a job, but due to some bureaucratic problems in the US, he couldn’t accept the offer. He returned to Hungary and Pannonia where he would make two more short films.

The Unseen Oppressor “Gravity / Gravitácio” (1984) opens with a long-shot of a melancholic blue-and-white landscape of a tree standing in a backyard. Rofusz’s camera pans from one side to the next and then speeds up with an extreme zoom into the branches of a tree, where we see one apple with the face of a discontented young man. He looks at the apples which surround him, all of them with faces of old men and women with frozen grotesque expressions, the kind of gallery of suspects one might find in a Fellini movie. He grows more frustrated with his situation, begins to jump up and down, pulling down on the branch, until he falls and splits apart on the ground, the gore of his yellow insides splayed apart. It’s the only bit of color in the film apart from the bluish background. “Gravity” is a humorous mini-nightmare without laughs There are some vague similarities of style between “Gravity” and “The Fly.” Both films employ a sparse soundtrack. In “Gravity” we hear the grunts and moans of the one frustrated apple and the

AY 2007-2008 striking break when it hits the ground. But other than that the techniques were very different. Rofusz set up a standard 30 cm square cel on which to stage his cartoon, but in order to get the various camera effects, and the rapid panning, he used an actual camera, which he rigged on a poll above his cel to zoom in and out accordingly. He drew “Gravity” with a blue Faber Castel grease pencil. His colleagues at Pannonia served as models for the faces in the film. He had to change a great deal of his original plan for “Gravity,” in order to gain the approval of the board at Pannonia. He initially planned that in the opening shot when we saw the landscape with the tree, we would also see in the foreground, the folded legs of a Russian soldier with Russian military pants and “ugly Russian boots.” The figure would essentially be studying the tree as its own private universe of which he “was the absolute boss.” If we were to watch “The Fly” from the perspective of a victim of an oppressive regime, in “Gravity” he wanted us to see an oppressive regime from the eyes of the oppressor. It almost makes the viewer complicit in the tragedy of the film. The board was not happy with this aspect of the script. “[They said], ‘No Ferenc, it’s not a good message.’ So I changed it to Levi’s pants and Chinese tennis shoes.” They were still unpleased. The legs were cut entirely. He wanted the apples to have different colors. The young rebellious apple would be red, the older apples, a rotting yellow and green. Again the board refused. He tried to compromise by maybe making the rebellious apple yellow, which led to the

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation odd question of whether it represented the Chinese. And so all the apples became blue and white like everything else in the film, except for the insides of the dead apple. The original title of the film was “Apples” and again the board was wary with what that might represent, and so he changed the title to “Gravity,” to make the censors believe the film was really about Isaac Newton. “Deadlock / Holtpont,” (1984) which tells the story of the final three minutes of a man’s life before he faces a firing squad in a prison fortress through his own completely sober undistorted perspective, was his final film at Pannonia. It opens with the man’s blurred vision slowly focusing on a dripping water fountain in what looks to be a prison yard. He glances at his ugly, deteriorated surroundings, the floodlights atop a fortress wall, the cracks in the stones, when a bureaucrat stands in front of his vision and places a blindfold over his eyes. Most of the screen goes black except for the small slits of vision left to the protagonist. And he concentrates on a fly that has come to rest on his shoe. The firing squad enters. (For the sound of the firing squad, Rofusz used the famous sound effect from The Doors’ song “The Unknown Soldier.” He thought the squad leader in that small piece sounded black, and he didn’t think he could get any white Hungarian actors to mimic the voice so well.) The soldiers shoot the man and he falls seeing, through his two slits, only the vague outlines of his twisted legs before the screen goes black. For the film, Rofusz set up a large screen, approximately 1.8 square meters, on which he drew the basic set of the

prison yard. He then utilized a live-action camera to pan and track his protagonist’s line of vision through his surroundings. For the individual parts of the set that are animated – if you watch closely you see that there are remarkably few such parts, such as the dripping water fountain and the fly cleaning itself on the shoe, in an otherwise heavily dramatic film – he set up small cel animation pieces. It was “Deadlock” that earned Rofusz the greatest disapproval from the authorities in Hungarofilm. They sent the film to only three festivals, a strikingly small number for an Oscar-winning filmmaker. This was only one part of his frustration with Pannonia. He had been working on a feature length film about a heroic Jewish cat modeled on Woody Allen. But he was denied funding for the film, he thinks partly due to his behavior during the Academy Award incident. He got an offer to go work for an animation studio in Cologne, West Germany and in 1984 he moved there with his wife and two young sons.

Selling Out “I was not too happy with the German animation business at the time.” He found the quality of the films he was working on wanting and four years later he moved to Toronto, where he got a job in Nelvana Studio. In 1990, he finally set up his own independent company, Superfly, with 50 employees. Rofusz spent about a decade in Canada making commercials. One colorful ad promoting bike safety used the same

kind of background animation he utilized in “The Fly,” except his pictures were much simpler and used color pencils. For an Esso ad, he repeated the same look he developed in “Gravity.” But he also experimented in oil paints for the first time. He wasn’t making festival films anymore, movies about individual struggles, but the work made him happy. “In every job I work a different style. Different training. I love it, the commercial business.” He spent a maximum of six weeks working on any given ad, and would find himself racing to produce, say 480 drawings for the 30 seconds that went into his bike safety ad, “Road Warrior.” Both of his sons entered the animation business and both of them opted for computer animation, which upset their father. In an interview he gave in 1984 he said of the new computer animated films, “They are all fine, they are all pleasant to watch, but they lack dynamism, and none of them has a world of its own.”16 His sons have converted him. When he made his first festival film in almost two decades, “Ceasefire,” he used his sons’ advice to make three-dimensional balloons float over a war-torn landscape. If he were to make “The Fly” or “Deadlock” today, he believes he would have an easier time. In order to get the effect of light reflection in “The Fly” and the floodlights” in “Deadlock” he cut small holes in the paper he was filming, shot at a half-exposure for several hundred frames 16

Ferenc Rofusz, “An Interview with Ferenc Rofusz,”

Interpressgrafik (International Organization of Journalists, Budapest: 1984).

AY 2007-2008 while shining a light bulb underneath through photocarbon paper. “You would go in and shoot this, then you would wait three days for the film to process and it would come back and you wouldn’t know if it was right or not.” Today, he says the computer makes things easier. Almost all of his colleagues from that era disagree. Béla Ternovszky used computer animation for Cat City II Macskafogó II that came out last year and admits that he missed the old hand-drawn techniques. István Orosz doesn’t even own a computer. And there is a frightening realism to those lights in “The Fly” and “Deadlock” that, despite Rofusz’s objections, would be very hard to recreate on the computer.

Ticket to Life Rofusz is back in Budapest at the moment, where he keeps a small clean private studio. He’s working on a new short black-and-white film he calls “Ticket,” his most ambitious project to date. The film will tell the story of one man’s life from his birth when he comes face to face with a doctor and then his mother, through his childhood at a birthday party, his adolescence playing basketball at a high school, his reckless youth gambling, his love affair that leads to a wedding, his kids, his mundane mid-life as a commuter on a subway, his crippled old age, his death and then his burial. A 26-year-old Hungarian musician who goes by the name of Yonderboi composed an insistent high-tempo piece that will provide the protagonist and the film with a heartbeat.

Paul Morton: Jankovics and Rofusz: Hungarian Animation Like “The Fly,” “Ticket” will be a work of background animation in which the tale is told entirely from the point of view of the protagonist, whom we never see. But at six minutes, it will be twice as long, requiring a full 7,000 drawings. And it will be even more technically difficult. In “The Fly,” Rofusz did not bother to give any movement to the objects in his fly’s path. In “Ticket,” as his protagonist’s camera-eye moves, so will the things he sees. The protagonist’s mother will spoon feed his infant self. His naked fiancé will throw a towel in his face as she walks in front of his bed. An undertaker will throw dirt in his face as he lies in his burial plot. One of Rofusz’s sons had encouraged him to re-explore and go beyond his style from “The Fly,” and part of him regrets that he allowed himself to be talked into making a film like “Ticket.” “I’m stupid,” he says. “It’s double work.” He says he needs about 7 million forints to get “Ticket” made, but, despite his status as one of Hungary’s two Oscar winners and its only Oscar-winning animator, he’s having a hard time raising funds in his homeland. The Motion Picture Foundation of Hungary, he believes, may be wary of giving a grant to an artist who spent almost 20 years of his professional life abroad in Germany and Canada. Still, he’s showing a DVD of his storyboard to high school students and anyone else he can find to get their take on the film.

- was too pat, an obvious sentimental statement on reincarnation. Instead, he’s thinking of ending with the protagonist’s wife throwing yellow rose – a kind of striking use of color in a black-and-white setting similar to the little red girl in Schindler’s List – into his grave. Some complained that the protagonist’s wife has too small a presence in the film. He’s thinking of placing her as an old woman near the end of the film, tending her husband, spoon feeding him in the hospital, which would serve as a bookend to the protagonist’s own mother’s spoon feeding at the beginning of the film. “Ticket,” as it now appears, clearly takes place in Budapest, particularly one subway station that looks strikingly similar to Moszkva Ter. Some of his viewers suggested that he make a few changes. “Maybe I’ll change the subway. A fireplug, a US fireplug. A mailbox, a US mailbox. I’ll make it something of all the world.” That bid for universality is not just the fruit of a professional life half-lived outside his homeland. It also reflects an earned maturity. “The Fly,” “Gravity,” and “Deadlock” were all films that took place at the very end of a life-cycle. With just a few more minutes of film, Rofusz wants to tell the entire story of human existence. He’s not a dissident anymore. He can focus on other things than miserable politics.

Bibliography Madách, Imre. The Tragedy of Man. Tr. George Szirtes. Budapest: Corvina, 1988. Petöfi, Sándor. John the Valiant: A Bilingual Edition. Tr. John Ridland. Budapest: Corvina, 1999. “An Interview with Ferenc Rofusz.,” Interpressgrafik Budapest: International Organization of Journalists, 1984.

Some complained that his original ending - in which after his protagonist is buried we see the beginning of another birth

An Artist in Budapest: Building a Docent Program and Connecting Museums, Galleries, Artists, and Viewers Damian H Stamer ............................................................................................... Arizona State University P.O. Box 871612 Tempe AZ 85287-1612 United States Hungary damianhstamer@gmail.com www.damianstamer.com www.asu.edu

Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Palace of Arts 1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell u. 1. www.lumu.hu Adviser: Linda Kondor Hungarian University of Fine Arts 1062 Budapest, Andrássy út 69-71, Hungary www.mke.hu Advisor: András Hálasz

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Abstract As a Fulbright Grantee, I helped build the Ludwig Museum Docent Program by strengthening volunteer recruitment, retention, development, and management. Through my experiences managing the Living Classics Series, I realized the benefit of connecting the docent program with local museums, galleries, artists, and viewers in order to increase its visibility and effectiveness. Although this young volunteer program faces many challenges, the organization continues to grow as it experiments with possible solutions to overcome these obstacles. In addition to my contributions in the museum, I continued to pursue my painting studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and my newest works were exhibited in Budapest and Szolnok.

AY 2007-2008

1. Introduction My journey to Budapest started in 2005 in Seville, Spain, where I shared my international research of museum volunteer programs at the World Federation of Friends of Museums (WFFM) Twelfth International Congress. There I met Linda Kondor, who was at that time the Docent Program Manager at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (Szépművészeti Múzeum). She would later be asked to start the docent program at the Ludwig Museum and has been my advisor this year. In addition to making contact with Linda, I also was captivated by one of the resounding themes of the conference, the lack of museum volunteer programs in Central and Eastern Europe and the lack of information on how to build them. The European Volunteer Centre (CEV) 2006 Manifesto for Volunteering in Europe echoed the concern voiced at the WFFM Congress and states that “We call on the institutions of the EU to put a specific focus on the development of volunteering in the Central and Eastern European States, both in new Member States and candidate countries to support their work to consolidate their newfound democracies” (Manifesto CEV 9). As a new Member State of the European Union, Hungary was the ideal place for me to help this development and contribute to the formation of the young Ludwig Museum Docent Program. The first segment of this paper will describe the growth of the docent program and evaluate its present status.

Damian Stamer: An Artist in Budapest: Connecting Artists and Viewers In order to understand my approach to building a volunteer program, I have included my previous research results in section 2. In section 3.1, I describe the docent program history and operational procedures. Section 3.2 discusses the Living Classics Series which I both initiated and managed. Section 3.3 illuminates the multiple challenges facing the creation of a docent program in Hungary, and section 3.4 presents possible solutions to these challenges. It was my love of art that led to my interest in museum volunteerism. I have been developing my skills in the visual arts and developing my painting practice intensively for more than ten years. Balancing my time between the museum and studio, I continued to create new works during my tenure in Budapest. Section 4.1 discusses the primary artistic influences during the past year and section 4.2 relates my experience sharing these new works with the community. My paintings attempt to harmoniously connect many diverse visual elements in a single composition. I have applied this philosophy to my Fulbright experience and have tried to bring together the many different niches of the art scene in Budapest as much as possible.

2. Previous Research and Experience During my time at the Ludwig Museum, my previous museum volunteerism research influenced my approach to building the new docent program. It

is necessary, therefore, to give a brief overview of this research and discuss the results, including pertinent conclusions and best practices. In the fall of 2002, I began volunteering as a student docent at the Arizona State University Art Museum. This experience led me to question how similar programs were conducted around the world. In the summer of 2004, under the auspices of the Circumnavigators Club Foundation, I visited eleven museum volunteer programs in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Graz, The Hague, London, New York, and Ottawa. Four main areas of volunteer programs were investigated: volunteer recruitment, retention, development, and general management. Recruitment focused on the methods used to attract new volunteers. Retention investigated how the museum keeps the volunteers loyal to and active in the institution. Development looked into the means used to develop the skill level of the volunteers to serve the museum most effectively. General management examined the overall integration of volunteers into the structure and activities of the museum. Analyzing these four main variables of volunteer programs allowed me to evaluate each museum and comprehensively compare their cross-cultural similarities and differences. Four methods of data collection were used in this study. First, a survey questionnaire was distributed to museum volunteers. The questions related to volunteer recruitment, retention, development, and management, as well as demographic data. Six art museum volunteer programs

participated, and a total of 159 surveys were completed. Second, thirty-four semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with volunteer directors, volunteers, and other museum staff from the eleven organizations that participated in the study. The third method was direct observation of volunteer activities. While visiting these organizations I attended training sessions, followed guided tours, and observed planning and board meetings. Finally, archival data were collected on all of the eleven organizations. These data included written histories and origins of the volunteer programs, as well as a variety of other documents such as newsletters, volunteer handbooks, museum organizational charts, and recruitment publications. Based on the analysis of data, four sets of promising practices in the management of museum volunteers were identified. The first set reveals the benefits of offering varied volunteer positions. The second set focuses on building a sense of community among volunteers. The third set of practices relates to enhancing the learning experiences of volunteers through training and continuing education. The fourth set aims at establishing ways for volunteers to become involved in their own self-management. When recruiting volunteers it is advantageous to offer a wide range of volunteer activities. For example, some volunteers may feel more comfortable helping in the office rather than giving tours to the public. Volunteers have many

AY 2007-2008 varied skill sets, and allowing flexibility in the ways to contribute opens the door to a larger volunteer group. Creating a strong community and friendship between volunteers can play an integral role in their recruitment and retention. Of the 159 volunteers surveyed, 60% joined to become part of a volunteer community, and 41% said that this community was the main reason for their continued involvement. The volunteer experience should provide a rewarding altruistic and social experience. The importance of initial training and continued education was well reflected in the design and implementation of the volunteer programs that were studied. Offering continuing education as part of volunteer training serves the dual purpose of both improving volunteers’ skills and enriching their overall experience. In fact, when asked their reasons for joining the volunteer program, there were twice as many responses for “to learn about art” than for “altruism (to help others).” Continuing education is also a major incentive in retention. Of the volunteers who reported receiving regular additional training or advisement, 59% (72 of 122) said this was a very important factor in their continued involvement and 37% (45 of 122) said it was important. Some 2% reported this as being a neutral factor, and another 2% indicated that it was not important. Volunteer self-management is beneficial both to volunteers and to the museum. For volunteers, self-management is an empowering practice that increases their

Damian Stamer: An Artist in Budapest: Connecting Artists and Viewers understanding of and commitment to the museum by allowing them to take control of their personal volunteer experience. Although perhaps overseen by other departments or museum directors, these programs maintain the autonomy necessary for the volunteers to have a sense of ownership in the program’s success. Drawing on these four concepts of creating successful museum volunteerism programs would help me build the Ludwig Museum Docent Program.

3.1 Ludwig Museum Docent Program History and Current Status The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest (LUMÚ) was founded in 1989 by the Hungarian cultural government with a generous donation from German collectors Irene and Peter Ludwig. In 1991 the couple gifted an additional 91 pieces of work to their initial 70 piece donation and the museum’s first exhibition was held in the Royal Palace. In 2005, the LUMÚ moved from the Royal Palace to its current location in the Palace of Arts. The LUMÚ exhibits both its extensive permanent collection which includes such influential artists as Picasso, Lichtenstein, and Haring and also rotates temporary exhibitions of international contemporary art (LUMÚ). The LUMÚ Docent Program was conceived in the fall of 2006 as a subsidiary program of the Friends of the Ludwig Museum, and all docents are required to

become Friends members. The program’s primary goal is to provide services for the international visitor and increase foreign attendance. For this reason, the program is operated in English. To accomplish the goal of providing English language guided tours, docent volunteers complete an intensive training program. For four months, the new docents attend workshops on public speaking, touring techniques, elements and principles of design, and other necessary presentation skills. Docents also attend weekly lectures on contemporary art which highlight artwork in the museum’s permanent collection. These weekly lectures also serve as continuing education for docents who have already completed the initial training semester and are open to the general public as well. Recently celebrating its one year anniversary in 2008, two semester classes of docents have been trained and another class began training in February. Beginning in February of 2008, the docent program began offering weekly tours. This has been an important step for volunteers to make the jump from training to touring. Young docents first give a number of group tours before moving on to offer solo tours to museum visitors. In addition to giving tours, docents also help with other aspects of museum activities while utilizing their English language skills. Docents translate printed educational materials and also help with simultaneous translation of museum talks.

In attempts to reach out to the international community, the docent program has been successful in publicizing the Ludwig Museum and its program events to the English language press, electronic media and organizations of foreign residents.

3.2 Living Classics Series Initiating and managing the Living Classics Series was one of my major contributions to the growth of the LUMÚ Docent Program. “Living Classics” refers to contemporary Hungarian artists who helped write the history of Hungarian art and are actively shaping its future. The Living Classics Series is comprised of museum and gallery visits that take a different view of the lives and works of these artists, many of whom are featured within the museum collection. These visits feature the unique opportunity to hear the artists speak first hand about their artwork and creative process. I developed the Living Classics Series with the multi-faceted goal of connecting four main components of the art world— the museum, the gallery, the artist, and the viewer. With the help of the name recognition of the Ludwig Museum, I was able to approach both galleries and museums to set up five Living Classics events. These were hosted by the Várfok Gallery, Memoart Gallery, Museum Kiscell, MODEM- Museum of Modern Art Debrecen, and OCTOGONart Gallery. These venues exhibited the works of István Nádler, Loránt Méhes (Zuzu),

AY 2007-2008 Csaba Nemes, Imre Bukta, and Sándor Pinczehelyi. All of the artists presented their works personally with the exception of István Nádler, in which case Róna Kopeczky, Ludwig Museum curator, and Viktória Villányi, gallery assistant and art historian, discussed his paintings and conceptual processes. I attribute the success of the Living Classics Series to the fact that it benefited all parties involved. The docent program offered the unique opportunity to learn more about artwork from the artists themselves while simultaneously increasing its visibility to other galleries and museums. On the other hand, the galleries and museums welcomed the large audiences of art enthusiasts, which averaged more than twenty visitors per event. And the artists appreciated the chance to speak with Ludwig Museum Friends members as well as docent volunteers who share their artwork with the public. In addition to connecting these four components of the art world, I structured the Living Classics Series according to my previous research in order to maximize the benefit to the docent program. In terms of recruitment, I invited docents who were not yet comfortable giving tours to help with simultaneous translation and photographing of the events. The series also sought to build the community of volunteers. This can be best observed in the day trip to the MODEM in Debrecen to meet Imre Bukta and view his retrospective exhibition. The twelve-hour trip featured lunch at a local

Damian Stamer: An Artist in Budapest: Connecting Artists and Viewers restaurant and offered ample time for volunteers to forge stronger friendships and connections with one another. The continuing educational opportunity to have access to contemporary artists and engage in discussions with them is one of a kind. These insights gained can be directly translated into more exciting and in depth presentations of the artists’ works in the museum. Finally, self-management was initiated by me as a volunteer. I intend to pass this program on to other docent volunteers when my stay in Budapest is completed.

3.3 Challenges Upon arrival in Budapest, I quickly understood why the Central European volunteer programs represented at the WFFM Conference requested help. They face many challenges that are unique to this region. The first major challenge to starting a docent program in Hungary is the current economic situation. When potential volunteers must choose between unpaid volunteer work and a paid position, many are forced to forego the volunteer opportunity to work a full time job. This accounts for attrition of the docent program. Volunteers commonly join the program when they are looking for a job or are in between jobs, and when a full-time position becomes available, they are forced to quit the program. This economic situation also explains the high number of student docents. Students are more likely to have available time to commit to the program without facing some of the financial pressures that arise after their studies are completed.

Another challenge regarding finances is the funding of the docent program. The program was initially established to be self-supporting. Despite attempts to raise money from fees for attending the public lectures and docent membership, the program is nowhere near this goal. Another challenge to starting a volunteer program is the lack of historical precedence of a volunteerism sector. In other western countries such as the United States and Great Britain, volunteerism has a long history and is manifested in almost all areas of society such as medicine, education, and the arts. Alexis de Tocqueville observed this propensity of Americans to help one another in his influential work, Democracy in America over 160 years ago. He stated, “when an American asks for the co-operation of his fellow-citizens it is seldom refused, and I have often seen it afforded spontaneously and with great good will” (185). There is also a marked difference in the concept of volunteerism in democratic and socialist societies, as noted by Shelley in 1995. In democratic societies, volunteerism is a desired goal. It is an individual giving directly and willingly to the community. In socialist states, individuals were forced to volunteer. There was a suspicion of actions that were not within state control and regulation (Shelley 200). This assertion in no way concludes that Hungarians have not helped their fellow citizens in the past, or that volunteerism did not exist. The roots of Hungary’s volunteerism tradition may not be as deep as some older democracies. However,

Hungary is quickly developing a volunteerism sector that will continue to grow with the relatively newly formed democracy. A universal challenge which also faces the LUMÚ Docent Program is increasing recruitment and publicity. As in the infancy of almost any new volunteer organization, recruiting new members and publicizing the program remains a difficulty. The location of the Palace of the Arts increases this challenge. Unlike the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest which enjoys the central location of Hero’s Square, the Palace of Arts’ southern location off the beaten tourist path has translated into low museum attendance. A related problem is to create an audience for the docents’ weekly tour. There is the fear that without a constant audience, the rewarding experience of helping others appreciate the museum’s collection will disappear, and with it the docents.

3.4 Possible Solutions Confronting the multiple challenges facing a docent program in its infancy offers the possibility of creative solutions. The following possible solutions may work both in the LUMÚ Docent Program and in other newly formed volunteer organizations facing similar difficulties. In a society where financial pressure prohibits many willing participants from contributing to the volunteer effort, it is imperative to emphasize the potential career benefits of completing the docent program. The European Volunteer

AY 2007-2008 Center recently held a conference to discuss volunteering as a route to employment, where a report from neighboring Croatia recommended that this approach “could ‘sell’ volunteering better and […] can lead to the recognition that skills and competences are learned” (Volunteering CEV 51). In the docent program, active participants gain many professional skills that may positively influence their jobs. For example, docents sharpen their English skills by constantly interacting with native speakers and completing written and oral tasks in English. Docent training also features public speaking workshops as well as the experience of giving tours to the public. In addition to both English and public speaking skills, which can be applied to many professions, docents also acquire an introduction to the museum which can translate into future career opportunities in this sector. At the Museum of Fine Arts, docent volunteers went on to hold paid management positions at the museum such as docent program manager and paid tour guide. Docent programs should publicize their training components that provide many valuable skills necessary in the workplace. Therefore, time committed to volunteering serves the many purposes of increasing one’s skill set, learning about contemporary art, and sharing the joy of art with the public. In addition to publicizing the docent program’s professional benefits, opening lines of communication between volunteers and management plays an important role in both alleviating financial tensions and receiving

Damian Stamer: An Artist in Budapest: Connecting Artists and Viewers constructive criticism. During the fall semester, I completed the docent training course. Although I had already completed docent training in the United States and have experience giving tours, I wanted to see the program from the volunteers’ perspective while forming a strong relationship with the new class. This proved very effective as Linda often asked me the sentiments of the group so as to better evaluate the program’s success. Docents also came to me to express their concerns. For example, when the price of the Living Classics trip to Debrecen was too expensive for the student volunteers, they voiced their inability to pay the full cost, and a new student rate was offered. The docent program has tried various initiatives in an attempt to bring the program to a level of financial self-sufficiency. One plan includes the courting of corporate sponsors to contribute funds to the program in return for sponsorship publicity. The Friends organization has been successful in this regard, and in 2007 received 19 million HUF in corporate sponsorship. However, almost all of this money was immediately donated to the museum to support programs earmarked by the contributions. The docent program did receive in-kind sponsorship from Önkéntes Központ Alapítvány – ÖKA (National Volunteer Centre), the International Women’s Club Association, Move One/ Fine Art Shipping, and Hudson Global Resources. Another possible solution to raise funds is to increase the attendance of the public

lectures. These weekly lectures given by art historians, curators, or gallery owners cost 1500 HUF for the public who are not members of the Friends organization or docent program. Unfortunately, the attendance has been insufficient to cover the cost of paying the lecturers. Hopefully the popularity of these lectures will increase through print and digital advertising as well as word of mouth recommendations. The docent program hopes to capitalize on a special exhibition in September 2008, to increase program visibility and recruitment. The Ludwig Museum will present a major Keith Haring exhibition, the first of its size in Hungary. One plan to increase visitor turnout includes shuttle boats which double as museum stores to carry visitors from the Chain Bridge to the museum. One of my docent program responsibilities is to prepare a team of docents to give special tours of this exhibition. I have already begun this process by giving a lecture about Haring’s life, and will organize special training sessions to teach docents how to tour the upcoming exhibition. A final possible answer for increasing docent program recruitment is to establish bi-lateral relationships with institutes of higher learning. There are already plans to welcome interns from Yale University in the summer of 2008. The docent program should look at domestic relationships with universities in Budapest. Possible partnerships may include school credit for completion of

the docent program. This service learning model has been successful at Arizona State University and many other schools in the United States, and it would be interesting to see how this system would work in Hungary.

4.1 Art Education and Influences When not working at the Ludwig Museum, I continue to develop my personal painting practice which I have been dedicated to for the past decade. Looking back at my time in Hungary, I can cite three main educational influences that served as a catalyst for my new works. These were the Tihany International Postgraduate Program, the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and the Venice Biennale. In September of 2007, I attended the Tihany International Postgraduate Program (TIPP), a contemporary art course co-sponsored by Goldsmiths College and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. As one of only sixteen international artists chosen to attend, I explored the creative diversity of contemporary art while interacting with practicing artists from around the world. The two week course was divided into two daily sessions. In the mornings, the program participants shared their work and engaged in a group critique. In the afternoons, visiting artists presented their art practice and tutorials were held with the instructors. Two elements of the program greatly influenced my work. First, the one-on-one tutorials with

AY 2007-2008 accomplished Hungarian artists, such as Janos Sugar and Beata Veszely, gave me new ideas about possible directions I could explore. Secondly, I benefited from the large contingent of graduate students from the Royal Academy. By witnessing their advanced knowledge of art theory and contemporary art, I quickly realized I had a lot to learn in these areas. Upon returning to Budapest, I created a small library on art theory and art history to begin increasing my knowledge of the broad subject. Another primary artistic influence in Hungary has been my experience at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem). I have been fortunate to experience three systems of art education at the university level in the United States, Germany, and Hungary. Although I was unable to take theoretical courses because they were taught exclusively in Hungarian, I completed studio work in the class of András Hálasz. After reviewing my portfolio during our first meeting, András told me that I already knew how to paint, and that he wouldn’t get in my way with any assignments. After the intensive assignment-based undergraduate program at Arizona State University, I welcomed the change to a more flexible and independent painting practice. I also learned from viewing the works of my Hungarian peers. My third major artistic influence was a trip to the Queen of the Adriatic to attend the Venice Biennale. Together with fellow Fulbright grantee Craig Webster, we spent three full days scouring the exhibition spaces and trying to digest the

Damian Stamer: An Artist in Budapest: Connecting Artists and Viewers expansive amount of work. Directed by American curator Robert Storr, the 52nd International Art Exhibition reaffirmed the fact that painting is far from dead and revealed the profound influence of military conflict on international arts. Seeing the works of some of my favorite artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke as well as newer emerging artists inspired me to return home and begin a new body of paintings.

4.2 Exhibitions As a foreigner with limited Hungarian language ability, there have been many instances when I wanted to share something about myself with my fellow Budapestians but have simply not found the words to do so. Exhibiting my artwork has in some small way helped close this communication gap. My paintings are closely linked to my identity, and the only way to communicate this part of myself is by showing my work to the world. Exhibitions are important to any artist, however, since my first international exhibition as a high school exchange student in Germany, I have felt that exhibiting within a different culture carries additional importance and opportunity for intercultural interaction.

In 2008, I realized my goal of exhibiting in Hungary, and my first show was held in the Kert Galéria at the Arists Colony in Szolnok. I exhibited with two other artists, Julia Schwarzwalder from Germany and Janos Jakucs from Hungary. Although the

participating artists came from around the world, we were united by our educations. We have all studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Stuttgart as well as the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. The exhibition also produced another new experience in my artistic career. Before the gallery opening, I was interviewed by Szolnok TV, and was broadcast regionally. In April 2008, I held my second Hungarian exhibition in the Art Factory Gallery. This show was much larger than Szolnok both in terms of the number of paintings presented and the amount of preparatory work completed. I was fortunate to have the help of my friend and fellow artist Benjamin Thaler, who collaborated in this dual exhibition. Together we designed the invitation cards, distributed the invitations across Budapest, prepared and translated artist statements, and installed the paintings. The Art Factory Gallery vernissage was one of my most rewarding and memorable experiences as a Fulbright Scholar. Looking out at the crowd of over 60 people who attended, it was hard to imagine that only eight months before I would have not known a single one of them. Surrounded by supporters from the Ludwig Museum, the Fulbright Commission, the U.S. Embassy, the University of Fine Arts, as well as many others reaffirmed the friendships built during my time here. Of course, there was a strong contingent of fellow Fulbright Scholars who helped with everything

from carrying wine glasses to preparing gourmet stuffed mushrooms for the guests. The event was a great success and a fitting way to conclude my Fulbright experience.

5. Conclusion My experience working with the Ludwig Museum Docent Program has enabled me to put many aspects of my previous volunteer research into practical use. With the implementation of the Living Classics Series, I aimed to strengthen volunteer recruitment, retention, development, and management. This goal was achieved by fostering the sense of community between the volunteers, providing unique continuing education opportunities, and promoting self-management. Through observation of docent program activities, I was able to identify major challenges it currently faces. These included financial pressures, both on the volunteers and the organization, as well as issues of advertisement, recruitment, and tour attendance. Possible solutions were proposed, such as emphasizing the career benefits of docent training. It is my hope that such suggestions would be beneficial to other volunteer programs facing similar challenges.

My work at the Ludwig Museum falls into my larger philosophy of the arts. I cannot see myself as an isolated painter, tucked away in the studio, laboring on canvases; that life never appealed to me. I love to make art, but I also enjoy using art to communicate across cultures and languages, and I share the art of others with the public by helping build the museum volunteerism programs necessary to increase the scope of museum activities throughout the world. I was able to balance these passions by creating and exhibiting new paintings in Szolnok and Budapest in addition to my work at the Ludwig Museum. During my stay in Budapest, I have realized that the art community in Hungary is relatively small. Therefore, creating connections with other major institutions within this community is both attainable and beneficial to a museum volunteer program and an American artist as well.

Bibliography de Tocqueville, Alexis, Henry Reeve, and John Canfield Spencer. Democracy in America. New York: Pratt, Woodford, & Co., 1848.

LUMÚ-Ludwig Múzeum. Collection. 2008. 8 April 2008 <http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/2005/ gyujtemeny/gyujtemeny_e.htm> .

An Investigation into the Recent Relationship Between the Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the United States

Manifesto for volunteering in Europe. Brussels: European Volunteer Center, 2006.

Barbara Lanciers

Shelley, Louise, and József Vigh. Social Changes, Crime and Police: International Conference June 1-4, 1992 Budapest, Hungary. Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Volunteering as a route (back) to employment: General Assembly 23 March 2007, Paris France. Brussels: European Volunteer Center, 2007.

............................................................................................... Towson University Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute 8000 York Rd. H-1013 Budapest, Krisztina krt. 57. Towson, MD 21252 www.oszmi.hu www.towson.edu blanciers@gmail.com Adviser: András Nagy

............................................................................................... In this critical analysis I discuss the rich, recent history of contact and collaboration between the theatrical communities of the United States and Hungary. I evaluate a variety of specific examples of three general working models used to facilitate these collaborations, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each. These working models include: institution to institution, institution to artist, and artist to artist interactions with the Fulbright Program serving as a hybrid model. During my travels to Budapest, Hungary between 2005 and 2007 and my time living in Budapest as a Fulbright grantee for the 2007-08 grant period, I conducted personal interviews, immersed myself in Hungarian theatre culture by developing personal relationships with Hungarian theatre professionals, attended countless numbers of Hungarian theatre and dance performances and read numerous publications on the past and present highlights of Hungarian theatre in order to gain insight into each of these working models. This paper draws on these experiences to shed light on the nature of recent contact and collaboration between Hungarian and US theatre artists, questioning how best to build on these relationships in order to increase cultural understanding between these two countries.

AY 2007-2008

Introduction Throughout history artists have incited large cultural shifts by driving the social and political discourse of the time using their bodies of work as a catalyst for societal change. Theatre artists in particular have been on the forefront of these shifts. One of the gifts of the theatre is that it facilitates sharing and communion between artistic collaborators and audience members. The theatre of a particular culture can reveal much about its struggles and value systems. Theatre is a place to learn about people, what they choose to say and how they choose to create. Martha Coigney, former International Theatre Institute (ITI) Worldwide President, believes, “…theatre will save the world because it is the place where we learn about other cultures; it is where we tell our stories to one another. That’s what I watched happen for forty years, the theatre’s ability to keep the human conversation going.”1 In 2005, 2006 and 2007-08 I had various opportunities to travel and live in Budapest, Hungary and see the theatre’s ability to facilitate the human conversation first hand. At first glance, the theatre cultures of Hungary and the United States seemed distinctly separate and dissimilar. However I soon discovered there was a rich, recent history of contact and collaboration between American and Hungarian theatre artists. While the dialogue between these two theatrical communities has 1

Martha Coigney. Personal Interview. 9 December 2006. NY, NY.

Transcript on file with author.

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US increased cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity in both countries, much is to be learned from the different models of contact and collaboration that have developed between the United States and Hungary over the past eighteen years. These various working models include relationships between institutions and other institutions (i.e. The University of Tennessee’s partnerships with the National Theatre in Pécs and the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest), institutions and artists (i.e. American regional theatres and universities commissioning the work of Hungarian theatre directors and Hungarian Repertory theatres hosting visits by American artistic directors), artistto-artist interaction (i.e. members of American ensemble theatres collaborating with members of Hungarian independent theatres and individual American theatre artists engaging and sharing ideas with Hungarian theatre artists) as well as collaborations fostered by the Fulbright Program (which serves as a hybrid of all three above mentioned working models). In this paper I will examine the positive and negative aspects of these various models in an attempt to participate in the established theatrical dialogue between the United States and Hungary.

Modern Hungarian Theatre History I cannot discuss the present state of the Hungarian theatre culture without addressing the social role theatre has played under the various modern foreign

occupations of Hungary. Theatre in Hungary has always been important in preserving the integrity of the Hungarian language. There have been several periods in Hungary’s tumultuous history of occupation where, because of the mother tongues of the various occupiers (i.e. Austria, Germany, the Soviet Union) and the overall difficulty and linguistic isolation of the Hungarian language itself, Hungarian was almost lost. Hungarian is unlike any other language spoken in the European world; it shares its roots with Finnish, however these two languages have gradually drifted apart over the centuries. Today is it nearly impossible to find any linguistic similarities between Hungarian and Finnish. The threat of losing the Hungarian language altogether was particularly present at the conclusion of World War 1 when, after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and ethnic Hungarians/native Hungarian speakers found themselves living in what is now known as Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Austria, Croatia and the Ukraine. During this time, theatre was an important way to retain the spoken Hungarian language and Hungarian cultural customs. As theatre critic István Nánay says, “…Beyond the [Hungarian] border, in their own communities, theatres played a role similar to churches. Their primary task was to preserve, cultivate and promote the Hungarian language, while their artistic roles were considered secondary.”2

Theatre in Hungary continued to play a key role in maintaining a sense of Hungarian identity under the Iron Curtain. During this time of Communist rule, the government controlled all aspects of the average Hungarian’s life. One of the safest ways to express displeasure with this totalitarian oppression without experiencing repercussions from the Communist party was to simply go to the theatre. Under the Communists, The programme of nationalization was total, preventing for many years the kind of spontaneous movements that could have mirrored organic, internal changes in the art of theatre…Some artists, however, found the antidote to this. A kind of conspiracy developed between the performers on stage and their audience, a mutual ‘winking’ as a form of public protest against the ruling regime, difficult to imagine among democratic conditions.3

István Nánay, Beyond the border: Hungarian Minority Theatres.

From A Shabby Paradise, ed. Péter Fábri, pp. 64.

A noteworthy example of this “winking” or speaking in code to the audience was a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade that premiered in the Hungarian province of Kaposvár in the early eighties. Weiss was born outside of Berlin to a Hungarian/Jewish father and a Christian mother. He and his family were forced to flee Germany in the early 1930’s to avoid Nazi persecution. They eventually settled in Sweden. In 1964, living in Berlin, he made a name for himself with his play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the inmates of the István Szabó, How the System Works. From A Shabby Paradise,

ed. Péter Fábri, pp. 13.

AY 2007-2008 asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The play is set after the French Revolution and follows the Marquis de Sade as he uses his fellow inmates at the lunatic asylum at Charenton to stage a play in 1808 about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, which happened fifteen years prior. The play examines issues of attaining power, abuses of power, the nature of revolution and the role of the individual within the revolution. In his production of Marat/Sade in 1982, Hungarian theatre director János Ács used visual cues in the stage design coupled with the text’s exploration of revolution to set the play not in France but in Budapest during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The fact that this production gave homage to the 1956 revolution was never said, let alone written, in so many words. But everyone knew—a peculiar contradiction of the time… The backdrop depicted the famous Corvin Lane, where one of the most bitter battles of the revolution was fought…1956 was the greatest taboo and so was the lack of freedom. For some reason, however, censors turned a blind eye. The production won the critics’ award and was performed over a hundred times before 1989. Some traveled from Budapest to Kaposvár over a dozen times to see it.4 The final scene of Marat/Sade was crucial to Ács ‘ evocation of the 1956 Revolution. At the end of the play, the inmates cry,

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US Charenton Charenton Napoleon Napoleon Nation Nation Revolution Revolution Copulation Copulation, and then begin a violent revolution. The stage directions read, The shouting grows…The struggle between NURSES and HERALD develops and catches the attention of the others. Suddenly the whole stage is fighting… Music, shouting and tramping increase to a tempest…The NURSES go among the patients wielding their batons. ROUX springs forward and places himself before the marchers, his back to them, still fettered with arms.5 János Ács used the violence of this last scene of the play to depict the horror of civilian Hungarian revolutionaries fighting a bloody battle with the occupying Soviet soldiers in 1956. This production of Marat/Sade was “…one of the most shattering instances of the use of allegorical, symbolic language and, at the same time, of truths being bellowed out in suppressed pain, straining the outermost boundaries of what could be said in public…”6

Peter Weiss. The Persecution and Assasination of Jean-Paul Marat

As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade. London: Dramatic Publishing, 1965. 4

Anna Merényi , The Provincial Theatre that Became a Legend: The

Story of Kaposvár. From A Shabby Paradise, ed. Péter Fábri, pp. 112.

András Forgách, Breaking Out, 12-13. From Collision, eds. Péter

The Hungarian Theatrical System The theatre system in Hungary is divided into two areas: those theatres funded by the state and those theatres receiving little or no state funding. This division breaks down into repertory theatres and independent theatres. The state-funded repertory theatre system involves the use of a salaried company of actors on long term contract playing in a permanent, home theatre building. The slang term for these theatres in Hungary is “stone theatres”. A repertory theatre usually has a large subscription base and, unlike our theatres in America which run one play for a fixed period of time and then move on to another, the repertory system allows for the company to put on a variety of plays in a short period of time using the same company of actors. So, in any given month, a repertory theatre in Hungary can run four, five, six and sometimes seven different productions. In the repertory system, once a play has been staged it can run for many years, which allows audiences, and tourists in particular, to see the popular shows from several seasons ago. This system does involve the constant need for elaborate changeovers between productions. However, it also allows for the mounting of only a few new productions in any given season, as opposed to the United States where the entire season of a regional theatre is made up of newly mounted productions or, due to growing financial pressures, co-productions with other regional theatres.

Independent theatres, however, are usually not funded by the state and exist in a much more precarious place in theatre culture. The word ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ “…is a label of being outside the mainstream structure…of subsisting on temporary funding, of problems with rehearsal and performance space, of the insecurities about an assessable and calculable perspective.”7 Independent theatre companies in Hungary have similarities to small ensemble theatre companies in the United States in that they often rarely have a permanent home building or rehearsal space but typically rehearse a piece for an extended period of time (the basis for a performance is often an adaptation or a work the ensemble creates collaboratively). These groups also tend to have their own form of performer vocal/physical training. Ironically enough it is the independent theatres that struggle for government support and space, but those same independent companies provide the basis for Hungarian international theatrical acclaim. The works of Krétakör, Pintér Béla and Company, Artus and Réka Szabó and Company are well known throughout Europe; Krétakör and Artus are also regular visitors to the United States. In January of 2007 and again in March of 2008, revered theatre critic, Andrea Tompa, and I discussed the plight of the independent theatres. It is her belief that: Independent work is fragile in itself. If somebody were to ask me what would I want to do for the development of 7

Andrea Tompa, I am the Text—Variations on Theatrical Text. From

Collision, eds. Péter P. Müller and Anna Lakos, pp. 151-152.

P. Müller and Anna Lakos, pp.12-13.

AY 2007-2008 Hungarian theatre culture, it would be to give more space to independent work: to venues, workshops and rehearsal spaces. I don’t necessarily think we should gradually close down the repertory system because I believe that Eastern Europe’s theatre heritage is this huge repertory system, and it should be preserved. But, at the same time, there should be more space given to independent work. And since this field is very narrow, good work can hardly be born because of the lack of sustainable possibilities to create.8 Although independent theatres and repertory theatres are often aesthetically at odds with each other, many repertory theatres are now recognizing the power of the cult following of the independent theatre scene and inviting popular independent theatre directors and their companies to perform in the smaller second stage and black box spaces. This is a trend that also exists in the United States. It is true that the repertory theatre system serves as the historical foundation for the theatre’s place in Hungarian society, but the work of independent theatres tends to be more controversial, cutting edge and mobile because of its low budget simplicity. In fact, it was the independent theatre company Squat Theatre that first traveled outside of Hungary and introduced the outside world to Hungarian theatre culture.

Tompa, Interview.

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US

Squat Theatre Many American theatre artists and audience members were first introduced to a slice of Hungarian theatre culture through the work of the Hungarian expatriate theatre collective, Squat Theatre. Squat Theatre had a profound influence on the American avant-garde theatre scene in the seventies and eighties. The company began in Budapest under the name Kassak Studio and, after being banned from working in the theatre by the Hungarian government, retreated underground and called themselves “apartment theatre”. The company was expelled by the Communist regime in Hungary in 1975 and came to the United States in 1977. Squat Theatre’s storefront performance space in the Chelsea district of New York City was also their living space. The group became known for site-specific work often using the streetscape outside of their live/work space as the backdrop for their pieces. The repertoire of the company was unique because of the obvious influences from other art forms such as film and music as well as the visual inventiveness, physical rigor and use of nudity, large puppets and live animals in their performances. Squat Theatre frequently toured small venues and large theatre festivals in the United States as well as Europe. In the seventies and eighties, Squat Theatre was the only example of theatre from Hungary in the United States. The company dissolved in 1984. Many of the members gradually returned to Hungary after the fall of the

Iron Curtain (Squat founder, Péter Halász, returned to Hungary in the early nineties. He died of liver cancer in 2006. Halász’s final “performance” was the staging of his own funeral in the Palace of Arts in Budapest one month before his actual death.) While Squat Theatre was based in New York City, they became a catalyst for exchange between the theatre cultures of Hungary and the United States because among the people who saw their work was American international theatre pioneer Philip Arnoult. Arnoult later produced one of their most celebrated pieces, Pig, Child, Fire!, as part of The New Theatre Festival in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977.

Philip Arnoult Philip Arnoult was the first American theatre practitioner to play a key role in introducing Hungarian theatre culture to the American theatre community and its audiences. Arnoult began his interest in international theatre in 1971 when he began the Theatre Project in Baltimore, MD. During this time he also became involved with the International Theatre Institute (ITI) and developed a close friendship and working relationship with Martha Coigney, the then Director of ITI Worldwide. ITI is structured so that there is a worldwide headquarters called ITI Worldwide with each individual ITI member country having its own ITI division office called a Center. These ITI Centers are usually housed in the building of a larger theatrical institution. For example, The United States Center of ITI is now based at Theatre Communications Group (TCG) in New York City and the

Hungarian Center of ITI is based inside of the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute in Budapest. The ITI Worldwide website describes the organization as, ìÖan international non-governmental organization (NGO)…founded in Prague in 1948 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the international theatre community. A worldwide network, ITI aims ‘to promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in theatre arts (drama, dance, music theatre) in order to consolidate peace and solidarity between peoples, to deepen mutual understanding and increase creative co-operation between all people in the theatre arts’.”9 ITI also coordinates seminars, conferences and workshops for international theatre professionals. Arnoult’s first involvement with ITI was attending a meeting in Helsinki, Finland. It was at this meeting when he realized the lack of information the world had on what was happening in America was substantial. His second involvement with ITI was when he presented a paper to the international theatre Congress in Bulgaria. Arnoult says he gave this speech because, In 1973/1974 there was a much savvier understanding in Western Europe of Robert Wilson and the Performance Group, Bread and Puppet, Mabou Mines…that first generation. But that was about the only touchstone and not everybody remembered that nor did everybody get to that. So I gave a 9 International Theatre Institute. See generally www.iti-worldwide.org.

AY 2007-2008 speech at this congress—not talking about playwrights, not talking about physical spaces and certainly then not talking about directors but I tried to look at…well, the posit was there’s something new happening in America in 1973/74...10 What Arnoult is referring to is the beginning of the ensemble theatre movement in the United States. Arnoult worked with many of these ensemble theatres during his tenure as Artistic Director of the Baltimore Theatre Project. Some examples include: Theatre X from Milwaukee, The Play Group from Knoxville and the Iowa Theatre Lab. Arnoult says that ITI (under Martha Coigney) was really the only organization paying attention to American alternative theatres. When theatre professionals from abroad came to America, ITI sent them to Iowa instead of Broadway. In 1974 Arnoult attended Don Boros’ Experimental Theatre Festival in Ann Arbor, MI. Boros was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. He was preparing the next festival (with NEA funding) when the university let him go. Then Herbert Blau came to Baltimore as the head of University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Arnoult met with Blau and said “let’s do a festival…I think there’s ten grand from the Endowment just hanging there. And let me talk to ITI.”11 In 1976 Martha Coigney was able to get $150,000 out of the State Department that had been set aside for the celebration of the United States Bicentennial. Arnoult and Blau’s festival with ITI was 10

Arnoult, Interview.

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US called The New Theatre (TNT) festival (1976-1979). In the first year, thirty three theatre companies participated: five were international, Meredith Monk was the only participant from New York City and the rest were small ensemble theatres from all over the country. The TNT festival drew theatre people from every region of the United States and served as a formative experience for many of today’s influential theatre professionals. Molly Smith, Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., first became aware of Arnoult’s presence in the American theatre community at the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director of the Theatre Project. Philip brought in the best and most interesting groups from Europe. He had a whole festival, the TNT Festival. And I attended that for 2 years and was completely blown away by the work that I saw there. It’s where I was introduced to Squat Theatre and other great experimental companies that were just terrific and very influential…I have always found companies that are coming out of Europe as very influential for my own work because I’m interested in what’s different from me as opposed to what is me. And I think that has been Philip’s whole gift throughout his career. His work at the Theatre Project created a natural segué into really being a connector between artists and theatre companies overseas.12 The TNT Festival solidified Arnoult’s relationship with ITI. He was asked to go to the next ITI Congress and he served on a world committee called the New Theatre Committee. 12

One of Arnoult’s colleagues at ITI was the director of the Hungarian Center of the International Theatre Institute, György Lenyel. Lenyel was on the Executive Committee of ITI and was persistent in encouraging Arnoult to travel to Budapest. Arnoult made the trip to Budapest with Martha Coigney; he was finally persuaded by Lenyel to come to Hungary because he thought of Lenyel as, “…a connector and a person who created access.”13 The fall of Communism (often referred to as the “political changes”) resulted in the opening of the Hungarian borders. At that time, the small country and its theatre culture was relatively unknown to the rest of the world. Lenyel says he made such a strong effort to convince Arnoult to come to Hungary because, “I felt that Philip was a person who can make a relationship and open a door to Hungary…and also, because of political reasons, Hungary was misrepresented to the rest of the world. I always felt that Hungary is not really known in the States. Philip was someone who could change that.”14

Institution to Institution: Educational Partnerships During this time, Arnoult began working at the University of Tennessee (UT). It was his idea that the UT theatre department search for a channel or institution in Hungary with which they could forge an artistic relationship. The university then received money from the 13

Arnoult, Interview.

Lenyel, Interview.

Ford Foundation to forge an east/west connection. Arnoult and Lenyel decided to have Lenyel’s theatre, the National Theatre in Pécs, serve as the UT partner institution. The two institutions initiated an exchange of artists. Marianne Custer, the current head of the MFA Design Program at UT, went to Pécs in 1991 to design costumes for a production of The Liar. Lenyel then visited UT for a week. It was during this visit that he and Arnoult began to lay the foundation for Lenyel to direct and give lectures at the university. Shortly thereafter, Lenyel made another trip to UT and Arnoult proposed that Lenyel direct Liliom by noted Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár because he felt Americans were only familiar with the American adaptation, Carousel. The production was plagued by difficulties involving miscommunications between Lenyel and the set designer as well as the casting of an actor who was ill equipped to play the lead character of Liliom. The play’s reception was very mixed due to the violence and anti-feminist sentiments in the script. The dramaturg for the piece raised concerns to the local media about the content of the play as well as the depiction of violence against women in the staging. Several protests were staged outside of the theatre during the run of the show. The reviews from local critics were not complimentary of the production.15 Lenyel eventually decided that the partner of a drama department should not be a professional theatre but another drama department. His theatre had no 15

Custer, Interview.

Smith, Interview.

AY 2007-2008

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US

financial resources from the state or city for this kind of relationship with an American educational institution. Lenyel thought the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest would be the perfect partner for UT, so he introduced Péter Huszti, the Head of the Academy, to Arnoult and Arnoult’s partner at UT, Tom Cooke. Huszti was and still is one of the leading actors in the country. Huszti was Lenyel’s good friend; they worked together many times in Lenyel’s former theatre, the Madách Theatre. Lenyel says it was a pleasure for him to recommend Huszti to Arnoult. “I am very, very emotional about this project. Not proud, but emotional. Because if I am thinking back on my activity with ITI, that was one of the star moments in my work and my life because that was one of the best ways to open doors. And I believe the contact with the University of Tennessee is one of the best contacts the Academy had.” 16 Philip Arnoult’s developing relationship with the Academy through Péter Huszti and his translator and collaborator, Peter Linka, was the second important step in solidifying an ongoing relationship between the theatre communities of Hungary and the United States. After the initial introduction through György Lenyel, Péter Huszti invited Arnoult and Tom Cooke to Budapest to introduce them to the Academy. Huszti, Cooke and Arnoult began talking about organizing an international theatre school festival in Budapest at the Academy. Péter Huszti says he was interested in hosting this international theatre school festival as a

way to build bridges between Hungary and the rest of the world. He remembers that when he was a student at the Academy the Communist regime allowed them to travel but only in one direction: east, from Budapest to Moscow and back. Peter Linka recalls that while he and Péter Huszti were in talks with Philip Arnoult, Huszti said to them, “Now that we have these political changes and the borders are open, let’s invite a couple of schools from the west to compare ourselves to see what we do and to see where we are…how they stand, how we stand.”17 The first exchange was five days long and informal because there was no set structure or packed program. The list of participants was created through personal contacts so there were only four or five schools involved. That was the beginning of what later became the bi-annual International Theatre School Festival. UT was increasingly involved in these festivals over the years as they grew in size. Péter Huszti traveled to the University of Tennessee over the course of four years (two or three weeks each year) giving acting workshops on four different topics. One such workshop was entitled, “Shakespeare on Love”, where Huszti wove together love scenes from Shakespearian plays. This later became part of the program at the International Theatre School Shakespeare Festival. Peter Linka says of this festival: “In the festival, we had scenes with American and Hungarian students together, because the American and

Lenyel, Interview.

100

Linka, Interview.

Hungarian students had worked on these scenes with Péter. So they came here and during the first few days of the festival, Péter started rehearsing with them together so they could get used to each other and learn the cues in a foreign language. So the American student would be doing their part in English while the Hungarian student would be doing their part in Hungarian. And it was watching what acting is all about, what people want and what they desire, what tactics they’re using. Even though they don’t understand the other person’s language, they fully understand the intent.” 18 Both Peter Linka and Péter Huszti say that the main goal for working with UT and beginning the International School Festival was to open a window to the world. “To get to know the world and to let the world know us.”19 Unfortunately, these festivals are now part of the past because Huszti is no longer the Director of the Academy. Reaching out to schools abroad was part of Huszti’s program during his seven-year tenure as Director. There is also no longer anyone at the Academy serving as a “foreign minister”, which was Peter Linka’s unofficial title. Linka was the first and last. After Tom Cooke left UT, the brains, motor and desire behind the international program died. The same happened at the Academy after Huszti was no longer Director (although he is now the head of the Acting Program). Philip Arnoult’s relationship with László Marton, Artistic Director of 18

Linka, Interview.

Linka/Huszti, Interview.

the Vígszínház (Comedy Theatre) in Budapest, marked the third major partnership focused on making connections between the American and Hungarian theatrical communities. The Vígszínház is one of the largest and oldest repertory theatres in Budapest. László Marton became the Artistic Director of the Vígszínház in 1985. In addition to his work in Hungary, Marton has worked many times at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), particularly during the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. He also often works at the Court Theatre of Chicago and Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto. Philip Arnoult and László Marton were both part of the ITI New Theatre Committee. Marton says he was immediately impressed by Arnoult’s ability to organize and connect people. They met again at ATL, when John Jory was running the theatre, during one of the Humana Festival special visitors weekends. Over breakfast they began brewing an idea to make ties stronger between American and European theatre cultures. Marton felt strongly about the need to strengthen this relationship because, “Something which became obvious during my time in the United States is America needs, as every theatre culture needs, directors with different perspectives and different views.”20 So, he and Arnoult started thinking about how to make the connection between the United States and Hungary more active. They met a woman who was visiting Louisville from the International Communication Agency (ICA) in Washington, D. C. 20

Marton, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 Jimmy Carter created The International Communication Agency during his presidency. The primary responsibility of the ICA is to work together with the State Department to oversee and guide international informational, educational, and cultural activities, including exchange programs.21 The ICA representative was very interested in Arnoult and Marton’s exchange idea. This was the first developing chapter of what would later be called the Eastern and Central European Theatre Initiative (ECETI). During a visit to Budapest in 1994, Marton called Arnoult and asked him to attend a dress rehearsal of the performance that was set to open the Vígszínház’s season after a major renovation of the theatre building. “The 1993/94 season will always be known as the ‘tent’ season. To prevent any hiatus in the theatre’s work during renovation, the company relocated to a large tent near the Western Railway Station.”22 This opening play was called Dance in Time (Össztánc). This piece was developed by the company through a series of improvisations, the best elements from which were incorporated into a story and written by Pál Békés. Dance in Time is a unique play: it is designed for the company by the company, again relying on the group technique. It dramatizes the last seventy years of Hungarian history without any words, only movement and gestures.23 21

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US Because of the physical and non-verbal nature of the piece, Össztánc became a favorite of non-Hungarian speaking visitors to Hungary and was highly praised by Jane Perlez of the New York Times: “ ‘For the opening work of the theatre’s new life Mr. Marton chose Let’s Dance Together (Dance in Time), short stories with mime, dance and music but no dialogue. The stories are based on aspects of Hungary’s 20th century history. The audience loved it…A rousing performance…The theatre is back!’”24 It was Arnoult’s idea to re-create the production with the students in Knoxville, TN. I asked Marton if trying to work with young Americans on a theatre piece that encompasses seventy years of Hungarian history, a history the students were not familiar with nor did they completely understand, somehow took away from the authenticity of the piece, but he said this was not the case. “One of the charms of the United States is that it’s a relatively new country. So, everybody in the United States has ascendants (sic), has fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers etc. that came from somewhere.”25 Marton’s says that many of the students working on the play had grandparents and great-grandparents that came from various parts of Europe. Therefore, these students had grown up hearing stories of surviving war. This re-creation of Össztánc was as successful in Knoxville as it was in Budapest and was well received by critics

International Communication Agency. See generally,

www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=30576.

Péter Fábri, pp. 87.

Eszter Harangozó, The Vígszínház. From A Shabby Paradise, ed.

Eszter Harangozó, László Marton: A Classic in a New Context.

Péter Fábri, pp. 87.

From A Shabby Paradise, ed. Péter Fábri, pp. 95.

Eszter Harangozó, The Vígszínház. From A Shabby Paradise, ed.

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and audience members alike.

Institution to Artist: Towson Univeristy and Hungarian Theatre Artists In 1994, Philip Arnoult and Juanita Rockwell helped found the Towson University Master’s Degree Program in Theatre. The idea was to create a program with an international component focused on training the experimental/ alternative theatre maker. It was also during this time in the early nineties that Arnoult was establishing ties with the Independent theatre scene in Hungary through his working relationship with the Artistic Director of R.S.9 Theatre in Budapest, Katalan Laban. Laban was involved in cultural politics and was in the process of bringing the major Informal European Theatre Meeting (IETM) to Budapest. She also was the co-chair of the Independent Theatre Organization sector of Hungary. In 1992 Arnoult saw R.S.9’s Kafka America “We Want to be Indians” at the Edinburgh festival. He was very enthusiastic about the group and the performance. After that, he made several trips to Hungary and invited Laban to the United States two or three times. Because of Arnoult’s connection with the ensemble theatres in the United States, he brought a group (including Michael Fields of Dell’ Arte, Conrad Bishop of the Independent Eye and Stacey Klein of Double Edge) to the Independent Theatre Festival in Budapest in 1997. Arnoult says that there was not much of a follow up on the part of the American ensemble theatres

because he believes they did not have the financial resources needed to do so. After the festival in 1997, Arnoult organized a tour for Laban in the United States of these small ensemble theatres, which was largely funded by Towson University. Towson University also brought Laban and a Hungarian contemporary dancer named Eva Magyar to the United States to teach master classes. Magyar later participated in an international festival of solo work sponsored by the university at the Baltimore Theatre Project. Laban says that the trips to the United States and discussions with American theatre artists in Hungary helped prepare her for what she saw as being a possible future of Hungarian independent theatres. Laban called this potential future an Americanized theatre system where independent theatres have a full office staff but no regularly paid acting company. After the fall of Communism, government subsidies in Hungary were being slowly cut from the arts and culture sector. Independent theatres suffered greatly and lost most of their subsidization, whereas the repertory theatre system was still fairly generously supported. Laban began to see the writing on the wall when she realized that independent theatres were going to have to exist with very little government financial support. She saw small American ensemble theatres struggling to survive in a situation where every penny must be raised or earned and feared that Hungarian independent theatres were potentially destined for the same fate. This fear is still very real for her and is

Marton, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 becoming a fast reality. Laban recalls the height of her theatre company’s success under the cushion of total government subsidization when she says, We could do our best work during this time because the actors had a steady paycheck and could focus solely on the work. We didn’t have to worry about newspaper people or ticket sales. We had more time to rehearse the show as an ensemble—we could develop the play together, base the show on the personality and talents of the actors. This kind of working model is happening less and less in the independent theatres in Hungary. Once the political changes came, R.S.9 was forced to change as well to the more Americanized model. 26

Laban says her ties to the United States raised her awareness of how to navigate through this new American theatrical model. She also believes the exchanges and interactions with theatre professionals from the United States were important for her development as a theatre director. She hopes the Americans involved in the exchange process learned something from their time in Hungary and came away from the experience changed in some way. I hope that all those people who Philip brought here to Hungary were able to realize that there is another country, there is another culture; understanding that there is not only one justice, there are different viewpoints. It is not only about how I was brought up or what I think is correct but what is other people’s way of thinking. You can learn how to respect other people’s way of thinking. And, of course, if you travel to another 26

Laban, Interview.

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US country, you have to look and listen and get adjusted and respect that culture and give up your own opinions, in some cases. You can realize that the whole human race is one family if you travel and work with people from other cultures. Theatre and art is how we can learn to respect each other.27 In January of 2000, Towson University hosted the TCG/ITI Conference: International Origins for New Theatre Practice. The main issue examined during the conference was emerging shifts in theatre training. This conference served as a way to deepen and continue the Hungarian connections fostered by Philip Arnoult and provided momentum for the beginning stages of the next phase of his plan to strengthen ties between the theatre cultures of United States and Hungary.

Institution to Artist: the Eastern and Central European Theatre Initiative (ECETI) The positive working relationship between Philip Arnoult and László Marton would play an important role in Arnoult’s future work in Hungary through the ECETI program (1999-2004). ECETI was a project of the Center for International Theatre Development, an organization Arnoult started in 1990. In 2000, Arnoult says, I was smelling something that was going on in Central Europe by then. 27

It was this next generation of young directors fully formed after the political changes. I was also at a really strong point with a Dutch project I was working on. But, ultimately, the triangulation of the three countries [the U.S., Hungary and the Netherlands] didn’t work out because the institute in Holland came under attack. I thought it might have legs, but it didn’t. What did happen was my discovery of what was happening in the theatre scene of Hungary and Central/Eastern Europe.28 The Eastern and Central European Theatre Initiative was funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. The purpose of ECETI was to link young directors, whose work was fully formed after the fall of the Iron Curtain, from Poland, Hungary, Romania and Russia with a select group of American partner theatres (Arena Stage, Washington DC: American Repertory Theatre/ART, Cambridge; New York Theatre Workshop; Alliance Theatre, Atlanta; Actors Theatre of Louisville/Humana Festival; Sundance Theatre Lab, Sundance, Utah; Portland Center Stage, Portland, Oregon; Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and La Jolla Playhouse). Arnoult would bring Artistic Directors and staff members from the partner theatres to see the work of these young directors. From 1999-2004, Arnoult brought delegations of Americans to Hungary seven different times. The Vígszínház, often served as the artistic home for these groups while they

were in Budapest. Marton says of this, The Vígszínház has hosted, over the years, various American theatre leaders (artistic directors and such) and showed them our view, our policy on running a large repertory: how we work with young directors, how we develop a huge audience (small children, young people, a subscription season based on classics). In the meantime, we always introduced young Hungarian directors to these American artistic directors. So these folks would come and see shows, see how the theatre works and meet the directors. We always tried to make the visits very personal. I think we achieved something that was very important for theatre culture. Ultimately, I think it became something that was the essence of cultural exchange…I think we learned a great deal from each other. That is the most important thing. I think the American theatre people that were here learned there is another way of thinking about the theatre.29 Because the Vígszínház, which has an active subscriber base and appeals to the wealthier segment of the theatre going audience in Budapest, can be considered as similar in administrative structure and artistic aesthetic to many regional theatres in the United States, it was an important place for the American artistic directors to find young Hungarian talent that would appeal to their own audiences. It could be argued that having one theatrical institution serving as the main lens through which these American

Arnoult, Interview.

Marton, Interview.

Laban, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 artistic directors viewed Hungarian theatre culture created a slanted view of the culture. However, having the regional theatre artistic directors view the Hungarian theatrical landscape through the eyes of a major repertory theatre with a similar aesthetic did create a comfort level for the Americans that ultimately ended in their commissioning the work of Hungarian directors. It is possible that American audiences would never have been exposed to the work of these Hungarian theatre directors if the regional theatre artistic directors had been intimidated by exposure to more cutting edge parts of the Hungarian theatre scene that did not appeal to them. Philip Arnoult’s major Hungarian partner during ECETI was András Nagy. Arnoult met Nagy in 1999 when Nagy had just taken over as president of the Hungarian Center of the ITI. The two immediately embarked on a partnership. Nagy says that at that time, “I was very newly active as the Hungarian ITI president and I felt like I was looking for new energy, new ideas and wanted to learn new ways of working in the international field and Philip was fantastic for that.”30 After that first meeting, Arnoult came back to Hungary in February of 2000 and he and Nagy (at the ITI Center) organized the first trip for a group of theatre professionals from the United States (including Jim Nicola from New York Theatre Workshop, Rob Orchard from American Repertory Theatre, Juanita Rockwell from Towson University and Molly Smith from Arena Stage) to introduce them to Hungarian 30

Nagy, Interview.

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US theatre culture and theatre artists. This was the test of Arnoult’s theory: “There’s interesting work being done here—it’s competitive, they can work in English—I wonder if anybody will be interested.”31 Arnoult says he would have been happy if, at the end of that trip, the response from more than half of the group was, “Philip, you’re right. There’s something here, you should keep an eye on it.”32 Instead, there were two directing contracts written for two theatres and three separate projects. After seeing Mother Courage and Her Children directed by János Szász at the Vígszínház, Rob Orchard said to Arnoult, “I want him to direct that at ART.”33 Later on, in 2002, János Szász was also commissioned to direct Marat/Sade at ART. Molly Smith said to Philip, “I want him to direct and I want to sit and talk to him about A Streetcar Named Desire.”34 It was also during that visit where Molly Smith saw Enikő Eszenyi’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Vígszínház and was impressed. She asked Eszenyi to come to Arena Stage and direct A Man’s A Man. Later, Chris Coleman, Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage, asked Robert Alföldi to travel to Portland and re-envision his production of The Merchant of Venice. Jim Nicola was also interested in this production but could not find the right venue in New York City. That first Hungarian trip was the springboard for the future. Nagy says working with Arnoult was an educational 31

Arnoult, Interview.

tutorial in how to deal in international relations. Nagy also believes that working with Arnoult aided ITI in expanding their horizons, particularly by creating access to well respected and established American theatre artists like Jim Nicola, Molly Smith and Rob Orchard. It was so important for me and the others at ITI to start a dialogue with these people and have their feedback on Hungarian theatre; to have the opportunity to learn from the American theatre makers’ taste, way of thinking and priorities but also to introduce them to what was going on in Hungarian Theatre which was at that time very exciting and interesting.35 When András Nagy resigned from the Hungarian Center of ITI, Arnoult lost his main partner in Hungary. Arnoult tried to continue working though the Hungarian ITI with Nagy’s successor but this proved to be a difficult partnership. The infrastructure Nagy had built during his time at the Hungarian ITI did not run smoothly after he left. Nagy says he resigned from ITI partly because he felt he was no longer understood, supported or trusted by his Board of Directors. Now Nagy is the Director of the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute (OSZMI). He says this is a very different situation because it is a state sponsored position of a much larger institution. OSZMI is also partly a museum, which has a very different set of rules and laws. This position does not allow him the flexibility to continue his focus on working in an international forum. Philip Arnoult says that András Nagy

was an important partner because he is, “…generous, truly diplomatic and never promoted himself as a playwright. He never came to the table with an agenda.”36 Arnoult and Nagy both say that the success of ECETI was that they understood each other very well. Nagy says it was always clear to him what it was and whom it was Philip was interested in. It was also important that Nagy had people/assistants/advisors/ colleagues who could help with artistic decisions and with the organization of visits. Two of these colleagues, dramaturg Kinga Keszthelyi and theatre critic Andrea Tompa, played key roles in introducing Hungarian theatre culture to American theatre artists. Keszthelyi became involved in the ECETI program during the visit of the second group of American theatre professionals in 2000. Nagy recommended her to Arnoult because he says she had wonderful organizational skills and very good taste in theatre. The group consisted of roughly ten Americans visiting Budapest for ten days (they traveled to Kaposvár as well). Keszthelyi escorted them to nine different performances. The group also met with Hungarian theatre professionals during the day. It was a rigorous schedule. Mornings and afternoons were set aside for interviews and watching videos of performances that had previously closed. Keszthelyi’s role as organizer of these early trips included: booking the group’s hotel, reserving the theatre tickets, arranging meetings with important theatre

Nagy, Interview.

Arnoult, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 professionals, getting video or DVD’s of performances, writing the synopsis of the plays that were not available in English translation and briefing the group on each piece they would see during their visit. She also dispersed books on Hungarian theatre that she felt would be interesting and illuminating. Kinga Keszthelyi acted as chief organizer of these visits until Andrea Tompa took over in 2002. Tompa’s first involvement with ECETI was organizing a trip for a group of Americans to attend the National Festival in Pécs. Participants included American theatre professionals Marc Masterson (Actors Theatre of Louisville) and Chris Coleman (Portland Center Stage). Tompa says she saw the mission of the ECETI program as bringing American artistic directors to Hungary and introducing them to Hungarian theatre directors. The goal was for these Hungarian theatre directors to be brought to the United States in order to have American audiences exposed to a foreign theatrical perspective. But she admits that, in the beginning, it was often difficult for her to understand the clarity and overall objectives of the program. There was also a lack of understanding about the American system of producing work; the term “producer” in and of itself was a foreign concept. In our view, sometimes I’d discuss it [ECETI] with the Hungarian theatre professionals…we felt that this project was not concrete enough. And it had no clear focus: where does it want to go? What is the target? For instance… well, you have to understand that for a Hungarian theatre maker or professional

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US the idea of a producer is something said in Chinese. We don’t have anything like that. The producer is the state here—the state gives money to produce things. When Philip was here walking around we were saying, ‘well he is a producer’, but nobody knew what a producer does.37 Arnoult served as more of a matchmaker than a producer. For some theatre professionals working in Central Europe the idea of having a project like ECETI, with no concrete gauge for success, was unfamiliar to them. The many trips to Hungary and the enormous effort for exchange resulted in four major productions by Hungarian directors in the United States. To Tompa, this seemed like a small number. To be honest, at the beginning, the results were not very convincing to me. Yes, I know that János Szász, or Eszenyi or Alföldi were invited to the States to direct shows but that’s not really a great number of people or a great number of shows. But when Philip translates it into US dollars and he says that there was a big amount of money [1.5 million dollars]…yes, the American theatres invested a big amount of money in producing shows. But this number didn’t really mean anything to us.38 Perhaps the difficulty for Tompa and her colleagues was caused by the signing of contracts as being the expressed purpose of the program. With this singular purpose in mind, it is possible that Hungarian theatre professionals were expecting a greater number of contracts 37

Tompa, Interview.

for Hungarian directors. However, because American regional theatres are large institutions complete with their own internal bureaucratic systems, it is highly unusual to achieve immediate results as far as planning collaborations and partnerships. Often times these relationships come to fruition and grow with time. Perhaps the real gift of the ECETI program, the gift of individual encounters and interactions between the staff of the American regional theatres and the Hungarian theatre directors as well as the dialogue between the Hungarian directors and American audiences, was easy for Tompa to overlook in the beginning because the outcome and direct effect is difficult to measure. However, Tompa says she eventually began to understand and appreciate the scope of these exchanges. When I met more theatre makers from the US and I started to talk to them… for me it became more and more clear that what they want is not necessarily to find the right director and to take them to the States, but to come to this part of the world and explore things, wander around, find things to get inspired by. And maybe, sometimes, continue the dialogue in another way…or sign a contract or whatever. But the concrete result is not so important… So, for me to understand basically what Philip does it took me quite a long time.39 An in depth conversation between Andrea Tompa and Molly Smith might have helped clarify some of the concrete results of ECETI. Molly Smith went on two trips 39

Tompa, Interview.

to Hungary with Philip Arnoult during the height of the ECETI program. Smith met Arnoult when she went on the first trip with him in 1999. Jim Nicola mentioned her name to Arnoult when she became the Artistic Director of Arena Stage. She recalls: I got a phone call from Philip saying, ‘Listen, are you interested in any international work.’ And I said, ‘I’m very interested in it…however, Arena has a focus on American plays and American voices, but what I would be interested in is looking at artists from the other side of the ocean in North/South America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, wherever, that could come in and look at the American work through a different lens.40 Smith was a delegate on the first trip to Hungary. And it was at that time that I saw the work of János Szász and Enikő Eszenyi. János I just knew as soon as I first saw his work, it was on Mother Courage and Her Children at the Víg and I was just flabbergasted by it. And then the other project that I saw there was Much Ado About Nothing and that was Enikő Eszenyi. They were the two artists that I immediately connected to.41 What drew her to János Szász was, Brilliance of imagery, design, verocity of acting. I know Mother Courage and Her Children pretty well and what he was able to do with it was quite different and iconic. And so, pretty soon we were able to contract him to come here and direct a 40

Smith, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 production of Streetcar Named Desire from his perspective…And he also brought over his own set designer. Because he doesn’t really know America, a place like New Orleans is a land of the imagination. And so he really worked at it psychologically through the relationship between the two sisters. He just blew the play apart and had audiences arguing in the aisle ways. Audience response was pretty great. Critically, The Post slammed it, which was really odd. And other critics came up to this critic and said, ‘You completely missed the boat on this.’ If I were to look back on the five productions that have been the most important in my nine years here, that would be one of them.42 Smith’s impression of Enikő Eszenyi was, I liked Enikő Eszenyi’s work on Much Ado About Nothing. She comes at it as a performer; she’s one of their stars over there. There was a fleshiness about her work that I liked, a humanness about it. And also a volatility in the actors which I thought would be terrific. And with Enikő we went in a different direction. She directed A Man’s A Man; again, different lens looking at that play. And that was a production that was critically well received but audiences didn’t like it very much… almost the exact opposite of Streetcar. They just didn’t get it. But I think it was more that they didn’t get the play--- her translation of it, it was a much more European translation as far as the feel of it. I thought it was stunning visually.43 One of the highlights of the ECETI program was introducing American audiences to the work of Hungarian theatre directors. Molly Smith believes it

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US is extremely important for the audiences of Arena Stage to see American plays though the lens of a foreign director because these directors, “...just look at the text, they don’t have all the cultural baggage we would have.”44 I think we as Americans have a familiarity with the work, we have a familiarity with something like Streetcar Named Desire and it has been such a part of our American vernacular, Marlon Brando, ‘STELLA!’…to have someone come in who doesn’t have that, where it’s wiped clean, where they don’t go to those moments at all. And I think the way János really looked at it is that she was as brutal as he was. That Blanche is as brutal as Stanley. And so it really was these two tigers meeting up and almost devouring each other. In the end, he had her in a straight jacket. That’s how she was taken out by the doctors…He also added two young girls as the sisters, two children within the play so that you saw what the earthquake of their relationship was and saw why they were bonded…two beautiful girls with long black hair that would move through this world. So, you had an entre act to it as well. He saw the whole play through that perspective of the two sisters, so by the end of the play when Stella has to give away her sister it’s horrifying.45 Smith has been to Hungary twice. “Interestingly, they are my favorite directors…as far as just looking at groups of directors, of any of Eastern Europe… nothing moved me in the same way as the work in Hungary.”46 44

Smith, Interview.

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Although the Hungarians are Smith’s favorite directors, her process of working with Hungarian directors has not always been easy. The collaboration between Arena Stage and Enikő Eszenyi on A Man’s A Man proved to be quite difficult and taught Smith about the nuances of working with directors from a completely different cultural background as well as the complexities of working in an international, global forum. Not only are cultures and customs completely different but methodologies and styles of communication are dissimilar. This makes it even more necessary that the collaborators be the right fit for the project. It’s not easy bringing people in from different countries. The challenges, the difficulties…it’s not just a language barrier, it’s a cultural shift as well. I think it has a lot to do with the way in which actors and designers are worked with because, over there, anything is pretty much fair game. Or you go into Russia and a director yelling and screaming at you for an hour is a sign that they like you. Whereas, in America, that’s a sign that you’re a complete failure. So, you’re always having to deal with the cultural divide within that.47 Molly Smith is passionate about continuing this tradition of cross-cultural exchange between Arena Stage and directors from abroad, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. I want our audiences to see our American classics or soon to be classics the same way that they would view Shaw or 47

Smith, Interview.

the same way that they would view Ibsen; that they can be constantly re-interpreted for our time. As opposed to, ‘Oh for goodness sake, I saw Death of A Salesman twice.’ So, for us, as a theatre that really focuses on American work, there always, always has to be this step back from it to see it from a different perspective.48 American audiences can learn a great deal about themselves by seeing the re-envisioning of their classic plays through the eyes of a director from another part of the world. It is illuminating to see these stories told from the point of view of a director who is coming from a completely different cultural context. This kind of exposure is also a way to increase cultural understanding and engage in diplomacy. Molly Smith says of this, …for me the biggest thing has always been to promote not just cultural understanding but it is this soft diplomacy that occurs through artists when it isn’t occurring through governments— then artists need to step up and make it happen on a one to one basis, because that’s how minds change. And America, in this moment, is seen in a horrific way around the world and one way that that can change is one on one relationships.49 János Szász also believes in the importance of building cultural understanding through collaboration and says he has been directly impacted by this notion of creating soft diplomacy through artistic exchange. He describes the process of working on A 48

Smith, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 Streetcar Named Desire at Arena Stage as one of the most remarkable experiences of his life. “I do my best work under difficult circumstances. At Arena, we had almost no time to rehearse the show. I also felt that the area in D.C. where the theatre is located is breathtakingly dangerous. I was completely out of my element and far away from my family. But these challenges helped me. And I was able to work with the best actors I have ever encountered. I am very, very proud of that show.”50 In addition to his relationship with Arena Stage, Szász has a long-standing dialogue with American Repertory Theatre (ART). Since the beginning of the ECETI Program, Szász has directed Mother Courage and Her Children, Marat/ Sade, Uncle Vanya and Desire Under the Elms at ART. He is also scheduled to direct The Seagull in December of 2008. Szász says that working in the United States has shaped his directing career in numerous ways. “Working in the U.S. really made me sharpen my skills. Being in an environment with such clear rules and expectations was good for me; I thrive under this kind of compression. Hungary is much looser somehow and has a kind of Eastern European Mediterranean mentality which is difficult for me to deal with.”51 One large difference between the theatre communities of Hungary and the United States is that American regional theatres have a much shorter rehearsal period (usually four to five weeks) than 50

Szász, Interview.

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US Hungarian repertory theatres. Szász feels that the condensed time in the American system creates a sense of urgency and clarity of focus; he notices that the “all the time in the world” mentality of the Hungarian theatre system brings about a lack of concentration that permeates the overall creative process and affects the work ethic of the actors. “I have a hard time in Hungary now since I began working in the U.S. because I expect the same level of dedication from the Hungarian actors as the American actors. But in the United States, actors focus on one project at a time while Hungarian actors are working on many things at once (because of the nature of the repertory system). I think this Hungarian way of working breeds laziness in the creative process.” 52 Due to his preference for the American working method, Szász plans to continue to nurture his close relationships with Arena Stage and ART. He feels strongly about his established place as an important part of ART’s worldwide community of collaborators. “ART is really my second home, my family. I cannot find a theatre or company here in Hungary that feels as natural for me.” Despite the achievements of ECETI, the program was ended in 2004. When Philip Arnoult began ECETI in 1999, he established the 2004 end date. Arnoult’s definition of success for the program was to create a dialogue between the theatre cultures of the United States and Hungary that had a life of its own and did not need 52

Szász, Interview.

his cultivation. Failure would be the absence of any conversation. Arnoult felt that a time frame of five years was enough to determine the result. Fortunately, ECETI was a success in that the collaborations and exchanges it generated continued to flourish and have fostered a new generation of ripple effects.

to theatre festivals around the world, providing an immersion experience in some of the world’s most vibrant contemporary arts communities. The Suspects Abroad pilot program was designed to elevate the activities of the Usual Suspects, provide an infusion of new theatrical ideas and techniques into American theatre, and create opportunities for multidimensional artistic growth.53

Artist to Artist: Suspects Abroad One of the most notable ripple effects of ECETI was New York Theatre Workshop’s Artistic Director, Jim Nicola, beginning an exchange program called Suspects Abroad. However, the goal of this program is different than that of ECETI. The Suspects Abroad program involves New York Theatre Workshop affiliated theatre artists, called the Usual Suspects, traveling the globe on organized tours in order to be immersed in different theatre cultures and introduced to new and different ways of thinking and creating work. The Usual Suspects make up NYTW’s community of theatre artists, which includes important figures in the theatrical fields of performance, design, directing and choreography. A possible byproduct of these immersions for the individual Usual Suspect is meeting potential future collaborators, but the main purpose of these trips is to find inspiration. A description of the program from the NYTW website states: This program supports distinctive opportunities for NYTW’s community of artists, the Usual Suspects, to travel with small groups of their colleagues

Jim Nicola’s first trip to Budapest was in 1999. “In the biggest global sense for me it was becoming acquainted with a culture that I knew nothing about and a region that I knew very little about, Eastern and Central Europe.”54 Nicola was highly informed by the difference in the structure of theatre culture in Hungary as opposed to the United States. “Learning the shape and structure of the field, of the art form, was very powerful. To still see the old idea of a repertory company at work and relatively strongly even though they were feeling that it was suffering because subsidies were being cut and so forth.”55 He was also moved by the place theatre life has in Hungarian society. The most important thing that united the experience of getting to know a history and a culture of a community, a nation and the world of theatre art that I live in was to encounter a culture where theatre was so central and had been such a significant mechanism for creating a 53

New York Theatre Workshop. See generally, www.nytw.org/

artist_development.asp. 54

Nicola, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 national identity...Here [in Hungary] I feel like people who are making theatre are in the core of their community. So that was great to see a society that believes in something and puts money forward for it to be there at the center.56 One major component that differentiates the theatre in America and Hungary is the examination of history that is found in Hungarian theatre. There is a clear, overarching concern with history within the population of Central Europe because this is an area of the world that has been so defined by its past. It is difficult to forget a country’s collective history when there are bullet holes from World War II still embedded in the buildings, where plaques mark the street corner in the former Jewish ghetto where people were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz, where family members still hesitate to express their true beliefs and opinions due to lingering fear of the Communist regime. As an American theatre professional, Jim Nicola says he believes it is important to understand how the history of a particular country influences the art emerging from that country. He says that traveling and being introduced to different theatre cultures helps him to understand that our way in the United States is not the only way of living and making work. He touches on this when he says, I heard Chuck Mee once talk to a group of students at Dartmouth, and he told them that he had a degree in history. And they all kind of looked at him like ‘why would you bother with that?’ He said that it was really important to study 56

Nicola, Interview.

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US history, not so much for the details of facts of the past, but to be constantly reminded that the way things are now doesn’t have to be this way; it can be another way. And that you could make it another way, or you should feel empowered to make it another way. So those things seem really important to me: that Americans in general and artists in my particular circumstance are very isolated. My impulse as an artistic director is to engage other people in things that have interested and excited me. So, it’s very personal. So, I try to present work to the audience that interests and excites me and I think might interest them. And with artists I try to do the same thing. What can we do together that you might find interesting that I’ve already found interesting? So, I thought the opportunity to travel and see that it doesn’t have to be the way that it is and they [the Usual Suspects] don’t have to be the way that they are was important. I knew it would be important to distinguish for them that we weren’t suggesting they should do that kind of work or be like that and you get produced at NYTW. That wasn’t what we were saying. What we were saying was: here’s an opportunity for you to consider your life and work and possibly meet some interesting collaborators as well.57 Although New York Theatre Workshop is a theatrical institution, the idea behind the Suspects Abroad program is to give the individual artists affiliated with the theatre an opportunity to experience new theatre cultures, find fodder for inspiration and possibly meet potential 57

collaborators. These trips are about person-to-person encounters. A recent Suspects Abroad trip was to Budapest in October of 2006. Andrea Tompa served as the organizer for this trip. Tompa’s work at the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute involves many different aspects, but she says the most important element of her job is to organize Hungarian theatrical immersions for non-Hungarian visitors. During this Suspects Abroad visit, she understood that this group from NYTW was visiting Hungary for the educational and inspirational experience and not to sign contracts. So, she changed her tactics from the days of ECETI and decided that there would be no list of compulsory shows to see or directors to meet. There were, of course, important names but she decided to focus simply on people who were doing good performances. I don’t care about their age or interests because the important thing is to give something interesting to those people who come to see shows. And if I compare the very first meeting of ours and the last group of Americans that came in 2006, the difference would be that at the beginning it was clear that people are coming here to find new directors, interesting directors who are willing to work in the US and they can sign contracts. So, it was a very clear output or desired result. But this last visit of this group of people from NYTW, which is related to Philip’s work, had a different target because it wasn’t already about searching for people and working with different

directors but to make contacts, to get inspired by work, to talk to interesting people…My position in Hungarian theatre is completely neutral. I’m not interested in selling anybody. I’m interested in my own success but I am successful if these people are happy, if they get inspired by what they see and if they have new ideas, questions, etc. So, if they hate a show it is the same for me as if they love it. But the success of mine is if I can show them something that is good for them.58 Tompa expresses concern, as someone who is responsible for making introductions to Hungarian theatre life, for showing theatre professionals from abroad an accurate portrayal of theatre culture in Hungary as opposed to a utopian view. …probably for those people who come here for a week or two to look around and see Hungarian shows, they have the impression that Hungarian theatre is very good, because we usually pick the top of the shows to show them---and not only from one season but two, three, or even four seasons ago [this is a product of the repertory system]. So, this is a completely distorted image of the Hungarian theatre culture.59 Andrea Tompa is trying to change the distortion of that image.

Tompa, Interview.

Nicola, Interview.

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Artist to Artist: Artus in the Studio The second type of artist to artist model I will explore in this paper is when members of Hungarian independent theatre companies collaborate with members of American ensemble theatre companies. An example of this type of working model is the tri-company collaboration between Gábor Goda’s theatre/dance company, Artus (Budapest), and the company members of Thunder Bay (Massachusetts) and the Toaca Cultural Foundation (Bucharest, Romania). The overall artistic aesthetics of these three companies share distinct similarities and differences. For example, Gábor Goda comes from a training background of pantomime and contact improvisation. In Goda’s works, the boundaries between the various art forms become blurred; music, puppetry, song, verse, architecture, and visual art all contribute to the whole as much as motion does. Goda founded his company Artus in 1985, and soon moved out of conventional proscenium venues, based even today in a disused factory building. Artus’ collective compositions tend to reveal—on the level of associations, not narrative—the most ancient and most universal emotions and experiences of humanity, and thus present a primarily intellectual challenge to the audience.60 60

Thunder Bay’s aesthetic includes a focus on music and soundscape. On their website, Ed and Beth Skinner describe the aesthetic of Thunder Bay as: Thunder Bay’s dramatic worlds are manifested through striking visual imagery and music in an innovative style linking mask and puppet characterization with extraordinary voices, dance and acting. The evolving style of speech, chant and song uses overtone harmonics and other multiphonics, microtonal slides, yodels and calls. Within the group’s performance aesthetic, visual elements are animate and set design is always in motion and interactive.61 Toaca’s aesthetic is best described in a review of their production Dorde by Paul Xuereb of The Sunday Times in Bucharest. It was an aesthetic relief to watch a piece that was pure theatre, a work in which technique and discipline were fundamental, language only secondary in importance and entertainment incidental. DORDE, (MITP Valletta) is a myth made flesh, a short but impressive work directed by Nona Ciobanu (Romania). The work is fluid, like the rivers and clouds over which Dorde flies over his magic horse, Murgu. The plot is a basic one about human longings, fears and the final reality of death. It is an austere fairy tale that depends for its effectiveness on the skill and expressiveness of the actors and their

Fuchs, Two Decades—Three Generations: Hungarian Dance

Theatre. From A Shabby Paradise, ed. Péter Fábri, pp. 60-61.

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Thunder Bay. See generally, www.thunderbayus.org.

ability to evoke a variety of space or the remote spaces of a grim forest. As one can well imagine, the acting skills needed were hardly of the naturalistic type and depended very largely on the expressive use of the body, sometimes in a semi-acrobatic style, and the ability to use, deploy and re-deploy what little there was in the way of set, which was basically a platform easily taken to pieces and easily reassembled. As in dance theatre, much also depended on the discipline interaction of the cast and their ability to switch roles from one second to the next. The dialogue was mainly English, with a liberal sprinkling of Romanian, Russian and even Maltese.62 It is possible to see how an outside eye might find the idea of a collaboration and collision between these three different aesthetics enticing. Gábor Goda first met Philip Arnoult through Eva Magyar and her company, Shaman Theatre. Magyar brought Arnoult to see one of Artus’ pieces and this introduction opened up a direct connection between Arnoult and Goda. Arnoult came to see another Artus production and brought Nona Ciobanu, Artistic Director of Toaca, with him. Arnoult, Goda and Ciobanu started to talk about the fact that Ciobanu and Goda’s companies might have something in common. Arnoult encouraged them to meet so they could begin an informal dialgoue. Goda and Ciobanu immediately

felt a positive connection. Goda says, “It was very nice that Philip’s idea was not to do anything. There was no goal…just to speak and inform each other about how we work, what’s the style. There was no pressure. Nona and I were both very cautious. And it wouldn’t have worked for us if there was any pressure…we would have stepped way back. Even later when we started to talk about how to work together we had to keep the idea of no pressure, no goal, just let happen what will happen.”63 Arnoult had put Ed Herbst and Beth Skinner, Artistic Directors of Thunder Bay, in contact with Ciobanu and Toaca much earlier. Therefore, Artus was the third company to join the conversation. When Ciobanu was in Hungary and it was clear Goda and she were developing an artistic bond, Arnoult called Herbst and told him, “We’re having a nice conversation here so let’s continue the dialogue.”64 After one year, all three companies found a way to meet together. The first time Artus met Thunder Bay, Gábor Goda and his collaborator, Ernst Süss, went to the United States and met Ed Herbst and Beth Skinner. Goda did not immediately feel that these were people his company could work well with. But he said it was nice to meet them and spend time with them. On the other hand, he felt he instantaneously spoke a common language with Toaca. He says he thinks this could be because Thunder Bay was from a different culture. But with

Goda, Interview.

Toaca Cultural Foundation. See generally, www.toaca.ro/Thetre_

project1.php.

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AY 2007-2008 Toaca, they understood the same jokes, there was an instantaneous kinship. Later in the process, Herbst traveled to Hungary. There was a two-year period of these kinds of meetings: Artus to the United States and to Romania, Thunder Bay to Romania and Hungary. All three companies continued to talk together and share ideas. Eventually, they started to discuss what they might do together, what kind of collaboration they could create. All three companies decided to begin dreaming about what they would make together and where they would create this work. They agreed that in order for all members of the collaboration to be on equal artistic footing it would be best to create in a neutral territory, a place none of them was familiar with or called home. Perhaps this was because all three companies feared being considered the “other” in this creative situation. Creating work based on a culture that was “other” for all of the individuals involved did somehow put them on what they perceived to be a level playing field. For a number of years, Goda says he had been interested in the role time plays in the Mayan language. When Goda brought up an idea about exploring Mayan culture, everyone was immediately interested. “Ed and Beth had a friend in Chiapas, an anthropologist (the best friend of Ed’s mother) and there was also a dancer living in Chiapas who used to work with Ed. So, there were many signs and connections that showed this was the right spot.”65 They then traveled to Chiapas, Mexico in 65

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US the spring of 2006; this was the first time all three companies came together and were attempting to generate material. The main concern was how to work together. Thunder Bay and Artus/Toaca had very different definitions of what it meant to collaborate and different ideas of how they should work and exchange ideas. All three companies decided to best way to begin was to go to separate rooms and generate material. Then, at dinner or lunch time, they would show the others and talk about what they had made. If someone was interested in what the others were doing, then they were free to join in. Goda wanted to allow something to happen rather than force something to happen but he felt that Herbst was frustrated with this way of working and desired more direct contact and structure. After one week, Goda invited Herbst to add sound for a piece Artus was working on and this invitation seemed to ease Herbst’s frustration. On the last day, there was a kind of workshop day or showing day where the companies shared how they had been working and what they created. Here is where Goda said he could see just how different the three companies were. Regardless of the apparent difficulties in this collaboration and the differences in aesthetic process, the three companies decided to continue working together. In October of 2006, Ed Herbst traveled to Budapest to work with Artus. It was planned that all three companies would meet in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the fall of 2006, but they were unable to secure funding. It had been Goda’s plan to ask Herbst to compose music in Santa

Fe for the creation of the Artus work based on the material they generated in Mexico. Instead, Goda invited Herbst to come to Hungary because he felt he still needed Herbst for the music. During the rehearsal process, the Artus Company would generate material one day and Goda would cut it the next. It was a very loose process and it turned out that music became a less integral part of the piece. This meant that Herbst needed to be very flexible but had difficulty because he felt his role in the collaboration was unclear and underdeveloped. On the last day, Goda gave Herbst an outline of the piece and asked him to write down (going step by step through each scene) the music for each part of the performance. Goda says that Herbst seemed to relish this part of the process because he had a clear set structure and attainable goal. The next time these three companies met in the spirit of collaboration was in October of 2007 at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Susan Prince, who had been a coordinator for their program in Mexico, also joined the companies. The three groups approached this residency with a very different set of goals and working methodologies in mind. Goda and the members of Artus arrived in Santa Fe with the intention to travel to the surrounding areas of the Institute and explore ideas based on themes of nature and using the human body in replacement of natural elements. Because they had premiered a piece inspired by their discoveries in Chiapas the year before, they felt ready to embark upon a new investigation. Thunder Bay

was creating and refining material for a new piece based on the story of Alice in Wonderland; they asked for specific help with video projections from Ernst Süss (Artus) and Iulian Baltatescu (Toaca). Toaca was continuing to explore the investigation they had begun in Chiapas, but they decided to work primarily inside of the Institute. Like in Chiapas, the three companies worked mostly separately with some small collaboration between particular company members. A decision was made at the beginning of the residency that after one week they would have a sort of “open day” in the Institute in order to show each other what they had been exploring and creating. Thunder Bay and Toaca immediately began generating material specifically for that showing while Artus ventured outdoors and explored. Goda said he and his company decided they would choose which material to present on the morning of the showing. Because Toaca and Thunder Bay were both working inside the Institute, there was more collaboration between them, although there were instances when certain members of Toaca or Thunder Bay would join Artus in the natural elements. In fact, there was one day when everyone accompanied the members of Artus on an outdoor excursion and showing in a riverbed. Goda believes that what he and his company members received from this long-term collaboration was not necessarily inspiration from the other two companies but inspiration from the opportunity to travel and engage with

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AY 2007-2008 various cultures. From the point of view of Artus, this tri company collaboration has reached its natural end. Through his experiences with Toaca and Thunder Bay, Goda has come to the conclusion that a particular collaboration can only be fruitful if there is complete equality among the various members or if the working relationship and hierarchy is extremely clear. In order for this to be possible, smaller groups of collaborators are necessary. For example, four or five people. With this collaboration behind him, Goda is now focusing on and researching the possibility of his company traveling to Australia or Africa. He says that he would like his company to travel and spend two or three months in a new place every second year. Over the past three years I have gotten a lot of inspiration from the trips with Thunder Bay and Toaca. In the past I have worked in other co- productions with international companies (from New-Zealand, Israel, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, etc.), which have added to my work a great deal. This helped me to look upon life, the world and my own work from another viewpoint. Through traveling and meeting people I have learnt about the myths of other cultures and peoples. I see my own contemporary being in the intersection of progressivism and tradition. This has been the focus of my interest for the last 15 years. I have written and directed a performance on the 131 sentence fragments of Heraclitus, the story

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US of Osiris, the Chinese fox spirits, Cain and Abel, the Mayan creation myth, the songs of the Maoris, the legend of the Grail and the Hungarian turul bird. When I look back I realize that large part of my work builds on the ancient consciousness of the various peoples and places of the world. As if I was examining a single gem from various angles – it glitters differently, it shows a different face from each angle, but it is still the same. I am not interested in the literary theatre but in the theatre situation itself. The ritual itself.66 For Goda, these intercultural immersions are necessary in order to gain perspective on who he is as an artist in a global context and what stories he and he company members are compelled to bring to life.

Fulbright: The Hybrid Model The Fulbright Program was established by the United States Congress in 1946 and is named after Senator J. William Fulbright, a proponent of education and international exchange. The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State and “Is the largest U.S. international exchange program offering opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary

schools worldwide.”67 The program’s mission is to “enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”68 The Fulbright Program seeks to foster cultural empathy by sponsoring one on one acts of diplomacy through immersion and awareness. J. William Fulbright believed that, …international relations can be improved, and the danger of war significantly reduced, by producing generations of leaders, who through the experience of educational exchange, will have acquired some feeling and understanding of other peoples’ cultures why they operate as they do, why they think as they do, why they react as they do and of the differences among these cultures.69 The Student Fulbright Program between the United States and Hungary has a strong history of creating a dialogue between theatre professionals in both countries as well as providing the financial and structural stability necessary for cross cultural collaboration. A student “Fulbrighter” is sponsored by the educational institution where they are currently earning or have previously earned their degree and is hosted by a 67

Goda, Interview

U.S. Fulbright. See generally, www.us.fulbrightonline.org/about.

html. 69

U.S. Fulbright. See generally, www.us.fulbrightonline.org/about.

html.

Huszár, Ildikó, ed., Fulbright Student Conference Papers:

Academic Years 2002/2003 and 2003/2004. Back cover.

supporting educational or governmental institution in the visiting country. This is representative of an institution to institution exchange. However, the stated goal of the Fulbright Program is to provide students, scholars and teachers with one on one, personal interactions and cultural immersions. This means that the student Fulbrighter’s host institution, while being in direct contact with the student’s home institution as well as the visiting country’s Fulbright commission, encourages and facilitates the student’s engagement in various artist to artist and institution to artist encounters. Because the Fulbright Program serves as an institutional umbrella designed to foster direct engagement with the host culture, it is truly a hybrid model. There have been many examples of American theatre artists developing artistic relationships with people and institutions in Hungary and vice versa with the support of the Fulbright Program. One such example of the web of collaborative exchanges Fulbright has provided between the theatre communities of Hungary and the United States involves a former American Fulbrighter named Ashlin Halfnight and his theatre company, Electric Pear Productions. Halfnight came to Budapest on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2005 and was hosted by the National Theatre. While in Hungary he wrote several plays, one of which was a bilingual English/ Hungarian piece entitled Cronotopia that wove the myth of Cronos with the modern tale of an American real estate developer in Budapest. In July and August of 2007

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Halfnight and Electric Pear Productions (the name comes from the direct English translation of the Hungarian word for light bulb) spent time workshopping Cronotopia and premiered a fifteen minute abridged version at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, one of Europe’s largest summer music and arts festivals. The American collaborators on the project included Halfnight, Emily Long and Melanie Sylvan while the Hungarians consisted of Yvette Feuer, Andy Hefler, Ottó Pécz, Samu Gryllus and Kinga Keszthelyi.70 It is important to note that Kinga Keszthelyi, Ottó Pécz and Yvette Feuer are all Hungarian Fulbright Scholars and Samu Gryllus was recently awarded a Fulbright for the 2008-2009 academic year. Halfnight believes his time in Hungary, …gave my work added depth. Being in an environment where everything’s new...allows for a shift in perspective that I found very rewarding. I began to notice things about my routines and my writing that I hadn’t before…It was a liberating and wonderful time, and one that has produced some of my best work yet. Halfnight met many colleagues at the National that quickly became collaborators. …the two dramaturgs were wonderfully supportive and welcoming both in terms of professional help…and in terms of social networking…I also cultivated a very close and professional relationship with several of the

Ashlin Halfnight’s time working at the National Theatre proved crucial to the development of Cronotopia and allowed him to make several deep artist to artist connections. National Theatre dramaturg Kinga Keszthelyi also served as the dramaturg for Cronotopia and introduced Halfnight to actor Yvette Feuer and her musician husband, Samu Gryllus. National Theatre actor Ottó Pécz was as an actor in the piece and is now currently studying on a Fulbright at The New School in New York City, where Halfnight now resides. Halfnight says he is hoping to continue to keep this piece alive and tour it to various theatre festivals in New York City and Europe. This collaboration between one American Fulbright Scholar and three Hungarian Fulbright Scholars is far from being the only example of a theatrical collaboration fostered by the Fulbright program, but it is the most recent, direct and easily traceable. The Fulbright Program provides the financial and institutional structure necessary in order for individual theatre artists to make artistic connections with other theatre artists and theatrical institutions. It also provides a concentrated amount of incubation time and cultural immersion where an artist can be financially secure and able to focus solely on creating. In Halfnight’s words, “I think the Fulbright

Electric Pear Productions. See generally, www.electricpear.org.

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actors in the National’s company. This resulted in professional collaborations that are still in the works…”71

Ashlin Halfnight Fulbright Final Report, 2005.

program is the best kind of foreign relations effort, period. It’s on the ground, personal, and highly engaged in a non-threatening way.”72

Critical Analysis: Philip Arnoult began his efforts to create a dialogue between the theatrical communities of the United States and Hungary in the early nineties. Since then, many different working models have emerged between the two theatre cultures. The three main categories of working models include institution to institution, institution to artist and artistto-artist relationships with Fulbright serving as a hybrid model. There are many positives and negatives that come from these working models and the sub categories that emerge. As an American theatre artist working in Hungary, collaborating with Hungarian theatre artists and creating work based on my Hungarian roots, how can I and artists like myself best continue the impulse Philip Arnoult started fifteen years ago? I believe that in order to do this we must take the lessons learned from examining these different models and incorporate them into our own work. By closely examining the ECETI program, it is my belief that its overall impact on both theatre cultures has been and continues to be significant. Possibly the most important impact of the ECETI program was the introduction of Hungarian theatre culture to American 72

Ashlin Halfnight Fulbright Final Report, 2005.

theatre audiences and theatre critics. This engagement in a global dialogue is necessary for American audiences, particularly today. The events of September 11th in the United States have further isolated an already geographically isolated country. The kind of artistic, international collaborations that flourished in America in the seventies, eighties and nineties are becoming more difficult due to fallout from Homeland Security. It is becoming increasingly problematic for an individual theatre practitioner, a theatre organization or a theatre festival in the United States to obtain visas for international artists. There was a time when the State Department saw international dialogue and exchange as a necessary diplomatic step in order to deepen perspective and break down cultural barriers, but, unfortunately, that time has passed. Any chance an American audience has to engage with the work of international artists opens an essential door of awareness to the outside world. The ECETI program has had a positive impact on the audiences of American regional theatres, however, the impact on Hungarian audiences is more abstract. Hungarian audiences are indirectly affected by seeing the work of Hungarian directors who have come to the United States and been influenced by their contact there. It is also possible Hungarian audiences are indirectly affected by the kind of artistic validation and boost in self-esteem an invitation to work in the United States has brought to their theatre directors. What I do believe has been of clear importance for Hungarian theatre

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AY 2007-2008 culture is the opportunity, through ECETI, to open doors to the rest of the world and receive direct feedback from the theatrical community of the United States. András Nagy believes that the Hungarian theatre culture benefited from ECETI in several ways. Figuring out the way to show the best face of our theatre culture to foreign visitors was an important process for us. Our dialogue with Philip helped give us a clearer vision in that regard. It was important for us as Hungarians to see work of and meet people from abroad who have a different view and mindset. We are in a kind of isolated theatre culture and we are not able to tour all over the world with everything we have produced. It was extremely important to have people coming here that were able to create those kinds of opportunities. For any theatre professional in Hungary to be able to travel and work in the United States or any other foreign environment is extremely important. This was influential in the work of Eszenyi, Szász, Alföldi and the others and served as a huge part of their learning process. It was also important for these directors to have international successes or failures…for them to see how their mentality, mindset and method would be received by a different culture.73 I believe the theatre community of the United States could have also benefited from similar feedback from the Hungarian theatrical community as well as Hungarian audiences. I realize I am 73

Nagy, Interview.

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US touching on difficult ground here because this would have involved bringing delegations of Hungarians to the United States or bringing shows from the United States to Hungary, which was and is an extreme fiscal challenge. Nagy says of this, “The original idea behind ECETI was to bring Hungarians to the United States as well. We had a relationship with Bennington College and were in the middle of working out the arrangements for such a venture when the head of the program left. So this idea somehow died.”74 It is my belief that the ECETI Program had the potential to truly solidify a long-term dialog between the theatre cultures of the United States and Hungary but was ended before it could reach its full promise. András Nagy says that if he had been able to continue the project, I would have wanted to give the next generation of cutting edge, challenging, controversial theatre makers a chance to travel to the U.S. This would have been a fantastic way to bring their experiences in America back to Hungary and to show different Hungarian energies and points of view to the American theatre culture. It could have been very beneficial for the Hungarians and possibly very inspiring for the Americans.75 But the cultural differences between the countries proved to be difficult. Here it is a bit looser as far as the ability to change or re arrange schedules at the last minute or the acceptance of taking

a long time to return phone calls. These things are not possible or tolerated in the U.S. I was very unhappy that this project didn’t continue, and I think that much of the reason had to do with a lack of interest and energy on the part of the Hungarian ITI and the board of the ITI after I left.76 Nagy would be overjoyed if the dialogue between the two theatre cultures could be somehow reinvigorated. He believes it is important to breathe new life into this relationship. Jim Nicola’s visit to Budapest with a group of Usual Suspects in 2006 was part of an impulse to resurrect and deepen the exchange, but that particular group did not travel to Hungary in order to meet collaborators or make collaborations happen. They were coming under the auspices of engaging in a brief introduction to Hungarian theatre culture while looking for general artistic inspiration. Nagy says he was “… very happy they came, but Philip was not there. So this type of energy [that of a producer] was missing. It was very nice to have Jim here with his group, which was a wonderful group of artists. But the follow up or how things would move forward didn’t come into the picture in that sense.”77 Jim Nicola’s Suspects Abroad initiative is possibly the most important organized ripple effect of the ECETI program. A clear positive and negative of this program is that these trips provide merely an introduction to particular theatre cultures, as seen in their trip to

Nagy, Interview.

Budapest. It is up to the individual Usual Suspect to continue the dialogue with a theatre culture only if they are inspired to do so, and the trips themselves are so short in length that it is rare for a Usual Suspect to follow up with a potential collaborator from abroad. The Suspects Abroad initiative is less about building concrete collaborations and more about cultivating the individual Usual Suspect’s world artistic view. These kinds of quick theatrical immersions can be life altering and provide much artistic inspiration for the individual artists but they can also be difficult in that the artist is introduced to an altered or slanted view of the theatre culture. There is also the danger of cultural tourism or cultural shopping. Josette Féral, a professor at Quebec University, addresses this by saying, Curiosity about other cultures is… not recent, no more than the practice of adapting and borrowing. This has always been the essence of art. What is new, however, is the process of awareness which is connected with the phenomenon as well as to the theory and critical analysis that take it as its object. The need to understand the reasons for such transfers, crossings, contributions and exchanges seems to have become inescapable.78 Lee Breuer also touches on this point when he says, I am desperately trying to develop an overview of what it means to be working interculturally in the theatre. There are a lot of underviews. They 78

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AY 2007-2008 fall in the pattern of either I love the world and the world loves me, lets all get together and party interculturally, or, the notion of Western cultural imperialism—that we are ripping off every cultural icon we can get a hold of, and then selling it.79 I trust that the caliber of artists NYTW is bringing on these trips understand that in order to create a work about a particular culture or informed by a particular culture, it is necessary to critically analyze the reasons behind the artistic impulse and do an in depth immersion in and investigation of that culture. Instead of “borrowing” from the different cultures they encounter, I have witnessed first hand that the Ususal Suspects use these trips to point themselves toward asking deeper questions regarding the nature of their work and the place they hold in a global society. A challenge all of the working models have faced over the years is the difficulty that comes with language barriers as well as cultural divides and misunderstandings. I believe it is important for all members of any collaboration to do extensive research and educate themselves on the cultural differences between themselves and their collaborators. This self –education is necessary to help all collaborators enter into the partnership as informed about each other’s individual cultural contexts as possible. Being educated and informed is a healthy way to avoid miscommunication and a way to show respect. It is also 79

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Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US necessary to make sure each collaborator is the right fit for the overall scope of the project. There should also be meetings deciding on a working methodology before the creative process begins. Artist to artist encounters are extremely important in driving cultural exchange on an intimate, personal level. Often, the products of artist to artist encounters and collaborations are eventually showcased in a public forum where the audience then participates in the exchange, creating an even larger dialogue. Finding the right combination of artists for a collaboration is an extremely delicate process. Often, when searching for collaborators, artists pay close attention to similarities in aesthetic product as opposed to compatibility of aesthetic process. There are basic, fundamental questions that must be answered before an artist chooses to work with another artist or group of artists: Do I like this person or company? And I intrigued by their work? Do I connect with their artistic mission? Are we able to communicate? Do I agree with their working methodology? Answering positively to all of these questions is extremely important to a successful collaboration. However, these questions are often overlooked and remain unanswered until the process has already begun.

Conclusion It is my belief that theatre artists and audiences can learn a great deal about their particular context in a global society by being introduced to the art and culture of other countries. Since the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1990, the theatre communities of Hungary and the United States have been engaged in an artistic dialogue. However, the strength of this dialogue is now waning. One main reason is the closing of the ECETI program and Philip Arnoult’s subsequent shift in focus toward Russian theatre. Without Arnoult and ECETI, there is no program or institution devoted specifically to nurturing the dialogue between American and Hungarian theatre cultures and, thus, there is no driving force behind the initiation of conversation and collaboration. ECETI served as a main catalyst for dialogue that created numerous ripple effects representing various working models; however, the more that time passes, the less these ripple effects retain their momentum and potency. It now appears that Fulbright is serving as the main driving force behind theatrical immersion and collaboration between the two cultures. But Fulbright has a wide scope focusing on all scholarly and cultural areas. Therefore, there is now no organization or program that is focused solely on the theatrical dialogue between the theatre cultures of the United States and Hungary. A large issue is finding someone with enough contacts and financial backing to drive the energy of such a program.

Another obstacle to the continuation of an in depth dialogue is the overall level and quality of the work happening in Hungary. Currently there is a general feeling of stasis in the Hungarian theatre culture that could very well be limiting American interest in dialogue and exchange. Andrea Tompa is worried about the current state of theatre in Hungary. She feels that theatre is becoming a less relevant part of the social dialogue because Hungarian audiences are becoming solely concerned with entertainment value. This is a common worry among theatre professionals in the United States as well. Unfortunately, in the tradition of Hungarian theatre, as in everywhere else in Eastern Europe (and it is because of the Soviet theatre system) we think about theatre as a form of art that is separate from reality. Probably the lack of dialogue between reality and art in Hungary is very little because of this Soviet tradition. When we go to the theatre we want to forget the reality from which we are coming. We don’t want to face painful things, we don’t want to understand anything about ourselves or our environment or our lives but we want to be entertained. Entertained either by something that has no consequences or something that is only art and has no dialogue with reality.80 Nagy agrees with this assessment but says, “…you can never really know what will change a point of stasis. Forming 80

Tompa, Interview.

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AY 2007-2008 a new company, or having a wonderful class at the Academy, or opening a new theatre or Robert Alföldi taking over the National Theatre can become a catalyst. And it may not happen very soon but after a time of preparation it has the potential. But another question is what is needed for the Americans. Sometimes they can connect easily with what is happening here but sometimes it’s Russia or Poland that is a place of interest.”81

Barbara Lanciers: Theatre Cultures of Hungary and the US

The overall decline of ITI as an international organization plays a large role in the waning relationship between the two theatre communities. With ITI becoming an increasingly obsolete presence in the world’s various theatre cultures, the strength behind international, intercultural dialogue continues to deteriorate. The problems of ITI loosing it’s viability and the quick erosion of the theatrical exchange between the United States and Hungary can be partially explained by funding cuts in the arts and culture sectors of both countries. With political turmoil and recessions in the United States and Hungary, the arts have become one of the first areas to experience slashes in funding. Politicians often see the arts as being frivolous and unnecessary. This creates an insurmountable problem because lack of funding leads to lack of support, which leads to a view of irrelevance in the greater populous. A major debate I have heard during my

time here in Hungary is if there will ever be resurgence in the theatrical dialogue between the United States and Hungary. I believe there will be, but it will have a new face and will fall almost entirely under the guise of artist to artist collaboration or exchange (with Fulbright continuing to play a key role), unless issues of funding are somehow resolved. I have just recently joined the cross-cultural conversation between the United States and Hungary because I believe that my work as a theatre artist will initiate from a deeper place if I expand my understanding of what theatre is by immersing myself in the theatre of a different culture. I believe that in order to become a better theatre artist, I must first examine my heritage and investigate what came before me. Professor Josette Féral describes the necessity for this kind of exploration by saying, “…the artist has to analyze and establish a cultural position. To reflect on their own history and background, investigate and analyze their origins so as to establish their own cultural position and thereby identify possible meeting points: in other words, one must clarify one’s own analytical and creative context.”82 It is my choice, at this point in my career, to create work that is inspired by my Hungarian roots. My interest in and understanding of Hungary and its theatre culture comes from a personal place. My paternal grandmother hails from Budapest. She fled in 1944 during World War II and came to the United States via Germany. Two years ago I began

Nagy, Interview.

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Féral, Pluralism in Art or Interculturalism?

developing a theatre piece, entitled Leaves with A Name, based on her experiences during the war and the secrets she had to keep in order to survive the horrors of that time. Leaves with A Name premiered in Baltimore, Maryland in 2007 and will be shown in New York City in 2009. My work on this play is the embodiment of my critical analysis of the theatrical working models that have developed between the United States and Hungary over the past eighteen years. In order to make this work with a sense of authenticity, it was and is important for me to learn from prior collaborations between the United States and Hungary. During this nine month period in Budapest as a Fulbright Scholar, I have spent my time digging through dense layers of family history and immersing myself in the local theatre culture. I saw many shows and met many theatre professionals under the guidance of András Nagy at the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute. I developed a close working relationship with many theatre professionals in Budapest and became intimately aware of the complexities of the theatre community. In order to create work inspired by my Hungarian roots or to create work based on any kind of cultural exploration, I must have an intimate knowledge of the social/ political complexities of the culture as well as an understanding of the current theatre and dance in the region. For me, this kind of awareness has come through the exposure, immersion and dialogue that the Fulbright program fostered. Questions I am currently asking of myself are: how can I continue to make work

in the United States as well as Hungary, nurture working relationships with my Hungarian collaborators from such a vast distance, introduce Hungarian culture and customs to American audiences and introduce American independent theatre culture to Hungarian audiences? How can I continue to learn about Hungary and treat the culture with respect in my work? These are difficult questions with no clear answers, but the opportunity to live and work in Budapest on a Fulbright Scholarship has given me the confidence and knowledge base to continue asking. Perhaps I can some day bring the next ECETI program to Hungary.

Bibliography Cody,

Gabrielle

and

Breuer,

Lee.

Lee

Breuer

Interculturalism. Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, The Interculturalism Issue, 1989.

Csáki, Judit, ed. Tradition and Innovation in Modern Hungarian Theatre. Budapest: Frankfurt Kft., 1999.

Csikós, Virág, ed. Backlight: Chekhov and Ibsen directed by László Marton. EU: Pepperman Productions, 2006.

Csikós, Virág and Harangozó, Eszter, eds. László Marton theatre director. Budapest: Láng Publishing and Holding Company, 2000.

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Dusa, Gábor, ed. Félúton: Contemporary Theatre and Dance in Hungary.

Custer, Marianne. Telephone Interview. 23 April 2007.

Budapest: IETM, 1994. Goda, Gábor. Personal interview. 17 January 2007. 21 March Fábri, Péter, ed. A Shabby Paradise: Contemporary Hungarian

2008.

Theatre 2004. Busapest: Hungarian Centre of the International Theatre

Huszti, Péter. Personal interview. 10 January 2007.

Number Theory and Educational Exchange in Hungary

Institute, 2004. Kinga Keszthelyi. Personal interview. 18 January 2007. 25 Féral, Josette. Pluralism in Art or Interculturalism?

February 2008.

http://www.powerofculture.nl/uk/archive/amsterdam/ ukverslag_feral.html

Laban, Katalan. Personal interview. 7 January 2007.

Hadas, Miklós and Vörös, Miklós, eds. Colonisation or

Linka, Peter. Personal interview. 10 January 2007. 16 October

Partnership? Eastern

2007.

Europe and Western Social Sciences. Budapest: Replika Hungarian Social Science

Lenyel, György. Personal interview. 15 January 2007.

Hakan Ali-John Seyalioglu ...............................................................................................

Quarterly, 1996. Marton, László. Personal interview. 18 January 2007. 5 Huszár, Ildikó, ed. Fulbright Student Conference Papers:

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Academic Years 2002/2003 and 2003/2004. Budapest: Hungarian-American Commission for Educational

Nagy, András. Personal interview. 11 January 2007. 1 February

Exchange, 2004.

2008.

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Nicola, Jim. Personal interview. 19 October 2006.

Contemporary Hungarian Drama. Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute, 2004.

Tompa, Andrea and Nánay, István, eds. Hungarian Theatre.

Hungarian Academy of Sciences Reáltanoda utca 13-15 Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, Bethlen Gábor tér 2 www.renyi.hu

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Smith, Molly. Personal interview. 2 February 2007.

Szász, János. Personal Interview. 28 March 2008.

Budapest: Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute, 2000. Tompa, Andrea. Personal interview. 16 January 2007. 20 Weiss, Peter. The Persecution and Assasination of Jean-Paul

Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hakan.Seyalioglu@Gmail.com Advisers: Antal Balog, András Biró College International www.bsmath.hu

October 2007. 3 March 2008.

Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the

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Marquis De Sade.

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London: Dramatic Publishing, 1965.

www.nytw.org/artist_development.asp

The purpose of this project was to spend a year studying number theory at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics while promoting Hungarian-American educational exchange. The project consisted of coursework, independent research, and helping compile course notes for a number theory class taught in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics exchange program. The report begins with background on the subject of analytic number theory, which was my focus, centering on recent developments and Hungarian contributions. The report also contains specifics of my academic tenure in Hungary as well as an overview of the course whose notes I am completing.

www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=30576 Arnoult, Philip. Personal interview. 23 September 2006 and 8

www.squattheatre.com

October 2006

www.thunderbayus.org www.toaca.ro/Thetre_project1.php

Coigney, Martha. Personal interview. 9 December 2006.

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www.us.fulbrightonline.org/about.html

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1. Introduction Hungary has a knack for beautiful mathematics. The results of Pál Erdős cannot be overstated, but one should also not forget the other legendary mathematicians whose portraits line the main stairway in the humble orange building on Reáltanoda Street. It was a thrill to be among the great minds at the Rényi Institute and to have access to their advice and guidance. My time as a Fulbright Scholar has proven a great opportunity for me to develop as a mathematician and has influenced not only my abilities, but also the focus of my research. My stay at the Rényi Institute consisted mainly of studying a subfield of number theory known as analytic number theory. This report begins with background on this subfield with focus on major contributions by Hungarian mathematicians. Apart from my studies in number theory, I was also affiliated with the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program, helping Professor Csaba Szabó complete the course notes for his introductory number theory course, one of the most popular courses in the program. The course is one of sentimental value for me, as it is where I was first exposed to number theory, over two years ago. The course gave me an opportunity I would not have had at my home institution and I hope that by finishing the course notes, I will make the course more accessible to American undergraduates so that they can gain access to the same Hungarian treatment of the subject that I found so enthralling.

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2. Development of Analytic Number Theory Before discussing the specifics of my project and research, I would like to give the reader some background by explaining some of the fundamental aspects of analytic number theory. Some topics included are the development of sieve theory, the Green-Tao theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions, and the results of Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım on small gaps between primes. Some terms from higher mathematics are used without explanation if understanding the specific concept is not necessary.

2.1 Origins of the Discipline Mathematical analysis provided a foundation for many disciplines that emerged in the last two centuries. First developed as a method to rigorously define calculus, elementary proofs in analysis have a distinctive flavor and language, concerned mainly with limits of functions and sequences. However, the techniques of mathematical analysis spread into other disciplines quickly. Its power would become apparent even when applied to one of the most ancient disciplines, number theory. Number theory is, in general, the study of whole integers and their properties. It is considered one of the oldest and most beautiful disciplines in mathematics, with seminal results which date back millennia still being studied. The proof of the infinitude of primes is considered one of the earliest results of the discipline

and some of the concepts introduced by the ancient sieve of Eratosthenes would later be revitalized to provide the basis for some of the most advanced modern concepts in the field. The disciplines provide a natural balance for each other, though the reason is hard to discern at first. Number theory deals with the discrete. Counting primes and analyzing their properties seems somehow incompatible with the continuous foundation of mathematical analysis. However, the natural regularity that the primes offer serves as a perfect avenue by which to apply the principles of analysis. While a function which counts primes under a given magnitude may be an incontinuous step function, when the average is taken, it follows a ‘somewhat’83 continuous pattern. Since the prime counting function allowed such regularity, Dirichlet capitalized on the rich theory mathematical analysis had to offer in order to prove what would serve as the foundation for analytic number theory. Dirichlet’s theorem [1], states that for any x and y which share no common factors, there are infinitely many primes congruent to x modulo y. Dirichlet’s proof not only states the infinitude of such primes, but also that the sum of the reciprocals of such primes tends to infinity in a similar fashion to a well-known proof of the existence of infinitely many primes. The proof uses the concepts of the Riemann zeta function and related L-functions heavily, tools which are still at the core of the 83

The notion of ‘somewhat’ is characterized in analytic number

theory as an error term, and is a rigorously developed concept.

discipline. Such functions are somewhat unique in all of mathematics. While they are easy to define, their properties are still mysterious, after over a century of study. Their structure and some very basic properties are completely unknown and they represent one of the most mystifying classes of functions in mathematics. The next major achievement in the discipline was the proof of the celebrated prime number theorem. Proved by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin in 1896 [1], it gives an asymptotic for the number of primes under a given magnitude. The proof uses methods pioneered by Euler and Dirichlet and relies on showing a lack of zeros of the Riemann zeta function on the extremal line of the critical strip. While the specific technical details of the proof are not important, one should note that the methods used in the proof are highly analytical.

2.2 Developments in the 20th Century Even with these landmark achievements, some of the greatest problems in number theory remained unanswered at the dawn of the new century. Fermat’s Last Theorem taunted mathematicians around the world and the twin prime conjecture (the existence of infinitely many pairs of primes with a difference of two) still loomed menacingly, as did the seemingly immovable Goldbach conjecture (that every even integer greater than two is the sum of two primes). The final two problems would provide a basis for some

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of the most exciting developments in analytic number theory, and while they are still without proof, related statements have given great insight into the structure of prime numbers. In particular, the most succesful attacks, mounted through sieve methods, provided a springboard for breakthroughs in many related problems. One of the most important techniques developed in analytic number theory in the last half-century is sieve theory. The basic idea behind it is simple and elegant. The theory owes its foundation to the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes. One defines a simple set, usually all numbers under a certain magnitude. One then attempts to sift out of this set, all numbers other than the ones under analysis, usually primes of a certain form. As an example, consider the aforementioned sieve of Eratosthenes. The goal of the sieve is to find the number of primes under a certain magnitude. In order to find this, one considers the set of all numbers up to the designated threshhold and calculates how many of them are divisible by two. Next, one subtracts this number from the size of the total set, in effect, sifting out the even numbers and leaving the size of the set of odd numbers under the designated magnitude. The process is continued for each number below the square root of the desired level. The sieve does not quite work, however, in getting a good estimate for the number of primes under a given magnitude, due to technical limitations and can only sieve out numbers with small prime factors.84

One of the greatest results of the discipline came from the work of the Hungarian mathematician, Alfréd Rényi concerning the large sieve. The large sieve was first developed by the Russian mathematician Yuri Linnik. Alfréd Rényi further developed the concept of the large sieve in order to prove one of the most celebrated results in number theory, that there exists a constant K such that every even prime number can be written as the sum of at most K primes [1]. Rényi’s result was the first that proved a weak version of the Goldbach conjecture and is one of the first steps towards a proof of one of greatest unsolved problems in mathematics. The Chinese mathematician Chen Jungrun also proved many problems related to the Goldbach and twin prime conjectures with the same tools. Using sieve methods, he proved that there are infinitely many primes p, such that p+2 is either a prime or a semi-prime (a product of two primes), a statement closely related to the twin prime conjecture. Similarly, he showed that every sufficiently large even number is either the sum of two primes or a prime and a semi-prime, closely related to the Goldbach conjecture [2, 3].

2.3 Recent Discoveries The last fifteen years have proven to be some of the most productive in the history of number theory. Andrew Wiles’ proof, using concepts from elliptic curve

Eratosthenes’ sieve fails quickly when trying to sieve out all

the main term as we continue sifting, rendering the method only use-

such primes as one can only find exact counts for how many numbers

ful in developing asymptotic estimates for numbers with only large

are divisible by a number d when the number d is fixed, otherwise, an

prime factors.

theory, shook the world. In addition, many works further contributed greatly to our understanding of the structure of prime numbers. Some of the most notable results in analytic number theory include the Green-Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions and the Goldston-PintzYıldırım results on small gaps between prime numbers. The question of primes in arithmetic progressions has been a constant source of inspiration for new and exciting problems. Arithmetic progressions alone provide a stunning number of questions, many related to Szemerédi’s proof [4] of the Erdős–Turán conjecture [5] and Erdős’ conjecture on arithmetic progressions. Each of these three Hungarian mathematicians tried to discern necessary conditions to place on a set of integers to guarantee that the set contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Szemerédi’s theorem gives necessary results when dealing with the density of a set. Erdős’ conjecture takes the statement a step further, asking whether the divergence of the sum of the reciprocals of a set of integers implies that the set contains arithmetic progressions of arbitrary length. It is a well known result that the sum of the reciprocals of primes diverges. The Green-Tao theorem [6] demonstrates Erdős’ conjecture in the case where the set is taken to be the primes. It is a great theorem with very deep consequences. Considering that the largest known arithmetic progression of primes to this day is only of about twenty terms,

the statement about the existence of arbitrarily large progressions is quite striking. Another nice result dealing with arithmetic progressions of primes comes from Antal Balog, a researcher at the Rényi and co-adviser to my project. His result (praised as ‘beautiful’ in the paper proving the Green-Tao theorem) shows that there are arbitrarily large sets of primes such that the average of any two primes in the set is prime. The most significant result to my project, however, is the result of Dan Goldston, János Pintz and Cem Yıldırım concerning small gaps between primes [7].

2.4 Small Gaps Between Primes The recent results concerning small gaps between primes are not only exciting findings, but they followed quite a turbulent path to discovery. With the original findings published by Dan Goldston and Cem Yıldırım which showed that one can find arbitrarily big pairs of successive primes whose difference is arbitrarily small when compared to their logarithm, the mathematical community was very excited. Not only had they improved the best known ratio of the difference to the logarithm, but they showed that it could be taken as small as one desires, the best possible result. But there was a major setback. After the proof had been released and was in the process of being scrutinized by the global mathematics community, a mistake was discovered. However, through the expertise of Professor Pintz of the Rényi

estimate must be used. The error term in this estimate encapsulates

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AY 2007-2008 Institute, a way to correct the mistake was found and the celebrated result stood. The improvement was such a big step forward, that many related problems’ results were improved trivially by these new findings. It is on improving results related to some of these problems through these new methods that my research has focused.

3. Research, Classes and Exchange In this section, the focus will be my project and my activities as a visiting scholar. I will talk about my time at the Rényi Institute and as a student as well as about the notes I am completing. My stay in Hungary has allowed me to develop greatly as a mathematician with attentive advisers and a wonderful work environment. I would be hard pressed to exaggerate, or even do justice to the hospitality the Rényi Institute provided me and the patience my advisers have demonstrated as I learn this new branch of mathematics. While most of my personal research is not complete, I would like to take this opportunity to give some background on my host institution and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program, my second affiliation.

3.1 The Alfréd Rényi Institute Founded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1949, the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics has housed one of the most prominent research staffs in mathematics since its inception. Temporary and permanent members

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Hakan Seyalioglu: Number Theory and Educational Exchange have included an extremely high portion of prominent Hungarian mathematicians and it provides a home base for an extraordinary collection of contemporary researchers. The Institute, housed in the heart of the city, has provided an excellent center from which to conduct my project. My personal lodgings have been turbulent and there were a few occasions during which if I did not have access to the technical offerings of the Institute, my work would have suffered a major setback. They provided excellent physical accommodations and access to an expansive library, where I could be confident that any source material I needed would be readily available. I recommend the Rényi Institute as a host for future Fulbright Grantees without reservations and hope that the great interchange between the Commission and the Institute is maintained.

3.2 Learning a New Field While number theory has always been a great passion, it had not been a primary focus of mine until this year. My personal research had been mostly restricted to applications in cryptography. While I am not sure if analytic number theory will be my permanent focus, I decided to spend a year conducting research in number theory because it is such an exciting field. Referred to as the Queen of Mathematics, number theory used to be a subject that seemed so far removed from applicability that this ‘uselessness’ was a testament its beauty. Why else would generation

after generation of mathematician hurl themselves at it with such vigor if no practical application to their work could ever be found? However, with the advent of electronic communications and the need for security, the Queen found another avenue through which she would compete for attention. In modern times, number theory has great practicality. It serves as a basis for innumerable cryptographic algorithms and one can be certain that practically any virtual transaction one makes owes a great debt to the works of Euler, Fermat and Gauss. The notion of quadratic residuosity has served as one of the first utensils for the theory of zero-knowledge protocols and discrete logarithms proved to be the backbone of the first non-classified public key encryption algorithm, both central concepts in modern cryptography. With my interest in cryptography, a year to study number theory in Hungary was a perfect opportunity. I would be allowed to study alongside some of the most prominent modern mathematicians in a style which I might never have been exposed to in the United States in a very relevant discipline.

3.3 Independent Study and Classes Serving as my advisers, Professors Antal Balog and András Biró have done more to introduce me to higher mathematics than anyone in my academic career. Since the beginning of the academic year, I have had weekly meetings with Professor Biró where we have discussed recent

advancements in number theory, ranging from Kannan Soundararajan’s recent work in moments of the Riemann zeta function to topics relevant to my research such as Helmut Maier’s famous matrix method (which was used in a follow-up to Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım’s first paper to improve it by a linear factor). In addition to these weekly meetings, in the first semester, I took two classes, one offered by the Rényi Institute’s Gergely Harcos on Elementary Methods in Prime Number Theory and a second, offered by the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program, taught by Professor Balog, Topics in Number Theory. Both classes served as a good way to acquaint myself with these new topics. Professor Harcos’ presentation of Postnikov and Romanov’s elementary proof of the prime number theorem was a highlight. I am including a similar proof in the notes for Professor Szabó’s class. In the second semester, I shifted my focus from classes and study to research. I took a second class offered by Professor Harcos entitled Modular Forms and L-Functions, which, while a little more removed from the focus of my study, proved to be a very rewarding class that gave insight into some of the biggest recent discoveries in mathematic. It was during this time that I also decided to take a part in the Budapest Semester in Mathematics program to encourage their goal of educational exchange.

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AY 2007-2008 3.4 Mathematics and Educational Exchange I participated in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program, first, two years ago, as a student. It was my study abroad experience as an undergraduate and one of the primary motivators in my decision to return to Budapest. It delivered a semester heavily focused on advanced mathematics, in a beautiful new culture, with instruction by some of the most devoted teachers I had encountered. It was as a student that I met Professor Dezső Miklós, who served as my first contact when deciding to apply for a Fulbright grant for study in Hungary. He was excited to hear I was interested in returning and put me in touch with both Professors Balog and Biró. I owe a great debt to his generosity in helping me arrange the specifics of my project as well as being a very reliable source of advice. Budapest Semesters in Mathematics owes its creation to the mathematical legends, László Lovász, László Babai, Vera Sós, and Pál Erdős. In operation for more than twenty years, it provides an opportunity for English speaking students to take courses offered primarily by professors from Eötvös Loránd University and the Rényi Institute. It boasts chances for the students to learn, among other topics, number theory and combinatorics in Hungary, one of the countries most dedicated to their study. These classes frequently feature the highest enrollment and both offer multiple sections. As I looked for an opportunity to contribute to the educational exchange mission of the

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Hakan Seyalioglu: Number Theory and Educational Exchange Fulbright Commission in a mathematical setting, Professor Balog suggested I speak to Professor Csaba Szabó, one of the introductory number theory instructors, about helping him finish compiling the course notes for his class.

3.5 Number Theory, Hungarian Style The above title is the subtitle for the course notes for Professor Szabó’s course. I was enrolled in Professor Szabó’s class as an undergraduate and was so excited by his teaching style that I also enrolled in his Galois Theory course, a topic far removed from what I saw as my academic focus. His teaching style is, as an understatement, unique. There are not many professors of mathematics who introduce the topic of quadratic residues with shouts and yells, who think throwing chalk at the board is an acceptable substitute for pointing and who knowingly put erroneous information on the board to keep students attentive. A few years ago, a student had begun compiling notes for the course, but as she was taking her first course in number theory at the time and was a full time student, the notes are incomplete and in need of technical polish. Professor Szabó and I have begun working together to finish them. I attend weekly lectures and every week, deliver him my update of the typed notes along with my hand written notes. We try to capture a conversational tone with occasional anecdotes from the class thrown in for variety.

The way the material is delivered is very different from most traditional undergraduate courses in number theory. The course begins with distinguishing the concepts of irreducibility and primality, which is often neglected in such courses. This introduction is considerably more algebraic than most, as these concepts, while interchangeable when discussing prime numbers over the integers, are two very important and separate concepts in algebra. In addition, the course focuses heavily on problem solving, after all, half of the course hours are dedicated problem sessions. Problem sessions are a concept regrettably absent in most American institutions. In his class, every Thursday, Professor Szabó will distribute a long sheet of problems, walk to the podium and exclaim several numbers. These will be the first problems that the class attempts as Professor Szabó makes his round, observing the students’ attempts at solutions and giving them advice. This gives students a chance for personal interaction with the teacher as well as an opportunity for the professor to get a better understanding of the class’ grasp of the course material. The absence of these sessions from American classrooms is a shame. Perhaps the reason for the absence is the pressure such scrutiny places on students; having a professor peering over one’s shoulder every week is certainly not the most relaxing environment in which to learn. However, I found the experience very compatible with my own learning style and think it would be a good way to supplement courses for willing students.

4.1 Results and Conclusions This section is dedicated to the current status of the project and the direction it will be continued in during the end of the grant period and the upcoming summer. My research has been productive, however, as our results are not finalized, I have not included them in this report. They are related to small gaps between groups of primes and use a modification of the Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım sieve in a related setting. Both advisers have expressed optimism about results and as soon as the project is finished, I will make the work available. There are very subtle points in modifying the argument, which may take a substantial amount of time to complete. The course notes are still in their infancy, as I began the project in the second semester of my grant period. The first three chapters are virtually complete with about half left, corresponding to the current state of the lectures. I have inserted several appendixes to the notes, one on number theory in public key cryptography, corresponding to my interest in the subject, as well as one on an elementary proof of the prime number theorem. The proof of the prime number theorem that is being used is due to Hedi Daboussi and is important in that it is the earliest that does not use Selberg’s Lemma. It is a very nice proof that was given to me by Professor Balog, which I have been translating from French, as I have not found a readily available English translation. I think that using this proof is a good choice because it is unique in

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relation to Selberg’s Lemma and is one that may not be available otherwise. I have also included heuristics for the first elementary proof of the prime number theorem. I hope to continue my academic relationship with both my advisers and Professor Szabó long after I leave Budapest. If our ideas bear fruit, it is likely that my advisers and I will continue to apply them to similar problems. I see my experience as a Fulbright Scholar as having affected my educational experience in a very substantial way and do not know of a way to demonstrate my gratitude. I hope to continue interacting with the Commission in the future and hope Hungary remains a popular host country for students of mathematics.

4.2 Works Cited [1] H. Davenport, Multiplicative Number Theory, Third Edition. Graduate Texts in Mathematics, No. 74, SpringerVerlag, (2000).

Egy amerikai az Amerikai Kuckóban

[2] J. R. Chen, On the representation of a large even integer as the sum of a prime and the product of at most two primes, Kexue Tongbao 17 (1966), 385-386. [3] J. R. Chen, On the representation of a larger even integer as the sum of a prime and the product of at most two primes, Sci. Sinica 16 (1973), 157-176.

Matthew D. Smith

[4] E. Szemerédi, On sets of integers containing no k elements in arithmetic progression”, Acta Arithmetica 27 (1975), 199–245 [5] P. Erdős, P. Turán, On some sequences of integers, Journal of the London Mathematical Society 11 (1936), 261–264. [6] B Green, T Tao, Arxiv preprint math.NT/0404188 (2004) arxiv.org [7] D Goldston, Y. Motohashi, J. Pintz, C. Y. Yildirim, Small gaps between primes exist, Proc. Japan Acad., 82A (2006), 61-65.

............................................................................................... University of Pittsburgh University of Pécs Pittsburgh, PA 15260 7624 Pécs Ifújsag utca 6 www.pitt.edu www.pte.hu wesselyn@gmail.com advisor: Dr. Kurdi Mária supervisor: Ms. Nagy Zsuzsanna

............................................................................................... There are four American Corners in Hungary. My placement is at the American Corner in Pécs where I take on numerous roles. This paper describes my roles and responsibilities at the American Corner in Pécs. I pay particular attention to advising-related activities and the neccessitiy for me to seek opportunities to advise students at the Amereican Corner. I also decribe the academic and cultural programs that I helped the American Corner in Pécs present during the 2007-2008 academic year. Finally, I enlisted the help of my American Corner and Fulbright colleagues from the other American Corner cities to give their input and feedback on what an American grantee can do for an American Corner. The objective of this paper is to share my experiences so that future Fulbright grantees to Hungary can know how they can better interact with American Corners in Hungary.

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AY 2007-2008 Being a Fulbright teaching assistant means that I get to wear different hats and take on different roles as a teacher, advisor, and more. My two placements are at the University of Pécs and the American Corner in Pécs. At the university, I teach two required undergraduate seminars: Contemporary American Culture and Listening and Speaking Skills. I am pround to say that I developed the syllabi and taught these courses with some guidance from my colleagues at the university, the Fulbright commission, and in the U.S. However, my other big role, and the focus of this paper, is my duty at the American Corner in Pécs. I often joke that I am the American at the American Corner. However, I quickly realized that beneath the toungue and cheek humor I applied lies a powerful truth. I am—for lack of a better term— the official American at the American Corner. Part of my grant says that I am an educational advisor, responsible to the American Corner in Pécs. However, I am much more than an educational advisor. I have been discussion leader, seminar leader, political analyst, brain-stormer and my favorite two roles: Dracula and Santa Claus. I make presentations at primary schools, speak at formal and informal occasions on bahalf of the corner, attend American movie screenings, and unofficially represent the corner at parties hosted by student groups at the university. Yet, these roles have little to do with educational advising. While I am ready and willing to be an educational advisor, the fact is that the American Corner in Pécs uses me in many different ways. In this paper I will describe my roles and

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Matthew Smith: Egy amerikai az Amerikai Kuckóban responsibilities at the American Corner in Pécs, then propose a few ways in which other Fulbrights or American fellows can help out at other American Corners. I enlisted the help of the four American Corner directors in Hungary, Fulbrights in American Corner cities, and colleages who work with American Corners in other countries to compile a brief look at what an American grantee (Fulbright, Peace Corps, English Language Fellow, etc…) can do for an American Corner and what an American Corner can do for them. Finally, I encourage all Fulbrights and American professionals working abroad to volunteer some of their time to an American Corner. There are over 500 American Corners worldwide, with new corners being added each month. Each American Corner is a partnership between local governments and institutions and U.S. Embassies. Partner institutions include, but are not limited to public libraries, local governments, and universities. U.S. Embassies provide material, technical support, and oversight of American Corners. This includes educational advising and testing resources, computers, televisions, projectors, and digital video conferencing equipment. The partner institutions provide financial support for staff, space for the American Corner, and budgetary oversight of corner activities. Aditionally, all partners take an active role in training and developing educational advising services at each American Corner. First, a short overview of Pécs and the American Corner in Pécs is necessary to understand the environment in which

I operate. Pécs is a small university city (population 110,000) located on the southern side of the Mecsek mountains. The University of Pécs is home to about 36,000 students and has 15 faculties. The city is widely known for its culture and education. In 2010, Pécs will be the European Capital of Culture along with Istambul, Turkey and Essen, Germany. Many Hungarians I talk to, speak very fondly of Pécs. Combined with generally warmer weather and more sunshine than other parts of Hungary, the region surrounding Pécs is a very pleasant place to live and work. With such a large city and University, it is an ideal location for an American Corner. The American Corner in Pécs, the first American Corner in Hungary was established in 2004. The other American Corners are located in Debrecen (opened 2005), Veszprém (opened 2006), and Eger (opened December 2007). The staff at the American Corner in Pécs includes Ms. Zsuzsanna Nagy, the director of the corner, and two project managers: Ms. Nora Cvikli and Mr. Peter Filák. The official partners of the AC in Pécs are the University of Pécs, the City of Pécs, and the Pécs 2010 public company, which is responsible for overseeing the European Capital of Culture program. The Pécs 2010 management company houses the American Corner in the city center of Pécs. The center of the city is an ideal location because the various faculties of the university are spread throughout the city, none being more than a 20 minute walk from the center. The American Corner has access to one large lecture hall and a smaller classroom for seminars, both

of which are shared with the company. Recently, the corner relocated its office from the first floor of the building to the gorund floor. The move resulted in more space for the library and a dedicated office for educational advising. Moving to the ground floor was also beneficial because the American Corner recieves more traffic than the other offices in the building. Along with the Euroean Union cultural information center, the American Corner is the busiest office in the Pécs 2010 building. The American Corner in Pécs runs a number of regular programs. These include a bi-weekly film screening based on a different theme each semester, a monthly “talk time” to discuss current events in English, and regular presentations from the local representatives of Camp Councilors USA. While I attend nearly all of the events at the American Corner, I have been most active in planning and preparing the “talk times”. I also write columns in the university newspaper, Univ Pécs, sponsored by the American Corner. During February and March I conducted a mini-series of edcuational advising seminars to help Hungarian students learn more about resume, cover letter and personal statement writing. In addition to the on-site activities at the corner, I have also helped and conducted a number of school visits and programs for primary and secondary schools. Although my Fulbright grant says that I am a teaching assistant and educational advisor, very little of my work at the American Corner involves educational advising. There are a few

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AY 2007-2008 factors that account for this. First, there is only spuradic visits of students seeking educational advice. Secondly, Nagy Zsuzsanna has been an educational advisor for her entire career. Since she is always in the office during normal hours, she is able to immediately help any student who needs advising services. There are times when Zsuzsanna will ask me to offer advice for aparticular student or program. Additionally Nora Cvikli is also being trained as an advisor. The American Corner has a partnership with Camp Councilors USA (CCUSA), an organization that links US summer camps with young Hungarians who can work for a summer abroad. CCUSA has two advisors/representatives that recuit and advise applicants from Pécs. A number of students who come for advising came to see the CCUSA representatives. Having three capable advisors gives the American Corner in Pécs a unique advantage in Hungary. It also means that talent can be devoted to other activities, which is the case with me. I began working with the American corner when I arrived in Pécs in September 2007. After discussing my interests and abilities with my colleagues, we agreed that I could be the moderator of the monthly “talk times”, discussion clubs that deal with U.S. current events. Evrry other week, I attended American film screenings, occasionally giving opening commentary. The topic for the fall film series was “Los Angeles: Cits of Angels”. At first, my participation at the American Corner was broad, but limited mainly to cultural programs and

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Matthew Smith: Egy amerikai az Amerikai Kuckóban entertainment, but I quickly found ways to share my educational experiences. November brought many opportunities to interact with Hungarian students and educators on a more professional basis. Nagy Zsuzsanna and I vitied the Ghandi high school to give a joint presentation about study in the U.S. Students at the Ghandi school are mainly Roma and are enrolled in beginning to intermediate English lessons. My portion of the presentation dealt with the typical day of a U.S. university student and included a lot of pictures and some humorous moments. I was very impressed with the facility and faculty at Ghandi. This was where I met another U.S. teacher, Jennifer Mara Holder who is living in Hungary as a State Department English Language fellow. Though I did not get to work directly with Jennifer, this visit to the Ghandi high school set up a very productive collaborative relationship that culmanated in a joint presentation with Jennifer at the “Secrets of Teaching English as a Foreign Language” conference in Narva, Estonia in March 2008. The third week of November was International Education Week. During this week, the American Corner had a number of programs designed to raise awareness about study abroad opportunities. I presented a segment on the Fulbright scholarship during a program entitled “Students of the World”, which included presenters from about 10 other organizations. This program was unique because it drew a number of students and educators together in a very informal setting to

discuss international study. There was no set schedule and plenty of refreshments. The program lasted over 2 hours, but all participants left with a great deal of knowledge about opportunities to travel, work and study abroad. I personally spoke with a number of participants about their aspiration to apply for a Fulbright. Upon reflecting about the application process to the Fulbright and many other prestigious scholarships, I concluded that I could help equip students to tackle the complicated application process for such scholarships. I wanted to focus on the written parts of an application because the ones I saw from Hungarian students did not have the extroverted style that I feel is necessary to win a competitive scholarship or internship. In January I approached Nagy Zsuzsanna about a series of advising seminars focusing on resumes, cover letters and personal statements. She was very enthusiastic about the idea and promptly worked out a schedule and made room arrangements for me. The goal of these seminars was to help students improve their already existing applcation materials or help them think differently about any new applications they wrote. I wanted to begin these seminars early in the semester when students would not be as busy as other times. Also, many scholarships and graduate schools have April deadlines for applications. I wanted to give students who attended the seminars plenty of time to revise and seek additional advice on their application materials. The seminars attracted between 9 and 14 participants each session. As a result of these seminars,

I took on a more aggressive position finding students who could use my help in constructing their applications. For these students, having me critique their application materials meant having an extra set of eyes and a native speaker give feedback. It was during the African American Week in February that I witnessed the American Corner in Pécs at its best. Though my planning and assistance were not always needed to prepare for this monumental week, I learned a great deal about my colleagues and their dedication during this time. The African Amercican week started with a photo exhibtion, film screening, and blues concert. This was followed up by three more concerts, a translation seminar, a lecture about the Civil Rights Movement, and a soul food dinner. All of the concerts were sold out and there was very good attendance for every event. The American Corner enlisted the help of the US Embassy in Budapest, a Fulbright professor from Debrecen, an American gospel singer living in Germany, and three fine Hungarian bands. Each of my colleagues had one or more events to coordinate— including making arrangements with different venues and scheduling performers. Cultural Affairs Officer Mark Tauber remarked that the even the US Embassy would not take on such an ambitious program for a week-long event. February and March demonstrated how well established the American Corner in Pécs is and how much support the US Embassy gives to it and the other Amercan Corners. Besides working with the American

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AY 2007-2008 Corner in Pécs, I witnessed the opening of a brand-new American Corner in Eger during December 2007 and visited an American Corner in Narva, Estonia during a conference in March 2008. On these two occasions I drew the conclusion that the American Corner in Pécs is a well-established, well-supported institution. Seeing two less established American Corners also made me think abot my contributions to the American Corner in Pécs and how much similar contributions might mean to other Amercan Corners. All of the American Corners in Hungary have at least one Fulbright grantee in its city. Not all of these grantees have a formal affiliation with their respectve corner, but each can and does contribute to the American Corner. Most of the time, contributions of Fulbrights are simple, but valuable. They are experts in their field and have personal interests that they can indulge with participation at an Amercican Corner. I decided to survey my American Corner colleagues and Fulbright colleagues located in American Corner cities to get a better idea of what we as American grantees can do for American Corners and what specific needs American Corners feel that we can meet.

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In addition to my more serious education endeavers at the American Corner, I had the pleasure to participate in a number of other programs. Some of my favorite times working with the American Corner came during special programs and holiday programs done for primary school students. For Halloween I donned a Dracua costume and taught fourth year students the finer points of pumpkin carving. In late February I hosted a station on the “Underground Railroad” at the same primary school during an African American Week program. To my pleasant surprise, the kids remembered me from the Halloween program. At Christmas time, I put on a different hat—and a different suit. I played Santa Claus at the American Corner Christmas party held at Café Dante in Pécs. The gathering was small, but those in attendence appreciated my hammed up performance.

Fulbright Grantees

2008-2009

Spectroscopic Investigation of Parsamian 21 and Development of Infrared Data Reduction Techniques David Westley Mi ller ...............................................................................................

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Abstract

I have spent my time with the Konkoly Infrared Space Astronomy Group (KISAG) working on two projects. The first is a spectroscopic investigation of Parsamian 21, a star whose classification as a FU Orionis type pre-main-sequence star was questioned in a recent paper (Quanz et. al. 2007) [1]. I estimate a spectral type, confirm the detection of a Lithium I absorption feature and discuss the implications on the star’s evolutionary status. I also report evidence that the star’s well documented bipolar jets are precessing. The second project is a highly technical one in which I furthered the development of a data reduction pipeline for data from the near-infrared CAIN II camera on the Carlos Sánchez Telescope at the Observatorio del Teide in the Canary Islands. New data reduction techniques were developed to correct saturated, over-exposed, images so that they can be reliably used for photometry. This effectively extends the dynamic range of the Mercury Cadmium Telluride (MgCdTe) detector in this camera, allowing relative photometry of stars much brighter than the standard stars around them, including many young stars of interest to KISAG.

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Spectroscopic Investigation of Parsamian 21 1.1 Introduction FU-Orionis systems are characterized by an increase in the brightness of a star by around 4 to 5 magnitudes (50 to 100-fold brighter) over a couple years and a decline back to quiescence over many decades. In fact, the initial outburst of the prototype star was so dramatic that for a time it was specualted that it may be some new kind of slow supernova. Now, the increase is attributed to light emitted in a disk of accreting material around the star, whose light output varies as it is related to the varying accretion of matter onto the star. A brief outline of star formation will illustrate the potential importance of this phenomenon in understanding star formation. Star formation could be very loosely described in the following manner: A

Westley Miller: Development of Infrared Data Reduction cloud of gas and dust contracts due to gravity until a protostar forms, onto which the cloud will continue to collapse so long as it is not prevented from doing so by the internal pressure of the gas, rotational momentum or the radiant energy of the forming star. Due to the rotational momentum of the cloud at the outset much of the gas and dust of the cloud will collapse into a disk orbiting around the star, rather than the star itself. In fact, the FU-Orionis phenomena is instrumental in depleting the diskâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rotational energy and allowing accretion. Young stars, from around ten-thousand to ten million years old, which are still embedded in the cloud from which they were born are necessarily faint or invisible in optical light which cannot eectively pass through the cloud. However, these objects are often quite bright in infrared (IR), as IR light from the star can pass through the cloud. IR light is also emitted from the disk around the star due to stellar heating and internal friction. Stars

A young star embedded deep in a dark nebula (evidenced by the total lack of background stars in left of the image as compared to the right) is accreting matter from a disc orbiting around it, and producing a jet which has plainly blasted through the nebula and now generates fluorescent knots of turbulent, ionized gas as it slams into the surrounding interstellar gas. These should not be confused with the re ection nebula at the bottom left which is not created by shocked, uorescing gas, but light reected from the central star o the wall of the cone-shaped cavity that has been carved out of the dark nebula by the jet. FIGURE 1:

which are making the transition from this period of IR excess to being optically visible, from pre-main-sequence to the main-sequence, from birth to life, are well represented by a class of low-mass stars, known as T-Tauri stars. These stars typically have masses around 2 Msun or less. They are known to undergo frequent, rapid and irregular variations in luminosity. They are often associated with Herbig-Haro objects, created by bipolar, supersonic jets which are created as the star accretes matter from the disk. One of the most famous and revealing images of this phenomena is shown in Figure 1. It is good to be familiar with the morphology of HH-47, as the same elements of this photogenic system (reection nebula, cone-shaped cavity, jets, etc.) can be identied in images of Parsamian 21, though perhaps less readily. A clear idea of what is seen in this picture allows a better understanding of the spectroscopic data presented in this paper. In this context it has been suggested that FU Orionis systems are T-Tauri systems which are undergoing a period of rapid accretion. The sudden increase in the luminosity of the system is attributed not to the star but to the inner part of the disk as it dumps mass onto the star at a much higher rate (10-4MSun = yr as opposed to 10-7) implying a much larger internal friction. In the course of such an outburst a star can accrete as much as 0:01MSun. As physical modeling of these accretion processes progresses observations of FU-Orionis outbursts can yield many useful constraints on the many variables involved in these complex systems which cannot otherwise be determined.

1.2 Observations and data reduction 1.2.1 Spectra The spectra were obtained with the 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory(APO) in New Mexico on October 13th, 2008. The Dual Imaging Spectrograph (DIS) was used with a 1.5 arcsecond slit and the R1200 and B1200 gratings producing a dispersion of 0.58 and 0.62 Angstroms/Pixel in the red and blue images, respectively. The spectral range covered was 3788-5050 and 6202-7382 Angstroms. Integration times were 15 minutes for each image, and four images were combined. Data were reduced using standard IRAF (cite) routines and techniques. Images were corrected for bias, ateld, and geometric distortion. They were wavelength calibrated using helium argon neon lamp exposures. One dimensional spectra with background regions subtracted were extracted for the star and two HH-Knots. It should be noted that a third HH-knot is embedded in the stellar spectrum, due to its proximity to the star. A standard star was observed and the spectra were corrected for wavelength dependence of detector sensitivity and reddening. The result is not expected to be truly spectrophotometric due to patchy cirrus, but should yield reliable emission and absorption line ratios.

A FAMOUS IMAGE OF HERBIG-HARO OBJECT 47.

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AY 2008-2009 1.2.2 GFP and HST Imagery

1.3 Results

Goddard Fabry-Perot (GFP) images obtained by this author and Carol Grady at APO on the 15th of May 2007 are presented. These data were already published in A. Kospal et. al. 2008 [2]. Images were obtained both in H-Alpha at 6563 Angstroms and at 6590 Angstroms. By subtracting the o-band images from the H-Alpha image we were able to image the HH-knots near the star. Imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), previously published in the same paper is also included as a useful gure. I refer you to A. Kospal et. al. 2008 [2] for more details of the data reduction on both. (The pre-print is available at http://arxiv. org/abs/0710.1431)

1.3.1 HST 2 Useful Texts

1. Solid State Physics, Ashcroft and Mermin 2. Principles of Magnetic Resonance, Charles P. Slichter 3. Semiconductors and Semimetals Volume 21, J. David Cohen and others 4. Semiconductor Devices Physics and Technology, S.M Sze

References

[1] Quanz S., Henning T., Bouwman J., van Boekel R., Juhasz A., Linz H.,Pontoppidan K. M., Lahuis F., 2007, ApJ, 668, 359 [2] A. Kospal, P. Abraham, D. Apai, D.R. Ardila, C. Grady, Th. Henning, A. Juhasz, D.W. Miller and A. Moor, 2008 MNRAS, 383, 1015-1028

Consumer Basket Analysis and Expected Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph Natalie Bowlus

............................................................................................... Swarthmore College 500 College Ave. Swarthmore, PA 19081 www.swarthmore.edu natalie.bowlus@gmail.com

Eötvös Loránd University Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C Budapest, Hungary www.elte.hu Adviser: Kati Vesztergombi

............................................................................................... This year, while a student in ELTE’s MSc in Mathematics program, I was involved in a project with a post-doctoral fellow in which we attempted to find a theoretical approach to the problem of the expected co-occurrence of two vertices of a bipartite graph. This paper details our work so far and our future projects, as well as my experiences as a master’s student and how they are related to the university’s larger transition under the Bologna Process.

1. Introduction For this past year, I have been enrolled in a Master’s program in Mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. While this in and of itself might not be extraordinary, my situation was unique in that I was enrolled in a program which did not exist until this fall. Rather, the English-language master’s program, of which I was a part, has been created as part of ELTE’s transition away from the traditional Hungarian five-year undergraduate degree and towards a more “European” system.

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AY 2008-2009 Initially, I had thought to focus my Fulbright research on this transition, and specifically how it impacted foreign-language programs. Through conversations with students and faculty in a variety of English-language programs, as well as my own experience, I have gained an understanding of the concerns of faculty members involved in programs, students who are enrolled, and the challenges faced in terms of attracting foreign students and providing them with an education. Most programs are also in a particular limbo period: that is, ELTE will not have actual Hungarian master’s students until next year. However, many of the questions I had posed myself before arriving turned out to be less interesting than I might have thought. To a large extent, the University’s transition is bureaucracy, and most of the programs were not nearly as developed as I had initially believed. While taking a course with a German post-doc in the Computational Biology department, I joined a research project concerning the expected co-occurrence of vertices of a bipartite graph, and specifically how to characterize it in a theoretical manner. This research has become much more professionally and intellectually fulfilling than my original plans. Through this work I learned important programming skills, gained an opportunity to publish and perhaps even opened the door to a job in the near future.

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Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph

2. Expected Co-Occurrence and the Netflix Prize 2.1. Background I initially came to this project through a happy coincidence that I attribute to both my visibility as a foreign student at ELTE and the difficulties associated with designing my curriculum. Accidental though it might have been, this research has become one of the most interesting and formational aspects of my year in Hungary. Not only has it opened a door to computer science, a field I was interested in before my arrival but in which I have had little experience; through this research, I have gained the opportunity to publish an academic paper, as well as learned valuable skills which should open up career prospects in the near future. Nina Zweig, a German post-doctorate student in the Computational Biology Department, was offering a class in the fall broadly targeted at mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists; furthermore, it was being offered in English. In short, it seemed a match made in heaven. One thing led to another, and I was offered to take part in a project resting at the intersection of discrete mathematics and computer science. Our problem of determining the expected co-occurrence of two vertices stems from the Netflix prize, and is best explained in this context. Netflix, the well-known online move rental company, maintains a database of

users and the films they have rented. The prize itself – a cool million dollars – is offered to the team or individual who manages to develop a more accurate means of predicting how much someone will enjoy a movie based on their prior rental choices. Currently, this is done by looking at other users who have rented the same movies as the user in question. However, the question of expected co-occurrence appears in many other fields as well, including economics, biology, and pure mathematics – generally speaking, whenever there are two sets of objects (renters and films, bird species and habitats) and scientists curious over whether two objects co-occurring (birds sharing a habitat, for example) is statistically significant. The current formula for determining the expected co-occurrence of two objects, known as the independence model, is frequently far-off from data achieved in an experimental setting, although this does not prevent it from being widely used. Its flaw is that it assumes that the co-occurrence of any two vertices is based only on their respective degrees. It is easy to construct a counterexample, albeit not one that is likely to be found in real-life. Our goal was to show first that the independence model is almost always incorrect, and then to characterize the difference between the independence model’s prediction and the actual expected co-occurrence of any two vertices in a graph. We hoped to find both a theoretical solution and compelling experimental evidence. Although a complete and definitely theory currently

remains out of our grasp, we have hope that experimental data will ultimately support our hypothesis.

2.2. Definitions The most efficient way of handling the data we are interested in is by considering it as a bipartite graph. A graph is a collection of vertices and edges. It can be represented visually in such a way that vertices are drawn as points, while edges are lines which connect two vertices. This representation will be used later in the text. A second useful way of representing a graph is known as the adjacency matrix representation. Here the graph is depicted as a matrix in which the rows and columns are labeled by the vertices of the graph. The a i, j entry of the matrix is 1 if vertex vi is connected by an edge to vertex vj and 0 if not. Adjacency matrices have the advantage of being easily stored and manipulated by a computer. For a given vertex of the graph v, the neighbors of v are the vertices which are connected to it by an edge. If vw is an edge in a graph G, we say that v and w are adjacent. In the adjacency matrix representation of a graph, the neighbors of vi correspond to the set of columns which contain a 1 in row i. The degree of a given vertex is the number of neighbors it has. We can also talk about the degree sequence of a graph, which is a list in non-decreasing order of the degrees of all the vertices in the graph. For example, {3,2,2,1} is a possible degree sequence for at least one graph. It is important to note that degree sequences are generally

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AY 2008-2009 not unique; that is, many graphs can have identical degree sequences. For this project, we consider a special class of graphs, known as bipartite graphs. What makes these graphs special is that their vertex set can be partitioned into two classes in such a way that all edges connect vertices from different classes. For example, the Netflix data can be stored as a bipartite graph, where one class of vertices represents the users and the other, the films they check out. An edge connects each user to every film he or she has rented. When thought of this way, it would be silly for an edge to connect two users or two films. From here on out, we will use L={l1,...,ln} and R={r1,...,rn} to denote the vertex sets of a bipartite graph. Except where it might lead to confusion, L and R will also denote degree sequences of a bipartite graph. The number of vertices in L and R will be denoted by l and r, respectively. Given a degree sequence, a graph is feasible if it has the given degree sequences and has no self-loops (where a vertex is connected to itself) and multiple edges (i.e., when two vertices v and w are connected to each other by two or more edges). Let G (L,R) be the set of all feasible graphs with fixed degree sequences L and R, that is, the set of all graphs with the same given degree sequence. Let G denote an instance of a graph in G and EG denote the edge set of a given graph G. G(L,R) is feasible if there exists at least one bipartite graph G without multiple edges and with degree sequences L and R. Let N(v) denote the set of neighbors of vertex v. For any two vertices vi and vj, their co-occurrence, denoted co(vi, vj) is

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Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph defined as: co(vi , vj )= |N(vi ) ∩ N(vj )| , i.e., the number of their common neighbors. Thus, if any graph G in G(L,R) is drawn uniformly at random, the expected co-occurrence Eco(vi, vj) of vi and vj is given by:

2.3. The Faultiness of the Independence Model The key assumption behind the independence model is that a vertex L is equally likely to be connected to any vertex in R; that is,

For the independence model to be an accurate predictor of expected co-occurrence, the sum it predicts should equal the sum we have explicitly calculated; however, this is far from the case. The independence model gives the sum .

The heart of our theoretical approach concerns the function we have called move, which is defined as follows. Given vertices v and w in L and x and y in R such that the degree of x is greater than or equal to the degree of y, which is greater than or equal to 1, if vx and wy are in EG and wx is not, then delete the edge wy and replace it with wx. We call x and y a moveable vertex pair. The general idea behind swap is to maintain the number of edges in the graph while moving edges from vertices with low degrees to those with higher degrees.

FIGURE 1. MOVE AND THE RESULTING GRAPH.

Under move the degree of x is increased by one and the degree of y is decreased by one. The degrees of other vertices in L and R are unchanged. For any feasible move, a graph G in G(L,R) is mapped to a graph G’ in G(L,R’), where R’ is the degree sequence corresponding to R after moving an edge from y to x.

Thus the probability of any two vertices in L sharing a common neighbor in R is given by the sum

Therefore, to sum over all possible pairs (v,w) L requires the double sum

Note that in our case the pair (v,w) is identical to the pair (w,v), and we only want to count each pair once. As the above equations illustrate, the assumptions made by the independence model makes calculating the probability that any two vertices co-occur rather straightforward; hence its popularity in the literature. Generally speaking, calculating the “actual” expected co-occurrence is substantially more difficult. However, in the special case in which all vertices in L have the same degree and all vertices in R have the same degree (note that it needn’t be true that deg(l)=deg(r)), we can explicitly calculate the expected co-occurrence of all pairs (vi,vj). In this case,

From this example we can conclude that the independence model is frequently misleading with respect to the actual expected co-occurrence of any vertex pair (vi, vj), although the actually discrepancy between the independence model and the actual expected co-occurrence depends on the specific degree sequences L and R.

2.4. Bounding the Expected Co-Occurrence Function The expected co-occurrence function has four parameters: |R|, |L|, deg(v) and deg(w) for vertices v and w in L. In order to be able to measure the discrepancy between the independence model and the actual expected co-occurrence for a given graph, in our experiments we will fix |R|, |L| and deg(v) while varying deg(w). Having done this, we can plot expected co-occurrence on a graph.

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AY 2008-2009 FIGURE 2. PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION OF THE BOUNDS ON ECO(V,W), WITH THE INDEPENDENCE MODEL’S PREDICTION ALONG THE DIAGONAL.

Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph vertex w in L, the expected co-occurrence of v and w will remain strictly greater or strictly less than that predicted by the independence model.

2.5. The Move Function: A Preliminary Theoretic Approach

Let the x-axis be labeled by deg(w) and the y-axis by the expected co-occurrence of v and w. If we let n=|L|, then the lower bound we have for Eco(v,w) is Ω(deg(v),deg(w)) = max{n-deg(v)-deg(w),0}. If deg(v)+deg(w) is less than or equal to n, then a feasible graph exists in which v and w have no common neighbors; deg(v)+deg(w) since expected co-occurrence cannot be negative, it equals 0. However, if is greater than n, it is necessary that they co-occur at at least |n-deg(v)-deg(w)| vertices. The upper bound, on the other hand, is given by O(deg(v),deg(w)=min{ deg(v),deg(w)}. It is relatively clear that the number of vertices at which v and w might co-occur is constrained by whichever of the two has smaller degree. The expected co-occurrence predicted by the independence model,

, is on the diagonal of this trapezoid. Our hypothesis is that for a fixed |R|, |L| and deg(v), if we vary the degree of a

With the move function, defined in Section 2.2, we hoped to obtain a theoretical bound on the expected co-occurrence of two vertices, thus demonstrating that it is strictly greater or less than the expected co-occurrence predicted by the independence model. The approach we took was to first prove that move is surjective, as shown below. Our next goal was to show that move strictly increases the expected co-occurrence of any two vertices. While we could not prove this definitively, we did find arguments which supported this conjecture. Our final step would be to repeatedly use move to go from G(L,R) to G(L,R’), from G(L,R’) to G(L,R’’) and so forth until there are no longer any moveable edges. At this point, we would either explicitly calculate the different between the expected co-occurrence and the independence model’s prediction or, more likely, prove that the expected co-occurrence remained strictly greater than or less than the independence model’s prediction.

Theorem: The function move from G(L,R) to G(L,R’) is surjective85. We would like to show that if there exists a G which maps to G’ in G(L,R’) then for any Gˆ in G(L,R’), there is some element in ˆ(L,R) which maps to it. Call G’ the witness and let ri and rj be the two vertices in G’ whose degree is different in R’ from that in R. Without loss of generality, let the degree of ri in G’ be equal to one more than the degree of ri in G and the degree of rj in G’ be one less than its degree in G. Furthermore, we can say that ri> rj in G’. All other vertices in R and L have the same degree in both G(L,R) and G(L,R’). Because the deg of ri is greater than the degree of rj in G(L,R’), there exists a vertex l such that l ri in EGˆ and l rj is not in EGˆ for any Gˆ in G(L,R’). For this reason, we can delete edge l ri and replace it with an edge l rj in order to obtain a graph G in G(L,R). This is indeed a feasible graph because our choice of vertex l insures that we would have no multiple edges. Therefore swap is surjective, as desired. □ The idea behind move is that by moving an edge from a lower-degree vertex to a higher-degree one we raise the expected co-occurrence (Eco) of many vertex pairs and lower the expected co-occurrence of only a few such the net effect should be that any pair of vertices v and w have a higher Eco in G(L,R’) than in G(L,R). 85

For a function f: V -›W to be surjective means that for every ele-

However, move is not without its limitations. First we observe that not every feasible G(L,R’) can be mapped to by the move operation; for example, the graph with degree sequences L and R equal {1,1,1,1}. We also know that if ri and rj are vertices which have been acted on by move than then in G’ the difference between their degrees is greater than or equal to two. Thus any graph G such that the difference of deg(ri) and deg(rj) is less than or equal to one for all pairs (ri, rj) is not mapped to by move. We haven’t progressed far enough to know whether or not these drawbacks significantly limit our definition of move; it could be that we can provide an accurate enough characterization of the limitations of the independence model without needing to map to such specialized graphs. Another option we have considered is allowing for edges to be swapped away from vertices with degree 1. If we determine that these vertices “disappear” after they lose their edge, then we encounter the problem that the independence model’s prediction, which takes into consideration the cardinality of the vertex set R, will change, thus defeating the purpose of our theoretical approach to the problem, described below. It could be that we might continue to count these vertices among the elements of R, although as has already mentioned, we are not in a position yet to say whether or not this would be advantageous. It is worth noting also that the move operation is flexible insofar as different choices of vertex pairs (ri,rj) will lead to different feasible families of graphs

ment w in W, there is some v in V such that f(v)=w.

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AY 2008-2009 G(L,R’). Additionally, two different degree sequences G(L,R)1 and G(L,R)2 can map via move to the same G(L,R’).

FIGURE 3. TWO DIFFERENT DEGREE SEQUENCES WHICH MAP TO THE SAME SET OF GRAPHS.

Let (ri,rj) be a fixed pair of vertices such that move decreases the degree of rj and increases the degree of ri. Then the cardinality of G(L,R’) shrinks relative to the cardinality of G(L,R) if there exists a G in G(L,R) such that no moveable edges exist; that is, N(rj) is a subset of N(ri). In other words, in the case that every vertex in L which is connected to rj is also connected to ri, we cannot move an edge from rj to ri without creating a multiple edge and therefore an unfeasible graph. A second circumstance in which the cardinality of G(L,R’) would be smaller than the cardinality of G(L,R) would be if there were two instances of graphs G1 and G2 in G(L,R) such that they map to the same G’.

FIGURE 4. TWO DIFFERENT INSTANCES OF GRAPHS WHICH MAP TO THE SAME G’.

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Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph With that in mind, let us examine how move affects the Eco of any vertex pair. For example, let x be a vertex in L and let r1 and r2 be vertices in R such that x r1 is an edge in a graph G and (ri,rj) is a swappable vertex pair. In G’ x r1 is no longer contained in the edge set but x r2 is. To understand the expected co-occurrence of any pair of vertices in G’, we look at the four possible cases. Case 1. In the first case, the co-occurrence of any two vertices v1 and v2 which are not adjacent to r1 or r2 is the same in both G and G’, since neither is adjacent to a vertex which is increased or decreased in degree. Case 2. Now examine a vertex v which is connected to both r1 and r2. In this case the expected co-occurrence of v with any vertex doesn’t change either. For vertices w not equal to x this follows simply from the fact that N(w) is unchanged. The only vertex which might cause us problems is x, but while v and x no longer co-occur at r1, they do at r1. Therefore co(v,x) is also the same in G and G’. Case 3. For all vertices which are connected to r2 but not to r1 their co-occurrence with x is increased by one. Case 4. The only time the co-occurrence of two vertices decreases is if a vertex v is connected r1 and not r2. Here the co-occurrence of v and x is one less in G’ than in G. However, since there are at most deg(r1)-1 such vertices, and because of the assumption that the degree of r1 is less than or equal to the degree of r2, in a given graph G the number of vertices with a decreased degree is strictly less than the number whose degree increases. For this reason, the co-occurrence over

all pairs in G’ is strictly greater than that of G. Furthermore, we conjecture that for all vertices v which have a decreased co-occurrence in G’, there exists another feasible graph in G(L,R’) where the co-occurrence of v increases correspondingly. Thus in theory, by summing over all feasible graphs in G(L,R’) we would see a net increase in Eco. On the other hand, the independence model’s prediction does not change. Our idea is to being with a graph in which explicit computations and the independence model yield the same expected co-occurrence. Next, we would repeatedly use move to map G(L,R) to G(L,R’) to G(L,Rn), a graph with no move feasible edges. We could calculate the expected co-occurrence of a vertex pair in G(L,Rn) and in this way obtain an idea of the possible gap between the independence model and the actual expected co-occurrence of vertices in G(L,Rn).

2.6. Future Avenues of Study From this point, our theoretical approach reached an impasse. While some work has been done on calculating the number of feasible graphs associated with a given degree sequence, it is enormously difficult. For this reason, although the surjectivity of move implies that the cardinality of G(L,R’) is less than or equal to the cardinality of G(L,R),

it is difficult to impossible to explicitly calculate the cardinality of either. Furthermore, although we conjecture that under move the expected co-occurrence of a vertex pair (v,w) in G(L,R’) should be greater than or equal to their expected co-occurrence in G(L,R), we have yet to determine either a rigorous theoretical or computational approach to verifying this. However, this doesn’t settle the issue yet. Instead, in the coming months we hope to change tactics and try for an experimental approach. While at the moment it remains extremely difficult to calculate the expected co-occurrence of any two vertices v and w, it can be estimated. For our experiments, we will use the Netflix data, mentioned in Section 2.1. First, we will select two vertices and compute their actual co-occurrence; this merely requires examining the adjacency matrix representation of the data. Second, we will generate a large number of random graphs using a Markov chain. A Markov chain is a random walk through the space of all graphs of fixed degree sequences R and L. What the algorithm does is switch edges thousands of times until it obtains a graph that is in theory randomly selected from the set of all feasible graphs. In this newly obtained graph we measure the co-occurrence of the same two vertices v and w. We will do this for approximately 10,000 random graphs, each obtained with a Markov chain starting at our original graph. While this does not amount to a complete sampling of all feasible graphs, it should provide a good approximation. Using this data, we will

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AY 2008-2009 test our hypothesis that the independence method strictly over- or under-estimates the expected co-occurrence of any two vertices. Whether it is an over- or under-estimation should depend on the degrees of the vertices we select. If the degrees of v and w are significantly greater than average, we predict that the expected co-occurrence should be strictly greater; if their degrees are significantly less than the average, the expected co-occurrence should be strictly smaller; and if their degrees are in the middle, it could go either way.

3. My Experience at ELTE 3.1. Foreign-language Programs and the Bologna Process

Although at first brush the two seem unrelated, my work in the MSc in Mathematics program is intimately tied to the University’s general transition under the Bologna Process. I was initially interested in examining this and, more specifically, how it related to foreign-language programs at ELTE, as part of my Fulbright proposal. As it turned out, my research went in a somewhat different direction; however, I think my experiences at the university are indicative of the larger successes and challenges faced by students and faculty at ELTE during this transitional time. Before 2006, Hungarian higher education was on a 5-3 system, meaning that a students’ undergraduate degree lasted five years, after which they received a degree

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Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph equivalent in most countries to a master’s. In contrast, under Bologna these five years are split into a three-year bachelor degree and a two-year master’s. In 2006, ELTE ushered in its first class of students who will graduate in the Bologna system. They are set to graduate this summer; the fall will represent the start of the first class of Hungarian master’s students. Last year and now, I saw this transition as a window of opportunity for departments to broaden their programs so as to include English-language master’s students. There are a number of reasons it would be desirable for a large research university such as ELTE to attract foreign students. It would increase knowledge of the university abroad, outside of the specific research circles in which it is already known; it would increase the diversity of the student body; it would further cross-cultural education between Hungary and other countries; it would be an opportunity for Hungarian students to practice English, something especially important for those interested in continuing in the natural sciences; and, perhaps most importantly, foreign students’ tuition would provide a much-needed source of income. Before I came to Hungary, I had little idea what to expect regarding the prevalence of ELTE’s English-language programs or the number of full-time foreign students at the University. As such, much of my research, especially in the first few months, involved finding out what I didn’t know. For example, I knew coming in that the MSc in Mathematics was relatively new, although I didn’t

realize until I arrived that this was actually only the first year. I also had no idea how large it might be – as it happens, there are currently two students, including myself. The fact of the matter is that the lack of Hungarian master’s students puts the state of master’s programs in a strange limbo: currently, they have foreign students or none at all. For me at least, this also means that in some sense my program has been in somewhat of a test phase. It is unclear to what extent our curriculum this year will be related to the one used next year for all (Hungarian and foreign) master’s students, or whether it will become more flexible. My final realization, perhaps most important of all, was that the size of master’s programs is almost entirely dependent on the individual department. ELTE’s website – the main source of information for prospective foreign students – currently offers ten different master’s programs in English: Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth Sciences, English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Social Sciences, and Teaching English as a Second Language. However, some programs have had numerous full-time foreign students for years – most notably the Biology and Psychology programs – while others have merely one or two. And, most surprising to me, some programs are not only without full-time foreign students but also many members of the faculty disinclined to teach in English, perhaps largely due to a lack of financial incentives for them to take on the extra workload. To varying degrees all programs struggle to a greater or lesser

extent by the same problems: inadequate advertising, difficulty fitting students into the existing curriculum, and lack of a critical mass of students to make a program financially and practically viable. My experience was also shaped by such concerns.

3.2. My Experiences in Mathematics Although I had first heard about ELTE through professors who teach there, I found out about the English-language MSc program through browsing the website, much like the other foreign student currently in the program. In fact, almost every student I talked to came to ELTE either randomly or because of personal connections to Hungary, rather than because of knowledge of the university itself. Corresponding with various professors, I was told the math program was very new – only upon arriving did I find out that it is actually in its first year. Perhaps because the program is advertised largely through the internet, or because we are the first non-Erasmus foreign students, or because we are the first students in the master’s program, many of the students I encountered in the first few weeks were unaware that there were foreign (or master’s) students at ELTE at all, although they seemed for the most part pleasantly surprised. Some faculty members were also unaware of the existence of a foreign-language master’s program.

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AY 2008-2009 Like the many of the new master’s programs at ELTE, our curriculum is based on the last two years of the old Hungarian degree. To graduate, students are expected to complete three modules in different fields, where a module consists of approximately seven courses. A culminating thesis is also required, although these two alone are not enough to complete the degree – some additional coursework is also required in order to meet the required number of credits. When I was applying for the program, students were given the option of completing the degree in two or three years, although I am not sure if this will still be available to Hungarian students starting next year. Not every course is offered every year, even in Hungarian. Determining which courses can be offered in English is the job of a professor specifically in charge of foreign students. Although I have heard that a certain number of courses are officially offered in English, practically speaking, if there aren’t foreign students in the classes, lectures are in Hungarian. As one professor put it, “It’s ridiculous – I speak Hungarian, the students speak Hungarian. Why teach in English?” Whether the course will be taught in English to accommodate a foreign student is a decision left up to the professor and the other students. Should everyone agree, than a class can be taught in English. In my experience in the math department, professors have been generally more than willing to teach in English, for which I am grateful. Through my conversations with other students and professors in various departments, I have

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Natalie Bowlus: Analysis and Co-Occurance of a Bipartite Graph come to understand that their coursework consist almost entirely of one-on-one reading courses with professors (in the case of the smaller programs) or courses entirely for English-speaking students (Psychology, for example). In either case, the end result is general isolation from the Hungarian students at the university. I feel that were it not for my lecture courses, meeting Hungarian students at the university would have been substantially more difficult. However, my curriculum has been supplemented with reading courses, when courses were not offered in a semester when I needed them, or when courses officially in English overlapped. Although I would not chose to have a curriculum composed entirely of reading courses, these one-on-one opportunities with professors have been among the highlights of my studies. I think in very few places would a master’s student have the face-to-face time I have with faculty. In my case, reading courses have also served a third purpose: giving me access to material which would, generally speaking, be covered in the Hungarian students’ BSc. During this year, I was extremely aware of the fact that the American liberal arts education is radically different from the education my compatriots are receiving in Hungary and other parts of Europe. While at times, explaining my educational background proved an invigorating challenge – I was even invited to give a presentation at the English-language segment of the 2008 Varga Tamás Day Conference, held at ELTE. On the other hand, I was painfully

aware approximately every other week that, while I feel I made the best of my undergraduate education and received a very sound basis in mathematics as well as other subjects, I have less of a background in mathematical than fourth- and fifth-year students my age. This occasionally made it difficult to fill my schedule, and meant even in some cases that I was given a course equivalent to what a Hungarian student might encounter in his or her third year. To some extent, this is a consequence of my personal educational choices, and the differences in the university systems of Hungary and the United States; however, I think it is a problem that will be encountered at ELTE with increasing frequency. While I have no way of knowing now how many foreign students might attend ELTE’s math program in the near future, there will certainly be a huge influx of Hungarian students. Many of them will come from ELTE, meaning faculty can still expect students to know a body of set material; however, many others will come from smaller universities which cannot be expected to maintain full master’s programs after the Bologna transition. For these students, it might be necessary to increase the flexibility of the master’s programs and, for example, offer courses previously restricted to bachelor’s students. It seems for now that although a master’s curriculum is currently in place, it will take some years of adjusting to come up with a program which meets students’ various needs. Overall, however, my experience was

positive. Although at times navigating a university system primarily in another language was frustrating (in particular, figuring out the convoluted bureaucracy), I received help unstintingly from students and professors. I was actually surprised at times how concerned about my well-being they could be. When I first arrived, I was frequently asked whether or not I had friends, and whether I was settling in alright. Later, I was offered help finding a doctor, calling the BKV to complain about misbehaving controllers, and (most importantly), translating volumes of mathematics or other material into English. I hope for my part that I was also able to contribute to the math department, whether by trying to explain the American healthcare system, talking politics, editing graduate school applications, or just by being a native English speaker.

4. Conclusion My time in Hungary this year has been overwhelmingly positive. While our research on expected co-occurrence has moved in fits and starts, I am optimistic about our results so far. I believe that Nina and I have several further avenues for study in the near future, as well as a good chance of combining this work with other existing results to produce a conference paper publishable some time in the next year. Furthermore, aside from the aforementioned research, my time as a student at ELTE has been both personally and intellectually fruitful. Although I encountered occasional frustration on

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account of being one of only a handful of full-time foreign students, these were far outweighed by the benefits: the huge increase in my knowledge, connections I’ve made with students and professors, as well as the benefits incurred by standing out in a crowd. Regarding the Bologna Process itself, I feel that much of the changes will come down to “only time will tell.” It seems unlikely that foreign-language programs will expand dramatically unless more fundamental changes take place; however, hopefully a few years’ time will assuage doubts of professors regarding the new curriculum. I would like to thank several individuals in particular: Kati Vesztergombi, Gyula Károlyi, and Nina Zweig, for advising me in official and unofficial capacities; András Gács and Zoltán Kiraly, for the time they spent attempting to educate me; and the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission for making this entire opportunity possible.

Bibliography Eötvös Loránd University. 17 Apr. 2009 <http://www.elte.hu/ en> Gionis A, Mannila H, Mielikäinen T, Tsaparas P (2006) Assessing data mining results via swap randomization. In: Proceeding of the 2006 ACM SIGKDD international

Romani Education in Hungary: History, Observances and Experiences

conference on knowledge discovery in databases (KDD’06), Philadelphia, PA, pp 167–176 Netflix Prize. Netflix. 17 Apr. 2009 <http://www.netflixprize.

Eric Lopez

com/index>. Zweig, Nina and Christian Groth. Experimental and theoretical analysis of the expected co-occurrence in market baskets containing single-buy items. Pending Publication.

............................................................................................... Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11549-1000 www.Hofstra.edu eric_lopez_82@yahoo.com Advisor: Dr. Linda Longmire

Central European University Nádor utca, 09., 1051Budapest, Hungary Advisor: Dr. Anton Palinka

............................................................................................... As a former advocate for students in Harlem, New York, I arrived in Hungary with a set of expectations regarding the educational injustices faced by the Roma. However, my experiences could not have prepared me for what I would observe and experience during my time there. Researching articles, studies, reports, and statistics has yielded valuable information on the Roma, yet it was my observations at the Dr. Ambedkar School in Sajokaza and Hegymeg that clearly illustrated the challenges and issues faced by students, parents, educators, and advocates in Hungary today. After nearly one year of observation and research on the educational inequalities faced by the Roma in Hungary, one thing has become increasingly clear; Hungary’s efforts towards educational equality must rely more on Roma communities and organizations if it is to achieve harmonious integration between its Roma and non-Roma citizens. My observations at the Dr. Ambedkar School in the northern county of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, allowed me the unique opportunity to draw several comparisons between Hungary’s efforts towards providing a more inclusive educational environment for its Roma minority and some of the harsh realities faced by its most economically deprived Roma communities.

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Introduction For nearly 600 years, Hungary’s citizens have struggled with the integration of its Roma minority. Continued efforts at resolving issues stemming from failed attempts and flawed solutions have only recently led to a serious consideration of education as a means of achieving this goal. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies and grassroots movements have initiated projects aimed at increasing educational access for Hungary’s Roma. One of the leading institutions heading this new approach is the Dr. Ambedkar School in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County. In just two years, the Dr. Ambedkar School has turned itself into a major social forum for: a. race issues in the Hungarian educational system; b. reflections on the Roma’s migration thru Europe, particularly into Hungary; c. re-connections between the Roma and their Indian heritage; d. and the study and application of inspirational historic movements and figures. Though the school’s work is of landmark significance, its success is dwarfed by the everyday realities of its students. Already considered “dissatisfactory” by mainstream Hungarian society, the Dr. Ambedkar students have the added disadvantage of being deprived of most forms of social mobility. The school’s students (along with

Eric Lopez: Romani Education: Observances and Experiences most of Hungary’s Roma) have been historically denied access to traditional educational resources which has fueled existing stigmas, discrimination, and prejudice stemming from a pervasive ignorance of the Roma’s economic hardships, history, and aspirations to continue contributing positively to world culture. In the following pages, I will attempt to show how historical circumstances and contemporary politics have led to the Roma’s current educational situation and what the Dr. Ambedkar School has done to counter some of the resulting negative trends.

Issues Within the Hungarian Educational System On March 30th, 2008 the Republic of Hungary and its people were recognized by the Dutch civic organization “Unity is Strength” for their achievements in the social integration of its Roma minority.1 While such international recognition for its efforts is fairly recent, Hungary’s struggles, achievements and failures with Roma integration are not. Efforts towards peaceful integration in Hungary go back as far as the Roma’s first contact with Hungarians in the 15th century. They had achieved relative prosperity among their Hungarian neighbors as merchants and smiths, until 1

Roma Education Fund, Decade for Roma Inclusion 2005-20015,

Hungary Awarded “Certificate For Diversity”, April 16, 2008, available at http://www.romadecade.org/index.php?content=252

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failures to reconcile differences between the two developed into cultural conflicts. Increasingly violent confrontations resulted in some of the first institutional policies aimed at social integration in the late 17th and early 18th century. Ever since, Roma integration has been a contentiously debated political issue between those defending Romani cultural autonomy and those who view the Roma as a threat to the pan-Hungarian identity. Taking center stage at many of these debates is the socio-economic gap between Hungarians and Roma, with criminality, unemployment, housing, and education often given as explanations or causes for it. Of these, education is widely recognized as an area of improvement most likely to have a greater long-term positive impact on both Roma and Hungarian communities alike. Nevertheless, Hungary’s educational system still has many defects to overcome before it can take on an important role in the struggle for Roma equality.

Effects of Poverty on Equal Access in Hungary Hungary’s lack of attention and lack of governmental support for the educational needs of impoverished Roma communities highlights a systemic failure to consider how significant an impact poverty can have on equal access to education. To make matters worse, the declining socio-economic status of many Roma communities has left them politically vulnerable and unable to advocate for the educational needs that would grant them equal access.

The economic situation of Hungary’s Roma has been steadily worsening since the early 90’s.2 Between 1991 and 2001 the percentage of Roma considered to be poor had doubled.3 In that time, the percentage of Roma living in extreme poverty had risen to approximately one-third of Hungary’s total Roma population.4 As the number of impoverished Roma continues to grow, social welfare programs remain persistent in their focus on dependency creating assistance programs while access to quality education remains a neglected resource.5 Despite receiving government stipends for meals and other cost of living expenses, impoverished Roma families still struggle for access to educational facilities as early as pre-school. Inaccessibly distant schools are a financial burden for indigent families living in Roma settlements due to the high costs associated with transportation, while those with access to nearby schools are usually turned away because of overcrowding resulting from rapid over utilization of this scarce resource.6 2

Roma Education Fund, Advancing Education of Roma in Hungary:

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions, 2007, pg 8 3

Roma Education Fund, Advancing Education of Roma in Hungary:

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions, 2007, pg 8 4

Roma Education Fund, Advancing Education of Roma in Hungary:

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions, 2007, pg 8 5

United Nations Development Program, The Roma in Central

and Eastern Europe: Avoiding the Dependency Trap, A Regional Human Development Report, available at http://roma.undp.sk/reports.php?parent_id=1&id=182&scroll=182 6

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 88

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AY 2008-2009 Transportation related expenses, overcrowding issues and other access barriers disproportionately affect the number of impoverished Roma children able to attend pre-school at an early age. In most cases, children unable to attend pre-school by the age of five are automatically referred to special evaluation boards to test their school readiness and detect the presence of intellectual disabilities.7 Due to a lack of knowledge in the school placement process and their own educational disadvantages, Roma parents often find themselves intimidated by the expertise of evaluation board members, resulting in their decisions to send Roma children to specialized schools to usually go unchallenged.8 Roma children placed into these schools follow a reduced curriculum and receive an education that is, by most standards, of lower quality.9 The quality of education received by many Roma children in these specialized schools increases the odds that they will lack the necessary tools to achieve any socio-economic mobility and limits their chances for peaceful integration with the rest of Hungarian society. The difficulties impoverished Roma families face attempting to gain access to fair and equal education, places them in a seemingly inevitable cycle of perpetual isolation, disadvantage

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences and marginalization.10 Those fortunate enough to have some access to educational resources are likely to have to struggle with segregated schools and classes, non-welcoming school management, low quality education, teachers that are untrained to work in multicultural settings, and professional committees assigned to make “special education” placement decisions, among other economic and social barriers.11

School Segregation in Hungary The continued placement of Roma children into specialized schools and segregated classrooms are additional examples of the systemic exclusion of the Roma from fair and equal access to educational resources and facilities. Roma students attending specialized schools or segregated classes are unlikely to re-enter the mainstream educational system or be prepared for competitive jobs in Hungary’s labor market.12 To break the cycle of exclusion created by institutionalized forms of segregation and improve the socio-economic situation of the Roma, the Hungarian educational system must make provisions for the elimination of the systemic causes leading to racially based discrimination by including Roma 10

Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and integration of Roma

children in mainstream education from the very beginning.13 Unfortunately, not all forms of segregation in the Hungarian educational system are as overt as its specialized schools and classes. It is also common for Roma children to be designated as private or study-at-home students should teachers and administrators deem their behavior to be a disruption in their classes.14 While study-at-home students are able to take the examinations required of them to obtain their secondary school diplomas, few of them do, since academic performance decreases dramatically once they no longer have access to traditional educational resources and facilities.15 A disproportionate number of Roma students do not obtain their diplomas due to the prohibitive study-at-home designation. Albeit, while some of these students may be classified as study-at-home for reasons arising from a genuine concern for unaddressed behavioral issues, others may be victims of a discriminatory and corrupt financing system that facilitates educational segregation. Some of Hungary’s schools currently operate on a system of financing known as per-capita funding.16 In this system,

financial incentives are given to schools that practice strategies of retention that may maintain segregated and specialized schools disproportionately populated with Roma students.17 As a means of financing fair and equal education, per-capita financing has already proven to be ineffective.18 Several political and grassroots movements have tried to reverse the effects of this system but to no avail. Since there is currently little oversight of the enrollment procedures practiced by schools, and the collection of information based on ethnicity has been officially prohibited by the government since 1993, collecting the necessary data to effectively combat the trends created by this form of funding has been difficult.19 Nonexistent or flawed systems for monitoring and evaluating the enrollment in and financing of Hungary’s schools have led to the current crisis in Hungary’s educational system.20 Realizing this, Hungary’s lawmakers have attempted to create new laws or make changes to existing ones, in order to help bring about educational equality for Hungary’s Roma. Since 2002, most reforms to the Hungarian educational system have too narrowly focused on the elimination of

Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for Roma, Volume I, Chapter

United Nations Development Program, The Roma in Central

gets, based on the number of students attending. Open Society

and Eastern Europe: Avoiding the Dependency Trap, A Regional Human

5: Barriers to Quality Education, 2007

Development Report, Chapter 5: Education available at: http://roma.

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

undp.sk/reports.php?parent_id=1&id=182&scroll=182

Roma, Volume I, Chapter 5: Barriers to Quality Education, 2007

in Hungary

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 88-89

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions,

Roma, Volume I, Chapter 5: Barriers to Quality Education, 2007

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Roma Education Fund, Advancing Education of Roma in Hungary:

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions,

2007, pgs 11, 45

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions,

2007, pg 9

Roma, Volume I, 2007, pg 187

2007, pg 31

Roma, Volume I, 2007, pgs 230, 281

Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions,

Roma, Volume I, 2007, pg 276-277

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 88-89

172

Roma Education Fund, Advancing Education of Roma in Hungary:

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

Per-capita financing determines the amount of aid a school

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

2007, pg 32

173

AY 2008-2009 school segregation so that individual remedies provided by Hungary’s judicial system have proven unlikely to lead to major systemic changes.21 In 2003 several amendments were added to the Act on Public Education that would allow financial incentives to be given to schools for the desegregation of their classes. However, “[i]t appears that closing down segregated schools brings about political liabilities that are greater than the financial burden of maintaining them.” 22 Some independent reports even suggest that there are schools receiving funding for the desegregation of their classes and facilities, yet they are actively maintaining them segregated.23 These findings bring to light the growing resistance with which Romani fair and equal access movements and initiatives are faced. Despite new and existing legislation24 and the continued filing of suits against discriminatory practices in towns and villages, segregation will continue to be a major barrier against educational equality and justice for Hungary’s Roma. Roma children who are not designated as study-at-home students, not placed into segregated classes, or into specialized schools, are still likely to face many challenges in obtaining fair and equal educational access. Many of these 21

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 88 22

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences students will be encouraged to attend vocational schools which provide little to no preparation for competitive jobs in the Hungarian workforce.25 Regardless of its many educational issues, there are perhaps just many dedicated and compassionate men and women (Hungarian and Roma alike) working tirelessly to correct the inherent flaws of the Hungarian educational system. Yet, despite all that is being done to improve Romani education in Hungary, little has been done to educate the Hungarian public on the Roma’s historical origins and their migration into Hungary.

A History in Brief The importance of understanding our collective experience has long been acknowledged. In ancient Rome, historical knowledge was praised as divine medicine by both Cicero and Livy while contemporary thinkers like African American historian and activist, John Hope Franklin, likened it to enlightenment. For the Roma, whose already painful history continues to be smeared and tainted by slanderous myths and legends, history has taken on a different meaning. Their tumultuous journey across several continents has been transformed into “a nightmare from which [they] are trying to awake” (James Joyce, Ulysses).26 Yet, the importance of

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 89 23

Roma Education Fund, Decade Watch: Roma Activists Assess the

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

Progress of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2006, Page 89

Roma, Volume I, 2007 pg 208-211

Act on Equal Treatment and the Promotion of Equal Opportunities

(2003), Public Education Act of 2003, & The Civil Code

174

I quote Joyce here not because he is speaking of the Roma in this

understanding their journey cannot be ignored. In fact, the persistence of several derogatory stereotypes, myths, and legends in popular circles requires a more careful investigation into the Roma’s origins if an understanding of their plight is to be truly attained. Romani history and culture is not taught to most children in Hungary. Those who are exposed to it in schools are likely to get most of their information from textbook chapters titled “Roma lifestyle, education, and criminality”27. While textbooks and other media encourage prejudice and feelings of otherness, the Roma’s Diaspora out of the battle fields of northern India and into the rest of the world is not unlike the voyages taken many times before by people searching for freedom and prosperity.

Out of India Based on available resources, knowledge of the Roma’s origins is speculative at best; however, it is now generally accepted that the Roma migrated out of India around the 11th century A.D. During this time the Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu kingdoms of northwestern India were at war with the Islamic Empire of the Ghaznavids, centered in modern day

Afghanistan.28 India’s conflict with the Ghaznavids resulted in major territorial losses, forcing its rulers to quickly assemble armies to defend its borders. These armies were primarily composed of non-Arian (non-Brahmin) citizens, settlers and mercenaries who had been promoted to the Kshattriya warrior caste in exchange for their military service.29 Through a unique set of circumstances, combining both triumphant and failed military campaigns, the newly inducted Kshattriya armies spread further west through the Middle East and Turkey. Evidence of their westward journey is illustrated in an ancient Persian text written in the mid 10th century: Hamza of Isfahan describes the arrival of 12,000 Zott30 musicians in Persia. The story may be to a large extent legendary, but it informs us that there were many Gypsies from India in Persia; they were already noted as musicians, allergic to agriculture, inclined to nomadism and somewhat given to pilfering.31 Waves of westbound migratory groups continued to depart from India through the 11th century. Evidence of their arrival 28

Berzin, Alexander, Berzin Archives, The Historical Interaction be-

tween the Buddhist and Islamic Cultures before the Mongol Empire, Part III: The Spread of Islam among and by the Turkic Peoples (840 - 1206 CE) 29

Gypsyspirit.org, Hancock, Ian F. Origins of the Romani People,

to recall in the readers’ mind a picture of a journey whose beginnings

July 26, 2009 available at http://gypsyspirit.org/pages.php?menuid=7

were difficult and the continuity of this difficulty is something that some

Arabic word for Gypsy

Roma are, only now, able to confront and liberate themselves from.

UNESCO Courier, October, (1984) deVaux de Foletier, Francois

The World Their Homeland – Gipsies July 26, 2009 available at http://

Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

Roma, Volume I, 2007 pg 239

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_Oct/ai_3455603/

line (in fact he is certainly not speaking of them). My intention here is

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AY 2008-2009 in Europe by the 12th century appears in a mention by canonist Theodore Balsamon of Trullo who wrote of the Athinganoi (Roma) in a cannon to the council of Trullo in Italy.32 Romani families already residing in Europe along with those that continued to pass into Europe through the Ilkhanid Empire33 in the mid-13th century were eventually challenged to undergo changes that would forever transform them from India’s warrior caste into Romani wanderers.

Into Europe Romani customs and practices have developed into their present forms over centuries of change and adaptation. While some of these traditions have become hallmarks for a variety of regional and cultural differences, many have been used by non-Roma to formulate simplified and standardized conceptions of the Romani way of life. One of the most significant and prevalent stereotypes has been the Roma’s adaptation to a nomadic lifestyle. Learning to survive while constantly moving towards or away from conflict meant learning trades and customs that were mobile and adaptable. Adaptation soon led to synchronization and the eventual incorporation of a variety of skills and customs from the various regions which the Roma temporarily called home. As they moved further west, Romani dexterity aided their survival

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences in hostile and warring regions, while simultaneously allowing them to maintain cultural autonomy. Unfortunately for the Roma, their impressive skill set could not replace their inability to quickly adapt to cultural norms; leaving them vulnerable to dehumanizing victimization throughout the next stage of their historic journey: enslavement. Before making their way through Europe, the Roma split and parted ways near the Caspian Sea.34 Two main migratory routes resulted from this separation; one route took the Roma north and west into Eastern Europe while the other took them in a south easterly direction. The first Roma traveling along these two routes are believed to have arrived in Southern and Eastern Europe through the Ottoman Empire as free metal workers, rug makers, and entertainers in the late 13th century.35 When the Roma arrived in Moldova and Wallachia (modern day Romania) they formed loose relationships with feudal lords, providing them with crafts and entertainment in exchange for the right to live on their property. By the early 14th century, Roma who had associated themselves with certain estates were being sold as part of those estates.36 Shortly after, laws were enacted to prevent Roma inhabitants living on 34

UNESCO Courier, October, (1984) deVaux de Foletier, Francois

The World Their Homeland – Gipsies July 26, 2009 available at http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_Oct/ai_3455603/ 35

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of

Fraser, Angus The Peoples of Europe: The Gypsies, (1995), pg 46

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

“The Ilkhanids were originally the Mongol governors of Iraq and

1997)

Iran. They established their independence from China in 1295, when

they finally converted to Islam.” Information taken from: http://www.

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1342_islamic_middle_east/map/

1997)

176

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of

these estates from leaving their new masters’ property. These institutional measures enacted to prevent their escape did not deter many of the Roma living on these estates from attempting it, despite the harsh penalties faced by the many who would come to try. Some of the penalties a Roma slave could be faced with as a runaway included flogging, falague37, cutting off of the lips, burning with lye, and wearing a cangue.38 In the 16th century, Romani children were often separated from their families and sold at auction houses and lots for as little as 48 cents.39 By the 19th century, all Roma born within the borders of Moldova and Wallachia were simultaneously born into a life of perpetual slavery.40 Like slaves in the Americas, Romani slaves were divided into field slaves and house slaves. Field slaves were seldom visited by their masters but were under the strict supervision of a sometimes brutally cruel vatav.41 House slaves (some were the property of land owners and others of the church) were forbidden to speak Romani and female slaves were often used as sexual entertainment for guests. Any children born out of such 37

Shredding the soles of their feet with a whip

Three-cornered spiked iron collar

unions were automatically considered slaves as well.42 After years of enslavement, torture, and dehumanization, Romani slaves were finally freed in 1856 in Moldova and Wallachia to which Romanian activist Jean Alexandre Vaillant commented: “…those who shed tears of compassion for the Negroes of Africa, of whom the American Republic makes its slaves, should give a kind thought to this short history of the Gypsies of India, of whom the European monarchies make their Negroes. These men, wanderers from Asia, will never again be itinerant; these slaves shall be free.”43 But, despite Vaillant’s kind words, the Roma are still subject to prejudicial racism and discrimination in Romania and Hungary to this day.44 While Romani enslavement in the Balkans is the most extensively documented, their Diaspora spans all of Europe and “the New World”: “Spain sent a number of Gypsies across the Atlantic, followed by Portugal which, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, deported large numbers of Ciganos to Angola, to Sao Tome, to Cape Verde, and above all to Brazil.”45

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York 1997)

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

1997)

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of

Vaillant, J.A., (1857), Histoire Vraie des Vrais Bohémiens. Paris:

Dentu & Cie.

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

1997)

Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York

Overseer

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of

1997)

Hancock, Ian F. Roma Slavery Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Slavery,

Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York 1997)

The World Their Homeland – Gipsies July 26, 2009 available at http://

UNESCO Courier, October, (1984) deVaux de Foletier, Francois

177

AY 2008-2009 Louisiana and Virginia in the U.S., England, Cuba, Russia, Scotland, Jamaica, and even their native India have also had their share of Romani slaves. Yet, while slavery remains one of the key ways through which the Romani Diaspora spread throughout the world, it was not the only way it did. There were also many that traveled through the various migratory routes created out of their separation near the Caspian Sea. For the branch of Romani wanderers that traveled southeast through the Middle East, getting to Western Europe was a slightly more pleasant voyage. Greece is a significant place in the migratory history of the Roma. The Greeks were the first to assign the Roma the name “Atsinganos”, where modern names like the Hungarian “Cigány” are derived. From the Greek port of Modon, known in the 15th century as “little Egypt”, modern names like “Gypsy” and “Gitano” were also first coined.46 The Roma also came to learn the importance given to special groups of travelers known as pilgrims from the Greeks. Realizing that calling themselves pilgrims would get them better treatment allowed this group of Roma smooth passage north and west into Europe.

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_Oct/ai_3455603/ 46

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences Into Hungary One of the main routes through which the Roma arrived in Hungary passed through its southern borders. One of the earliest mentions of the Roma in Hungary is a 1416 Brasso municipal accounts record for a certain Mr. Emmaus and his fellow “Egyptians” and the donation of food that was given to them.47 The following year (1417) Holy Roman Emperor and Hungarian King, Sigismund I, welcomed a group of Roma “pilgrims” seeking a letter of safe passage to travel across his empire. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Sigismund’s signature on a decree guaranteeing safe passage for the Roma throughout his imperial domain was also an unintended institutional authorization for the establishment of some of the first Hungarian Roma settlements. While many did continue west and north, those that stayed underwent cultural changes that, over time, transformed them from Pharaoh’s People or “Athingani” into Hungary’s “Cigányok.” Unfortunately for those that stayed, the new name came with its own set of troubles. Persecution of the Roma began as early as 1479 in Germany, followed by virtually every European country with the exception of Hungary, Transylvania, and Russia.48 Both the Hungarians and the Transylvanians were too preoccupied with the invading Ottoman-Turks to bother with expulsion of their Roma populations. In fact, when the Ottoman-Turks invaded Nagyszebén in 1476, the town employed its Roma to strengthen its municipal fortifications and to manufacture and

UNESCO Courier, October, (1984) deVaux de Foletier, Francois

repair its arms. “Eleven years later, in 1487, King Matthias promised in writing to protect the freedoms of the Roma of Szeben.”49 Matthias’ document, addressed to the voivode of Transylvania, István Báthori, outlined the protections to be granted to the Roma of Szeben as follows: We hereby order and command that you at all times refrain from pestering, inciting or burdening the aforementioned Roma, that is, the Egyptians, and from extracting taxes or other dues from them…50 In 1502, King Ulászlo II offered similar protections and freedoms to a group of four wandering Roma in the service of Koloszvár in Transylvania.51 Eight decades later (1583), Zsigmond Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, reaffirmed Matthias’ document.52 Rákóczi I (1643), Ferdinand I, and Palatine Miklós Esterházy (1630) are among the many kings, emperors, voivodes, lieutenants, princes and feudal lords that followed Matthias’ example in granting freedom and protection to Hungary’s Roma in exchange for their valued service. There was a growing demand for Roma labor in both the military and peaceful civil services during the 16th century. In the city of Brassó, the Roma had been documented as having repaired the city’s gates and bridges, manufactured arms and cannons, kept the streets clean, swept the market, cleared the sewers, dug the graves, caught stray dogs, and carried 49

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 4

Pál Nagy as cited in Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary,

out the city’s executions.53 They were also known for their manufacturing of iron tools, horseshoes, and nails as well as their locksmithery, blacksmithery, and gold washing.54 While documents show that the Roma were somewhat acknowledged and respected for these and a variety of other skills and services during the late 15th-early 16th centuries, only the memory of their musical acumen continues to survive to this day. Late 15th – early 16th century documents show us the kinds of venues the Roma were requested to play at: - 1489 – the archbishop of Esztergom pays Roma lute players - 1525 – Roma were paid to play the cithara in front of the queen at the royal horse races - 1532 – a request was made for Roma violinists by Pál Bakyth chief captain of the hussars - 1543 – a letter was sent to Vienna by the court of Queen Isabella telling of the “Egyptian” violinists playing in the Hungarian court55

Hungarians were not alone in recognizing the value of Roma skills in this era. From 1541 to 1699, The Ottoman Empire occupied large portions of Hungary’s southern territories. During this 158-year occupation, the Roma enjoyed relative freedom among their Ottoman and Hungarian neighbors.56 In the regions occupied by the Ottoman-Turks, the 53

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 6

The World Their Homeland – Gipsies July 26, 2009 available at http://

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 1

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 5

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 7-8

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_Oct/ai_3455603/

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 3

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 5-6

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 1

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pg 5

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AY 2008-2009 Roma served as musicians, blacksmiths, firemasters, bullet casters, nailsmiths, swordsmiths, gunpowder producers, weapon polishers, hangmen, surgeons, soldiers, and guides.57 Rapid population growth in the occupied regions in central and southern Hungary supports the claim that the Roma thrived in these trades. Ottoman sources tell us that the Roma population was relatively numerous in these five sultanic municipalities of Hungary: Tolna, Pécs, Ráckeve, Esztergom, and Buda.58 By the time the Ottoman-Turks were ousted in 1699, the Roma had reached all parts of Hungary. Documentation from this era tells us that there was still a growing demand for Roma crafts and services. However, despite the demand, there were regions that had decided to expel their Roma population due to growing accusations of destitution and vagrancy.59 Though the Hungarian aristocracy was sympathetic to the Roma, incidents of violence and persecution became more and more frequent. Hapsburg rulers Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II enacted policies partly aimed at integrating the Roma into mainstream society and curbing some of the hostility being expressed against them. Some of these policies, “provision of residency and trade permits (1760), provision of land plots (1761), forced adoption of Roma children by non-Roma families, prohibition of a nomadic lifestyle, etc,” were, unsurprisingly, more harmful

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences than they were helpful for the Roma.60 Part of the reason for this outcome can be attributed to the motivation behind passing these decrees to begin with. Maria Theresa and Joseph II were not just altruistically motivated when they passed many of these decrees in the 18th century. The true purpose of the policies of this period was: …to count, record, and monitor everything and everyone, to classify the population and subordinate it to the purposes of the state, to settle all unsettled issues, and to regulate anything that was still unregulated. Maria Theresa’s decrees were clearly impossible to implement. Landowners were reluctant to grant land to Roma and guilds had no wish to accept Roma artisans as their members.61 These decrees even prohibited the Roma from playing their music as a way to administratively acknowledge the significance of the changes being made from “Cigány” to “New Magyar.”62 But the Romani spirit and culture could not be extinguished so easily. By the 19th century, Bálint Sárosi writes, “the public saw them [Roma musicians] as the representatives of [Hungarian] national music, welded to the Hungarian

national movement.”63 Roma musicians even accompanied their Hungarian compatriots in the War of Independence of 1848.64 In fact, after the Hungarian defeat, Roma musicians were in great demand for the plaintive merriment of their music.65 It was through this passion for both their music and freedom that the Roma were able to gain the respect of at least some of their Hungarian neighbors. However, Romani participation in the War of Independence of 1848 was not an indication of their general discontent with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Within Royal Hungary the Roma are said to have found several ways to carve out a relatively comfortable living.66 Then again, an 1893 census initiated by Minister of the Interior, Károly Hieronymi, revealed that of 7220 communities with permanent Roma residents 3750 were segregated.67 Of the 275,000 Roma recorded in the 1893 census, 13,000 were said to be unemployed and making a living through begging, soothsaying, fortune telling, quackery, theft, and loafing.68 Based on the data collected in the 1893 census, it seems like, however “comfortable” their living conditions may have been, the Roma lived in a separate and unequal society worthy of their contempt and protest. During the period between the first and second World Wars, the Roma faced great challenges in trying to keep pace with the

rapidly changing political, technological, and economic climate in Hungary.69 One of the only ways the Roma had to make a living during this time of economic crisis was through their music. Of the 100,000 Roma living in Hungary in 1927, it is estimated that most of the approximately 30,000 working age males were raised in musical homes.70 For many of Hungary’s Roma, music embodied the only possibility for social and economic advancement and few took this reality for granted. Yet, social mobility at the time depended on more than the desire to play. Unfortunately for many Roma musicians, noblemen with a passion for their music and prosperous peasants who had once invited them to play at their weddings had fallen victim to the economic troubles affecting post-Trianon Hungary.71 At the same time, Hungary’s middle classes had become less receptive to Romani music, turning instead to jazz and modern dance for entertainment purposes. Hungary’s Roma also made a living providing public services and crafts unrelated to music. One of the most respected Roma services was that of the blacksmith. There were also adobe makers, agricultural day laborers, basket weavers, wooden spoon makers, and tin smiths.72 But, despite all they had to offer, Hungary’s Roma “experienced a painful 69

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 2

63 Sárosi, Bálint as cited in Kemény, István History of Roma in

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 44 The treaty of Trianon signed after World War I was responsible

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 1-2

Hungary, pg 18

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 15-16

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 18

for the substantial loss of territory to the countries surrounding the

Cigány, the Hungarian equivalent for Roma, represented a set of

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 18

then Kingdom of Hungary (Slovakia, Romania, Austria, the former

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 9

ideas and customs that many thought were the source of the intolerance

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 2

Yugoslavia, and Poland)

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 9

and violence against the Roma at the time. For this reason a new iden-

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 28

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 44

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 13

tity, that of the “New Magyar”, was created by Austria-Hungary’s rulers.

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 32

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Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences

deterioration in their situation. They were simply too numerous for the professions that constituted their livelihood.”73 Blacksmiths were completely pushed out of the economy by Hungary’s rapid industrialization and modernization while the demand for adobe makers and day laborers was outpaced by their growing numbers.74 Yet, as if the Roma’s dire economic situation was not enough to worry about, the prevailing political ideology of the interwar period and its application would soon come to threaten their very existence as well. The deportation of Transdanubia’s Roma was ordered by Adolf Eichmann and Ferenc Szálas in the latter months of 1944.75 Originally, the Nazi and Hungarian Arrow Cross parties had planned on simply deporting all of Hungary’s traveling Roma bands, but their search turned up very few of them. Instead, entire communities were uprooted and sent to concentration camps.76 “During the [transportation] process, some Roma were murdered close to their homes by Hungarian military police and Arrow Cross party officials.”77 The “Victims of Nazism Commission estimated the number of Roma victims to have been 28,000”, but the exact number that died during the Holocaust (Porrajamos) may never be known.78 For a brief time after the war, the Roma were able to have some semblance

of normalcy. The limited democracy available immediately after the war extolled the principles of equality and prohibited racial or ethnic discrimination.79 This return to traditional living conditions and lifestyles was, however, cut short and drastically altered in socialist Hungary.80 Zsolt Csalog writes of this period as follows:

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 45

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 48

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 45

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 2

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 47-48

Zsolt Csalog, “A cigánykérdés Magyarországon 1980

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 52-53

elõtt” [The Roma Issue in Hungary Prior to 1980]. In: Bibó

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 53

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 2

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 3

Blénesi, Éva The Roma of Hungary Case Study, 2002, pg 2

The disappearance of the former consumer groups in society resulted in the end of the age-old market for musicians, and the remains of the other traditional forms of employment were swept away by the tide of history. The colossal and hard-won historical capital of the Roma was thus destroyed…A strange contradiction was that while the end of the second world war had brought emancipation and removed the immediate danger of extermination, it had failed to establish opportunities for making a living.81 The post-war socialist regime regarded the kind of private enterprise pursued by the Roma as “pernicious, a threat to public welfare, and a public foe. Yet they were left out of the land distribution process, were refused employment by many farm co-operatives, and were left out of the participative process in many other sectors.”82 While socialism had its faults, it also

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 48

Emlékkönyv (Budapest, 1979), II: p. 291.

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 48

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created some opportunities for Hungary’s Roma. Northern Hungary experienced a period of rapid industrialization so quick that it resulted in labor shortages.83 Thus the 1960’s brought great changes to the lives of Roma families: full employment was almost achieved among adult Roma males. Roma families witnessed a dramatic improvement in terms of their livelihood, standard of living, job security, and general welfare. Such progress enabled many Roma families to build “reduced-value” houses or to buy old peasant houses and thus to move away from the isolated Roma settlements to other towns and villages.84 While many Roma did find employment in the industrialized factories built throughout Hungary, some sociologists believe that the rapid modernization characteristic of this era had counterproductive effects on the integration of the Roma.85 As a result of the forced settlement, forced indoctrination into unskilled labor, and dependency on government assistance created during this period, the Roma experienced further losses of their traditional crafts and services. Today, in the north-central county of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, there is a line of former industrial cities and towns

known as “the rust belt.” Given this name because of the now abandoned and rusting industrial factories found throughout the region, the rust belt is also home to some of the poorest Hungarian and Roma communities in all of Hungary. It is here, perhaps, more than any other place in Hungary, that the effects of forced settlement and dependency are most vividly experienced. However, the rust belt is not a lone example of the failures of the forced indoctrination into an unskilled labor force. When the Roma entered, or in some cases forced to enter, into cheap agricultural and industrial jobs, they were also unknowingly entering into an impoverished and segregated social class.86 The privatization of state owned companies after 1989 led to the closure of many factories throughout the country; and the first to become unemployed during this time were unskilled workers dependent on the factories for their employment.87 Disproportionally, the majority of those laid off were Roma. The political shift of 1989 did not just mark a new beginning for the economic and educational impoverishment of Hungary’s Roma, it also marked a political awakening for the Roma community in Hungary as well. It was the beginning of political organization and self-awareness for the Romani community in Hungary. A process that started the discovery of a rich and unique identity rooted in the ancient past.

Kemény, István History of Roma in Hungary, pg 49

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AY 2008-2009

Hindupen Through European Eyes For centuries the Roma were regarded by Europeans as an enigmatic people. Few Roma knew the far distances their ancestors had come, making their presence in Europe all the more mysterious. Not knowing their place of origin, the Roma took creative license over their identities, becoming Egyptians, pilgrims, Greeks or whatever else suited their immediate survival needs. This strategy allowed the Roma to migrate unimpeded throughout Europe and the rest of the world, though not without its own consequences. While the Roma’s unknown history may have gained them the freedom to migrate throughout the world, it also empowered others to create harmful origin myths about them as well. At first glance, it may seem like the Roma were simply being deceitful liars when they called themselves pilgrims, Egyptians, or any of the other names and nationalities with which they associated themselves, but a closer examination of their intentions reveals that they were just telling people what they wanted to hear. Early Roma were more concerned with finding profitable markets for their trades than squabbling with the locals regarding their place of origin. The resulting ambiguity over their existence led to historic and systemic stereotyping by many of the cultures they came into contact with. The Roma have gone by many names since their first mention in Hamza al-Isfahani’s History of Kings in the tenth

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Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences century. Unfortunately most of these names: Tartars, Heathens, Saracens, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Jats, Athingani, Atzinganoi, Romiti, Bohemians, ‘Fools Styled Greek Bohemians’, Pharaoh’s People, Egyptians, Luri, Zingari, Zigeuner, Zotts, etc., were given to insult and derogate them.88 In his book, Die Zigeuner (1783), Heinrich Grellman explains how from the many names the Roma were given, many places of origin were assumed. Grellman himself outlines a theory for Roma origins based on the German “Zigeuner”: Perhaps a mixture of all kinds of rascally people gathered together having collectively no certain country, as their name Zigeuner indicates, signifying, “to wonder up and down,” for which reason, it is said, our German ancestors determined every strolling vagrant Zichegen…89 Grellman establishes several other Roma stereotypes in his book. Of these he pays particular attention to their supposed taste for human flesh. Grellman explains in detail how in 1782, the year before his book was published, 150 Roma were accused of cannibalism in Hont County (then part of Hungary and now part of Slovakia). Of the 150 Roma, “fifteen men were hanged, six broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women were beheaded.”90 The Roma of Hont County were treated so brutally that Hapsburg monarch and son of Empress Maria Theresa, Joseph II, was compelled 88

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

Grellman, Heinrich Die Zigeuner (1783)

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

to become involved. It did not take long after the emperor ordered an investigation into the validity of the accusations to discover that the alleged victims of the Roma’s cannibalism were still alive.91 Of course Grellman is not the first, or the last, to attempt to establish a connection between the origin-less Roma and the macabre. In 1929 the Roma were still being accused of cannibalism in Slovakia, while in 1897 Bram Stoker made them the servants and guardians of Dracula. Even Christianity has had its share of “Gypsy myths.” To some Christians the Roma were the descendants of Cain, cursed to forever roam the earth. To others, 1) they were the people that denied Joseph and Mary assistance on their way out of Egypt; 2) the ones that told Judas to betray Christ; 3) the descendants of the murderers of the children of Bethlehem; 4) and the ones who forged the nails used in the crucifixion.92 The Orthodox Greeks called them “Athinganoi” derived from an already existent group of heretics known for their fortune telling.93 Yet, despite the names people came to call them, whatever the history they decided to give them, one truth would ultimately come to reveal itself about the Roma. In due course, their true ancestry, their place of inspiration, empowerment, and origin would come to light.

Through Romani Eyes For the Roma, ancient history used to be the oldest memory of the oldest person

among them.94 Today a growing awareness and pride in their origins has led to a liberation movement some have dubbed “Hindupen” (Hindu-ness). In some ways, reconnecting with India highlights the differences between the Roma and their western hosts, but, more importantly, it dispels long-existing stereotypes that have been the basis for centuries of discrimination and fear. The fact that the Roma are ancestrally connected to India has been known since the mid 18th century. Hungarian pastor Istvan Vali first made the connection in 1753 while at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. While there, Vali met three students from Malabar, India, and through them began to collect a list of about a thousand words in their native language. When Vali returned to Hungary, he discovered that the local Roma population understood them.95 It was later discovered that the names they had been calling themselves for centuries – “Rom”,” Dom”, and “Lom”, phonetically correspond with Sanskrit and modern equivalents which refer to a tribe of Indians called the “Dom.” In Sanskrit “Dom”/ “Domba” means “man of low caste living by singing and music.” Music plays an important role in Roma communities across the world today and, according to Roma historian and activist Ian Hancock, its importance serves as further evidence for their Indian origins.96 Hancock points out that the Roma still use the Indian bhairavi musical scale “as well as a type of ‘mouth music’ known as bol, which consists of rhythmic 94

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

Story of Vali’s discovery taken from Fonseca, Isabel

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

“Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

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AY 2008-2009 syllables that imitate the sound of drum strokes.”97 In Hungary, the Roma have a dance called roviliako khelipen which also has Indian parallels. It comes as no surprise, based on all the linguistic and cultural evidence discovered thus far, that many experts have concluded with confident certainty that the Roma are the descendants of India. In the past, not knowing their origins has had an alienating effect on the Roma; today, however, connections with their Indian heritage have shed light on their customs and practices, while simultaneously providing them with a source of pride, community and inspiration.

Dr. Ambedkar and the Buddha The Roma have expressed pride in their Indian heritage through identification with India’s public and historical figures. About four years ago, a group of Hungarian Roma began to seek information on the Indian nationalist, jurist, political leader, and Buddhist revivalist, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. In their search for more information on Dr. Ambedkar, they discovered many parallels between Hungary’s Roma and the Dalits98of India. The group became inspired by Dr. Ambedkar’s story and his struggle for Dalit equality. They were convinced, just as Dr. Ambedkar had been seven decades earlier, that Buddhism offers a unique approach to issues faced by the oppressed as a theology

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences of liberation.99 Through their discovery of Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit movement many Roma today identify themselves as the Dalit of Europe. Born the 14th child in an Untouchable, or Dalit, family, Ambedkar faced many challenges growing up in a time when untouchability was both religiously and legally sanctioned in India. Like many of Hungary’s Roma, Ambedkar had to attend segregated government schools where he could not even sit in the same class with upper-caste children. As a Dalit, he was viewed as an object of horror, disgust, contempt, and loathing by teachers and classmates alike.100 Though there were many obstacles before him, Ambedkar eventually graduated secondary school. He went on to earn a law degree and multiple doctorates in law, economics, and political science from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics. Although a Dalit, Ambedkar was considered to be one of India’s foremost scholars by the time he returned from England in 1917.101 When he returned, he recorded his impressions in the following way: My five years of staying in Europe and America had completely wiped

out of my mind any consciousness that I was an untouchable, and that an untouchable wherever he went in India was a problem to himself and to others. But when I came out of the station (located in Vadodara in the state of Gujarat), my mind was considerably disturbed by a question, ‘Where to go? Who will take me?’102 His return and subsequent reminder of the harsh reality faced by all Dalits living in India were the driving forces behind the political career he would come to develop. For years he fought the social,103 religious,104 economic,105 and educational106 oppression of the Dalits but by 1935 he had realized that the only way out of the caste system was through its elimination. It was then that he publically announced his condemnation of Hindu philosophy and his decision to convert to another religion. Before he formerly converted to Buddhism on October 14th, 1956 Ambedkar had founded the Independent Labour Party, had several books and pamphlets published, was appointed chairman of the Indian constitution 102 A Timeline of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by Professor Frances Pritchet – Columbia University available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/

Ambedkar Studies in Heidelburg by Maron Bellwinkel-Schempp,

pritchett/00ambedkar/timeline/index.html

available at http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/saireport/2003/pdf/1_

103 ex. Dalits are at times forced to live outside city walls near sewers

ambedkar.pdf

104 ex. Dalits are not allowed to step foot inside of temples and are not

100 Many of the Roma I have interviewed have told me tales of experi-

allowed to hear the holy scriptures (Vedas)

encing these same kind of attitudes from their teachers and classmates

105 ex. Dalits are traditionally not paid for their work. Their occupa-

today.

tions are considered by many to be a religiously sanctioned form of

drafting committee, and became independent India’s first law minister.107 Each of these accomplishments saw an increase in his popularity and following. By the time he formerly converted to Buddhism, Ambedkar was able to call together an estimated 500,000 of his supporters to convert with him in solidarity. From an early age Ambedkar knew the importance of education as a tool for liberation among the oppressed. His father, seeing the unique opportunity his children could have, used his unique position in the Indian army to obtain access to schools his children could not have attended otherwise. As a student at Columbia University he was inspired by one of his professors, John Dewey, who is quoted as saying, “Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself”. Ambedkar seems to have taken Dewey’s words to heart and dedicated the rest of his life to the improvement of India’s “depressed classes.” Today, Hungary’s Roma have taken to Ambedkar’s message to “educate, agitate, and organize.” They too have taken on Buddhist philosophy as liberation theology and have started several schools in the hopes of giving Roma children their lives back through their right to education. Decades after his death, Dr. Ambedkar’s life and legacy live on in the dreams and aspirations of a new generation of Hungarian Roma.

Fonseca, Isabel “Hindupen” in Bury Me Standing(1996)

101 A Timeline of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by Professor Frances Pritchet –

slavery.

107 A Timeline of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by Professor Frances Pritchet –

Hindi word that means “the oppressed”. Also known as the

Columbia University available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/

106 ex. Many Dalits are barred from going to school creating genera-

Columbia University available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/

pritchett/00ambedkar/timeline/index.html

tions of ignorance and illiteracy.

pritchett/00ambedkar/timeline/index.html

Untouchables.

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The Dr. Ambedkar School in Sajokaza, Hegmegy, and Ozd Today’s Romani students, like Ambedkar himself decades ago, face prejudice and discrimination in their daily lives. It is within this modern reality of oppression that the Dr. Ambedkar School was founded. Located in a region of northern Hungary popularly known as the ‘rust belt’, the Dr. Ambedkar School provides educational services to a population that sees less than 1% of its high school students pass their matriculation 108 examinations. In some areas, such as Sajokaza, Lak, Alsovadasz, and Homrogd, Romani residents have no other access to secondary education.109 The school aims to raise the percentage of matriculated students in these areas through the application of a culturally-receptive pedagogy that prepares them for the challenges and discipline essential in today’s job market. Another of the school’s goals is to show its students that education is an effective, enjoyable, and fulfilling means out of poverty. By raising their standards and expectations, the school hopes to see significant changes in the confidence and lifestyles of its students. Ultimately, the school hopes that some of these changes will lead to a more integrated, more understanding, and more evolved community for both Roma and non-Roma residents. 108 Statistics obtained from “Our School” available at http://www. ambedkar.eu/our-school/

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences Unfortunately, if some of the school’s students’ stories are any indication of how close they are to achieving these goals, then it appears that they have a long way to go. Take Joszef Nagy, one of the school’s students, for example. Born in the northern Hungarian town of Kazincbarcika in 1987, Joszef has known segregation all his life. While he was lucky enough to attend integrated classes growing up, being in the last age group of integrated students in the entire village always kept segregation present as a reminder of his second class status. Joszef’s luck seemed to have run out when he, along with 29 other students in integrated classes, were chosen to be evaluated in order to determine if he was mentally capable of staying in an integrated class or if he belonged in a ‘C’ class.110 Joszef was aware of the fact that he would not be taught the same way in a ‘C’ class, and that the text books would be entirely different. With this in mind, Joszef nervously went to the evaluation. At the evaluation, a psychiatrist asked Joszef a series of questions on several topics. Fortunately for Joszef, the psychiatrist eventually asked him about the kinds of food that he ate. He told the psychiatrist about noodles and beans being a common meal at his home. The psychiatrist did not understand how this could be a meal, but since it was a common dish in poor Roma households, Joszef was able to give a detailed explanation of what it was and how it was served. Joszef explained his favorite dish so well that it convinced his evaluator that he was intelligent enough to stay in the integrated class.

109 Obtained from “Our School” available at http://www.ambedkar. eu/our-school/

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110 ‘C’ is short for Cigány. Hungarian for Gypsy.

Out of the 30 students that were evaluated, only five returned to the integrated class with Joszef. The realization that a lesser fate had befallen his former pupils had a negative impact on Joszef. He had all but given up on education when a teacher, seeing his promise, began to question him on his goals. She re-invigorated Joszef’s desires to excel. He began to take extra classes afterschool and saw his grades improve significantly. One day, his teacher brought in a Roma educator from a neighboring village to give a talk to her students. Seeing what he had never seen before, a well educated and successful Roma, changed Joszef’s perspectives on his possibilities. By the time the Dr. Ambedkar School founders and activists, Janos Orsos and Tibor Derdak, visited the school Joszef was attending, Joszef had become determined to continue his education and not be just another statistic in his community. Noticing that Joszef was driven and determined encouraged Janos and Tibor to take him under their wings. Since their first encounter, Joszef has received several grants to attend vocational schools; he is now a student at the Dr. Ambedkar School where one day he too may obtain his matriculation certificate and perhaps even attend university. Though Joszef has been successful, his success was earned in a difficult environment, unfriendly to his pursuit for fair and equal access to education. His latest challenge involves the Roma population of his village experiencing an increase in conflicts with their Hungarian neighbors due to the rise of the Roma

population there. But challenges like these are not limited to Joszef’s experiences. Students attending the Dr. Ambedkar School face many tribulations few students in cities like Budapest have to even consider. Statistics coming out of the Dr. Ambedkar School demonstrate that there are certain hardships their students must overcome to reach their goals. Of the 61 students that registered into the school in 2007, 19 were entitled to an orphans’ annuity, acknowledging that approximately one-third of that year’s students had no parents. Many of the students at the school have children of their own at an early age, but the lack of prenatal, pediatric and other healthcare services in Romani villages is a major problem. Eight percent of students attending the school have experienced the added challenge of child mortality to obtaining their matriculation. In one of the neighborhoods within the catchment area of the school the child mortality rate is as high as Africa’s poorest nations.111 It is this reality that has brought Janos Orsos to say that Hungary is only a western country if Romani villages are not counted and, based on my experiences at one of these villages, he’s right.112

My observations and experiences Since 2007 the Dr. Ambedkar School has set out to do the impossible; to 111 Obtained from “The Brutal Reality” available at http://www. ambedkar.eu/ the-brutal-reality/ 112 Statistics obtained from “The Brutal Reality” available at http:// www.ambedkar.eu

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AY 2008-2009 provide educational opportunities to young Romani men and women after a lifetime of denied fair and equal access to educational resources. Most of the school’s students come from families living in dire circumstances, in neighborhoods with inadequate housing conditions, without running water, and economic situations that don’t allow them to own a pair of shoes to call their own.113 Romani advocate and one of the founders of the Dr. Ambedkar School, Janos Orsos, knows the situation his students are coming from all too well. Like most of the students at the school, Janos grew up on a poor Gypsy street. Growing up, he shared a house about 27 square meters with eight other family members where only Beas (a Romanian dialect) was spoken. At age six Janos began learning Hungarian in a local elementary school where he also discovered that most teachers focused their efforts on students based on their ethnic origins. Janos was continually discouraged by his teachers. They told him that he had no real chance at continuing with his studies so there was no point in teaching him, a Gypsy, who’d never amount to anything anyway. At age 15, after years of having his spirit continually broken, Janos dropped out of school and went to work in a factory. Up to this point Janos’ story is typical of what most Hungarian Roma experience early on in schools. Research suggests that up to 10 per cent of Roma children do not continue with their

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences studies in the secondary level.114 Many others get screened out as “unwanted” children during the application process or wind up attending vocational schools that provide virtually no prospects for further educational opportunities. To better understand the circumstances, people, and communities where Hungarian Roma face these adversities, I spent several weeks over the past six months living in one of the Dr. Ambedkar School buildings in the town of Sajokaza just a few kilometers from the Slovakian boarder. In this time, I was able to observe some of the challenges faced by the school and the success it has had in bringing educational opportunities to the Roma communities surrounding the towns and villages of Sajokaza, Hegymeg, Ozd, Lak, Alsovadasz and Homrodg.115

Challenges Five thirty in the morning on the very first day I was to observe classes, I was still a little tired from staying up the night before discussing some of the school administrators’ concerns about their budgetary issues. By six I was in the back of a small European van with several tools strewn around but no seat. Making myself comfortable for the half hour ride on top of the van’s wheel, I began to consider how it might be to have a job as a teacher at the school. Judging by the van’s conditions and its contents,

teaching was clearly not the van owner’s only job. I knew how common it was for Hungarians to have more than one job to help make ends meet especially since taxes withheld from an average paycheck can be as high as 36 percent.116 But what is not so common is having a job on the margins, one that commands little respect from the rest of society and one in which you are almost certainly not prepared to provide a desperately needed service. Like Janos did over a decade ago, many of the school’s students were forced or encouraged out of Hungary’s mainstream educational system. According to Janos, a prejudicial attitude toward their mental capacity is just one of the reasons why Roma children are often not accepted in mainstream Hungarian schools, “We can’t learn properly, they think, because we have less mental capacity…”117 A 2004 survey conducted in BorsodAbaúj-Zemplén County (where the Dr. Ambedkar School is located) confirms Janos’ suspicions: In a school in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County, which 19 Roma students attended altogether, every single Roma student was placed in remedial classes. Only one student in the remedial classes was non-Roma. This research clearly indicates that remedial

classes are one of the most pervasive forms of segregation in Hungary. (pg 218) Havas and Liskó observed that the higher the proportion of Roma students in a class is, the more likely the class is to follow a catch-up curriculum, or to be a remedial class teaching an inferior curriculum, thereby enhancing the relative educational disadvantages of children attending. 118 An earlier survey by András Kádár explains to what extent this form of segregation has caused access issues for Borsod County’s Roma: A 1998 survey in Borsod County showed over 90 per cent of students attending schools with special curricula to be Roma. Most experts agree that a good number of Roma children attending special schools are not even slightly mentally disabled and are only relegated to such institutions due to the negligent failure to take into consideration their specific socio-cultural characteristics and owing to – conscious or unconscious – discriminatory considerations.119

118 Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for Roma, Volume I, 2007, pg 218

116 Tax and Finance Control Administration (APEH), Short summary

119

on the taxation of individuals, July 1, 2009, available at http://en.apeh.

Education Policy Note, available on the

András Kádár, Legislative Review for the Hungarian Roma

hu/taxation/summary_individuals.html

OKI website at http://www.oki.hu/oldal.php?tipus=cikk&kod=eselyaz-

117 FWBO, Following in Babasaheb’s Footsteps: Janos Orsos Tells of

kadar-legislative (accessed

113 FWBO, Following in Babasaheb’s Footsteps: Janos Orsos Tells of

114 Open Society Institute, Equal Access to Quality Education for

His Life and Struggles as a European Dalit, pg 2, available at www.fwbo-

on 24 February 2007) as cited in Open Society Institute, Equal Access to

His Life and Struggles as a European Dalit, pg9, available at www.fwbo-

Roma, Volume I, 2007, pg 208

news.org/features

Quality Education for Roma, Volume I, 2007, pg 220

news.org/features

115 List of villages available at http://www.ambedkar.eu

190

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AY 2008-2009 Knowing this, it was unsurprising to find out that many of the children coming to the Dr. Ambedkar School who had begun their educational careers in this hostile environment lacked the foundation to succeed in Hungarian secondary schools. Once the van had arrived in Hegymeg, we hurried into the school. I thought we were late and that the students had been waiting for us, but I noticed that only teachers and administrators were present. In the school’s main office teachers hurried themselves about, trying to come up with comprehensive lesson plans that would be receptive to all of the students. A challenging task since each student has been denied equal access in ways that require individualized plans that address each of the students’ needs. Once a lesson plan was decided on, keeping it challenging for the students was the next challenge teachers would be faced with. After introducing myself to the class, I sat in the back of the classroom and observed how some of the lesson plans went. In just a few minutes of observing, one thing clearly stood out to me. My first encounter with actual Roma children and I did not see the stealing, lying, cheating, smelly, dirty Gypsies so many people warned me about.120 What I saw were reflections of my own experience as a teenager. Kids being kids. I almost felt like I was in the Bronx again, but was brought back by a combination of strange sounding Hungarian words and

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences the realization that, unlike me, many, if not all, of these young men and women will not have the same opportunities I had growing up. As the teachers tried to go through with their lesson plans, I noticed the different levels of educational preparedness and development in each of the students’ faces. Some were confused and lost, some were paying close attention and participating, while others were acting out because the lessons were not challenging enough for them. As all these emotions played themselves out in a small countryside classroom, I remembered what Janos had said about the students in the school: …most of them know virtually nothing – most of them cannot read or write or calculate. Some of them have been declared mentally handicapped on the basis of their social situation. Those who were considered normal were usually in segregated classes for gypsies with very inadequate teaching. Even those in normal unsegregated classes could not learn because the teacher made no effort to understand them or to appreciate the situation from which they came. The gypsy children are taught by teachers who are not properly trained, with educational programs that are very dated. What they are taught, even at best, doesn’t touch them because it isn’t aimed at them. It is education

designed for the middle classes given to students from the under-class…121 Because the communities surrounding the school are primarily segregated due in part to the labeling of the Roma as, among other things, mentally handicapped, the school has made it one of its objectives to act as a platform from which to integrate these communities. However, recent events foreshadow challenging setbacks for the school’s vision of a multicultural community. In just over one year, at least seven Roma have been killed in Hungary; violent acts widely suspected to have been committed by extremist groups “…playing on old stereotypes of Roma as petty criminals and drains on social welfare systems at a time of rising economic and political turmoil.”122 Earlier this year I attended a funeral for Robert Csorba and his five year old son in Tatarszentgyorgy (approximately 60 Kilometers southeast of Budapest). Both father and son had been gunned down after trying to flee their home that had been deliberately set on fire.123 From that grey and solemn day when I attended a funeral in March to last month’s European Parliament elections, I have 121 FWBO, Following in Babasaheb’s Footsteps: Janos Orsos Tells of His Life and Struggles as a European Dalit, pg 2, available at www.fwbonews.org/features 122

New York Times, Kulish, Nicholas “As Economic Turmoil

Mounts, So Do Attacks on Hungary’s Gypsies” April 26, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/world/europe/27hungary. html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Robert%20Csorba&st=cse

120 FWBO, Following in Babasaheb’s Footsteps: Janos Orsos Tells of

123

His Life and Struggles as a European Dalit, pg 2, available at www.fwbo-

23,

news.org/features

view/11096/219

192

noticed an increase in the fear and sense of urgency among the Roma in and around the Dr. Ambedkar School. The school is located in a county with one of the largest Roma populations in Hungary and the most supporters for the extreme right wing political party, Jobbik. I remember the shock Janos expressed once news of the election results began to trickle in. In his face I could see the defeat, the fear and the anger that came with the realization that their fight for equality was not getting any easier. To him the news was a reminder of just how difficult integration will continue to be for the Roma students of the Dr. Ambedkar School. During my last week of observations at the school I noticed some efforts being made to strengthen the school’s relationships with its political friends and supporters. In one of my last conversations with a teacher at the school, we talked about the possibility that the school may have to put metal bars on its doors and windows for the safety of those inside. The surmounting issues faced by administrators, teachers and students (pedagogical problems stemming from a lack of the students’ educational foundation, prejudice, segregation, violence, inadequate funding and child mortality among many other issues) will truly be a test for the hope that one day the Roma will be seen as equals in Hungary.

Budapest Times, “Roma Man, Son Murdered”, February 2009,

available

http://www.budapesttimes.hu/content/

Successes I recently interviewed one of the Dr. Ambedkar teachers on what are

193

AY 2008-2009 some of the school’s successes. First, he pointed out the uniqueness of the school’s relationship with the members of the community it serves. The school’s leadership has successfully combined their roles as respected and accomplished members of the Roma and non-Roma communities, with an open door policy that allows Romani women’s association meetings, internet access for students and other community members, and even infrastructure projects in the Roma settlement to be easily organized. On one of my visits to the Roma settlement, I was shown a recently cleared patch of land leading out to the main road. Turns out it is the settlement’s first semi-paved road. The road’s construction was made possible by funding provided by friend of the school and consultant for human rights advocacy and community organizing, Michael Simmons. More important than the money the school was able to raise for this project was its use of the opportunity for community building. Bringing the community together for projects is not difficult for the school. Major projects are being worked on that will teach community members construction skills while, at the same time, providing them with the opportunity to give back to their community. But the most important opportunities provided by the school are to the Roma children living in and around Sajokaza. Students at the Dr. Ambedkar School, regardless of their socio-economic status, decisions to drop out of mainstream educational institutions, classification as mentally challenged, or any of the other

194

Eric Lopez: Romani Education in Hungary: Observances and Experiences prejudicial labels that have been attached to them over the years, are accepted as equals and treated with the confidence creating dignity that will allow them to be what many consider them incapable of being. School director Tibor Derdak told me once that each student’s education is the equivalent of the education of the entire community, Roma and non-Roma alike. I believe their success will be Hungary’s success.

Conclusions and reflections Today, as Romani advocates, non-profit organizations and community representatives continue their centuries old struggle for equality and access to educational resources, there are those working just as hard to deny them of these rights. This hostile social, political, and economic climate has been a threat to organizations like the Dr. Ambedkar School and is responsible for creating a culture of fear and existential uncertainty. Yet, despite these challenges, the school continues to be a beacon of hope and opportunity. For those young men and women attending, the Dr. Ambedkar School is a place of preparation and awareness. Through its ability to give Romani educational issues a historical perspective that both empowers and inspires its students, it is also able to equip them with the critical skills they’ll need to be competitive participants in Hungary’s labor market. Their added ability to bring international attention to the lack of

educational resources that has fueled existing stigmas, discrimination, prejudice and ignorance of the Roma’s economic hardships, history, and aspirations to contribute positively to society makes the school, and organizations like it, invaluable resources in the fight for equality and educational justice. Like Dr. Ambedkar decades ago, Hungary’s Romani Dalit have fought long and hard for the educational rights they currently have. Through the efforts made by Hungary’s educators the Roma may one day have the tools to break the painful cycle of ignorance surrounding their existence.

Dr. Ámbedkar Gymnázium, “Our School” available at http://www. ambedkar.eu/our-school Dr. Ámbedkar Gymnázium, “The Brutal Reality” available at http:// www.ambedkar.eu Fonseca, Isabel, Bury Me Standing (1996) Fraser, Angus M., The Peoples of Europe: The Gypsies, 1995, Wiley-Blackwell FWBO, Following in Babasaheb’s Footsteps: Janos Orsos Tells of His Life and Struggles as a European Dalit, available at www.fwbo-news. org/features Grellman, Heinrich, Die Zigeuner (1783) Gypsyspirit.org, Hancock, Ian F., Origins of the Romani People, July 26, 2009 available at http://gypsyspirit.org/pages.php?menuid=7 Hancock, Ian F., “Roma Slavery” Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Slavery, Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds. (Macmillan, New York 1997) http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/ microsites/1342_islamic_middle_east/map/ Kádár, András,

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Country Assessment and Roma Education Fund’s Strategic Directions

Roma Issue in Hungary Prior to 1980]. In: Bibó Emlékkönyv

(2007)

(Budapest, 1979)

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deVaux de Foletier, Francois, UNESCO Courier, October (1984),

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Back to Basics: The Social and Cultural Implications of Hungarian Modern Classical Composers and Their Music Randall Scotting ............................................................................................... University of Colorado at Boulder Boulder, Colorado www.colorado.edu randall.scotting@gmail.com

Liszt Ferenc Academy/Independent Research 1061 Budapest, Liszt Ferenc tér 8 www.lfze.hu Adviser: Eva Marton

...............................................................................................

Introduction “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” -Anais Nin Living in Hungary has allowed me an insight into better understanding Hungarian composers and their world. This, in turn, has given me a more complete comprehension of their music. My original goal was to better grasp what I perceived to be a sense of honesty in Hungarian classical music, an immediacy and direct purpose that classical music from some other areas of origin does not often display. I found that this honesty does indeed exist in the works of many varied Hungarian composers, and I began the interesting process of trying to determine why. Why did these composers search for a direct means of expression and unusual uses of instruments and the voice to display with greater accuracy the exact mood they meant to communicate? Not a simple question to answer and one which I will continue to explore; however, I have learned that the musical exploration of these composers is tied largely to the political and governing history of Hungary. The changing borders and shifting governmental structures led many to look inward for a sense of defined purpose and personal clarity.

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AY 2008-2009 As a singer, my work is focused primarily on performing, so the guiding motivation of my research has been to enhance my ability to communicate with an audience. It is difficult to sum-up an entire year’s exploration, however, here I would like to share a bit of what I found to be of particular interest and relevance and I will touch on a few of the experiences that have shaped my view of the modern Hungarian composer.

The Men, Their Music, and Their Homeland: an Overview “Everything of their thoughts and experience is given to us in their music” Béla Bartók, Zoltan Kodály, György Ligeti, György Kurtág. These Hungarian men helped to define and redirect the shape of modern classical music. Bartókth was active in the first half of the 20 Century as a performer, composer, and folk song collector. Kodály, friend and contemporary of Bartok, was also a composer and collector of folk songs, as well as an important educator who developed a method of teaching music currently used worldwide. Ligeti was a forward thinking, sometimes radical, practically unclassifiable, composer of classical music living from 1923-2006. György Kurtág, also a composer, is still living and actively changing the modern landscape of classical music composition. Why? Why have these Hungarian men all realized such a profound impact on modern music? And what? What moved these composers and musicians to such

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Randall Scotting: Hungarian Modern Classical Composers creative revelation? During my short time in Hungary, I’ve come to witness the immense bearing a nation’s history lays on its people; a burden compounded by disparate political systems, altering governing rulers, and quick societal shifts. These men were all profoundly affected by the political and social structures in place in Hungary during their lifetimes, and it is this very affect which led them all back to their roots. They each maintained a great need to define themselves and the art form in a way that communicated the very uniqueness and singularity of their perspective as Hungarian musicians1. I’ll begin where they returned. Béla Vikár started to record and collect folk songs in the Hungarian countryside in 1895, and he introduced these songs to Kodály and Bartók which ignited a life-long and important interest in this “music of the people”. It was indeed folk song that changed the direction of not only Hungarian art music, but also played a large role in transforming all Contemporary classical music. There 1

Notably the world famous Hungarian ‘cellist Janos Starker, who

was a child prodigy and later in his own journey for personal understanding asked himself the question “What happens to the bird who sings and doesn’t know how it sings?” leading him to analyze every aspect of his performing technique, and as a result he wrote one of the most important treatises on string playing in modern times. He also said, in regards to the fact that his comments cause occasional controversy, “I was just stating the truth as I saw it. I went through hell in my youth because of the war… and having lived through it I stopped being afraid. I couldn’t care less what others think if I’m speaking out against something that runs contrary to my fundamental beliefs. I don’t play political games, and I never have” (Internet Cello Society Interview, 2004). I think this sentiment sums up what would have been the view-point of not only Starker, but Bartók, Ligeti, and

were many appealing aspects of folk music to these men; it represented the search for the self in both a collective and an individual way. Folk music provided a sense of connection and helped to define a national identity for a Hungary where borders and political construct were failing, changing, and unreliable. Bartók and Kodály were simple, unassuming men, who without grand intention had started a change in perspective in composers worldwide. Their work was born out of an important need for exploration and understanding. These men were not seeking international fame; they looked inward, focusing on themselves, their families, and their homeland. Unfortunately, their focus on Hungary (which did, incidentally, bring them international recognition) and the debt they felt to it was not reciprocated from a nation in strife, leading to the exile of Ligeti and Bartók, and many other artists including not only composers 1 but also performing musicians. It was not exactly a directly forced exile by the government, but these men had a need to create, their voices were their music, and when their ability to speak was choked with governmental mandates, it was not only their music but also their lives that were suffocated. They concerned themselves with the experience of music making; it was something to be felt, beyond just being heard. This was the lens through which they understood the greater world and its inevitable truths. Bartók was not a religious man. His searching was very much secular; rather than being dominated by an ethereal voice of a distant world, his process was personal, in-depth, probing, and firmly planted in reality.

In all facets these men held little pretense; there was nothing false or showy about them, no barriers to their honest approach. In exploring their own lives and dispositions these men became the voice for a greater Hungary and its realities. Life in Hungary was truly difficult, and to this day it remains challenging for many, with exceptionally high rates of alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide. Many cite rapid and intensive social changes as having created this deep impact on Hungarian society. Béla Balázs, early experimental cinematographer and friend of Zoltan Kodály, is quoted as saying “art is born at the point when life becomes aware of death; art stems from the transcendental instinct of man, from a longing to overstep the limits of everyday reality”. The Hungary of the last century has been an especially fertile ground for artistic exploration. Hungary’s vivid traditions and art have had influence at times from Austria or the Ottoman Empire, but it has retained its own vibrant and unique way of life. To these composers it was essential that the music represent the distinctive experience of their country. As Hungarian composers they sought to redefine musical language so that it suited their own experience. Even in times of political or social strife, the essential element of culture would not be allowed to disappear in Hungary. Infact, just the opposite occurred. Interest in and links to a cultural identity became stronger as borders and politics fluctuated. Culture became a form of nationality for a homeland that did not fit neatly within externally imposed borders. Within 1

many others as well.

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AY 2008-2009 Hungarian folk music there can be found a sense of the people, a total experience of the pain as well as the rejoicing they felt. Through genuine exploration these composers were unafraid to depict the darker aspects of life and represent the whole truth. This portrayal of realism in the music guides also the performing, and hopefully too the appreciation. It strives to make the greater world a more truthful place in its simple and humble way, one song at a time.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and His Buddy Kodály “Create excitement. Don’t get excited.” -György Sebo´´k2 Bartók’s demeanor was penetrating and thoughtful, reserved and considerate. He rejected the given norms, preferring instead to analyze, understand, and decide on his own what best suited him. This trait was also apparent his own piano playing, “nothing was stereotyped, according to formula, but individually shaped, molded 3 in a most convincing manner.” 3 He was quoted as saying “the mind must be free to devote all its energies to the task of giving life to music.”4 Some other signs of Bartók’s inquisitive nature are his atheist beliefs at age 22, and living for years as a vegetarian (at a time when neither were quite so in vogue). Outwardly appearing to be a private and guarded man, Bartók was not without humor; he did not laugh 2

Sebok was an internationally renowned pianist and teacher born in

Szeged, Hungary

Randall Scotting: Hungarian Modern Classical Composers often, but when he did it was unforgettable. One incident arose when he saw a mistake, from his foreign publisher in one of his compositions. The title that was meant to read, “Tót legények tánca” (Dance of the Slovak Youths) but had instead been set in the first proof as “Tót lepények tánca” 55 (Dance of the Slovak Pies). For Bartók the act of music making was essentially sacred, “he sought to integrate the physical with the spiritual in 6 a life affirming totality.” Bartók “always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence”7 and this attention to a natural law and order, a sense of the detailed workings of nature, were also evident in his music. On his daily walks in the outdoors he would pay close attention to a pile of dung and the many beetles that fed on it, noting a connection to all of the cycles of life. The importance of nature is a key point to understand when looking to gain insight into Bartók as a composer. Bartók often wrote his music outdoors. He preferred to be alone or with family and in nature, to being in formal crowds of 8 people. The larger and total idea of nature also included a comfort with the body and with nudity, “the whole being”. Bártok endured a lifetime of ill health beginning with his childhood when he encountered a number of diseases; because of this “he regarded physical wellbeing essential 9 for any other accomplishment.” Kodály 5

Gillies, Malcolm (1990). Bartók Remembered.

Brown, Julie (2007). Bartók and the Grotesque.

Gillies, Malcolm (1990). Bartók Remembered.

Bartók was not alone in this, other composers like Hugo Wolf also

Gillies, Malcolm (1990). Bartók Remembered.

composed their music outdoors.

Gillies, Malcolm (1990). Bartók Remembered.

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Bartók, Peter (2002). My Father, Homossa, Fl., p. 48

and Bartók, along with their wives, took a holiday together in Switzerland that involved nudist activities.10 It was there that Bartók worked six to eight hours a day on the score of his psychologically thrilling opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The work is unafraid to go into a dark, abstract world where little is known, with its many doors acting as metaphor for hidden secrets and the heart. To think he composed it all-the-while in the solarium wearing only a pair of sunglasses!11 While Bartók was not a devoted nudist like his friend Kodály, he was certainly against what he viewed as the artificiality of modern life and its progression away from unspoiled nature. It was not just the body, but also the physical dimension of music-making that was very important to Bartók. He viewed the voice as the closest means of making music to the bodily ideal; having no instrument obstructing the musical expression from the audience. Some of Bartók’s contemporaries were concerned with primitive experiments using technology in creating sound.12However, aware of these experimentations Bartók had little interest in what he viewed as separating the body from music. He wanted instead a pure and honest representation of the human experience and generally steered clear of the phonograph for hearing music (unless it was for Folk music research) in favor of live performances with their many nuanced tone colors and full range 10 Brown, Julie (2007). Bartók and the Grotesque.

of expressive capabilities. The Kodály Method of education for music involves movement and the body as a key element of the musicmaking experience. The quest for balance and the search for simplicity were represented in every aspect of Bartók and Kodály’s lives.

Bartók’s Journey Back to Basics “penetrating into the real throbbing heart of the music” - Bartók As a young man who was eager to prove himself, Bartók wrote the Kossuth Symphony and as a result, Lajos Kossuth (perhaps the greatest man in Hungarian history) was defined musically with the vocabulary of Vienna at the time. Bartók’s youthful understanding of style did not yet afford a firm voice of his own, or of his country’s experience. The quest for his unique voice would later lead to a rejection of the Germanic and Austrian influenced composition models of the time. Within his own compositional style he soon shed his awkwardness and gained a greater importance, giving all of Hungary a voice. Bartók’s search for a real and soulful music, which he felt was absent in the music scene of his day, led him to the peasants of Hungary and their folk music – the Magyar népdalok. He regarded “each folk-tune as a model of high artistic perfection.”13 Bartók was happiest when collecting songs with the

11 Zsuffa, Joseph (1987). Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist. 12 including Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) with his use of the Ond

13 Manga, János (1969). Hungarian Folk Song and Folk

Martineau, a very basic early electronic instrument.

Instruments.

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simple peasant people of the countryside; people that were connected to nature and a “natural order” in a way that he understood, and to which he could easily relate. One example of Bartók’s poignant folk song arrangements is Elindultam Szép Hazámbúl. This song embodies the whole of the Hungarian sentiment: sadness at the loss of a homeland, the definite sense that it is not possible to return, looking back with tears in one’s eyes. It is short, powerful, honest, and real. The occasional well placed dissonant note by Bartók has an amazing amount of power, conveying the text of wandering and loss.

Illyes claimed Bartók’s most modern music as a site of active resistance to tyranny. Dissonance in music was a form of public revolt and in that way, Bartók was the voice of a united revolution. “His oeuvre and personality signify much more; they are the symbol of political radicalism, of a modern, democratic, “European” Hungary.”15 It is heartbreaking to know that this man of such great importance to music and to Hungary, in 1942 with much personal consternation emigrated to the United States, where he later died of Adult Leukemia in poverty.

Elindultam szép hazámbul,

Far behind I left my beautiful homeland

Hires kis Magyarországbul.

Fair among her valleys sleeping

Visszanéztem fél utambul,

On the roadway once I looked back,

Szemembül a könny kicsordult.

Looked, and found that I was weeping.

This unassuming (and by all accounts rather unattractive) man was true unto himself and as a result became a national hero. There is a street in Budapest named after him, he was on the 1000 Forint bill until 1983, and there are countless other examples of how he is admired both in his homeland and abroad. In the Mid 1950’s “reformist intellectuals demanded the right to hear Bartók’s music; they also reclaimed him as a speaker of difficult truths, and therefore as significant symbolic ally in their quest for personal and political freedoms.14 The poet Gyula

György Ligeti (1923-2006) “I could try to write music which preserved the great ideals of liberty and justice”16 György Sándor Ligeti is the primary reason I came to study in Hungary. His music captures my imagination with its sense of pure individuality. I believe his curiosity and constant pursuit of an innovative voice is truly inspiring. For me the fascinating concept is that his awareness of innovation climbs far beyond 15 Frigyesi, Judit. Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest

14 Danielle Fosler-Lussier. Music Divided, Bartók’s Legacy in Cold

16 Kerékfy, Márton (2008). ‘A “new music” from nothing’: György

War Culture

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shocking squeaks and effects, it comes from a place of meaningful understanding – Ligeti, like Bartók and Kodály, studied and arranged folk music early on his in career. Most of Ligeti’s family, with the exception of his mother, was casualties of the Nazi concentration camps, and he himself worked as forced labor during WWII. He began his studies at the Liszt Ferenc Academy in 1945 under Ferenc Farkas (who was also interested in Hungarian folk song and had set many folk-type tunes in his own compositions). Ligeti’s early compositions, such as, Bölcsőtől a sírig (From Cradle to Grave 1948) are already dealing with the larger question of life and mortality. From 19471989 Hungary was under Communist rule which was one key factor prompting Ligeti’s quest for his own unique identity; this is another example of the link to politics and the artist’s search for the self. Ligeti left Hungary in December of 1956, fleeing in the brief window of time when Hungary was not under Soviet occupation after the 1956 Revolution. This was a significant event in Ligeti’s life and the sorrow and sense of wandering he felt are apparent in many of his compositions, such as A bujdosó from his Öt Arany dal. Like Ligeti, many have fled Hungary in hopes of a better life, and A bujdosó or Elidultam of Bartók have spoken with song their profound loss. I think it was inevitable for Ligeti to be on a quest for personal meaning having experienced a number of life-defining events at such an early age. A quest for self knowledge and artistic insight was at hand; the question in his mind, “What

is my voice? Under Communist cultural policy folk songs were encouraged, and in his youth Ligeti found income creating non-controversial folk song arrangements for choruses in Hungary. The heritage of folk music and its connection to the people and their lives organically infuses it with a sense of earthly reality. Ligeti learned this reality early on, and it was sustained as paramount with all his later compositions. One such set of compositions Négy Lakodalmi Tánc (Four Wedding Dances), with their lyrical and sometimes mysterious sound-colors, paint a picture of traditional village life and the trepidations and merriment of a young girl’s wedding. These songs have been important to my own acquaintance with Hungarian folk music, as they were the first I heard and came to love, prompting me to explore further. The previously mentioned Öt Arany Dal are also a good example of this style of Ligeti’s composing, originally banned in Hungary for their open questioning of authority (V. Az Ördög Elvitte a Fináncot, The Devil Took the Tax Man Away) and the sentiment of loss of a homeland (A bujdosó, is a style of song that originated after the Turkish occupation of Hungary and displays a profound sadness and sorrow for the loss of a homeland). These pieces show a strong Hungarian identity and would have encouraged in the people dissonance away from the Communist ideal. For Ligeti, Bartók, and others, the connection to folk song became the roots upon which the new tree of original composition could grow. Their new pieces were distinctive

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AY 2008-2009 and often experimental, but they were still grounded in the Hungarian traditional music, giving it a purpose and a heart.

Ligeti’s Journey Back to Basics “What can I do with a single note? With its octave? With an interval? With two intervals? With certain rhythmic relationships?”17 Ligeti felt dissatisfaction with previous styles of composition, trying them on and experimenting but never finding the right fit. He felt a need to emerge as a distinct entity representing his own thoughts and views. The idea of “back to basics” was embodied by him and was essential for self discovery; he had to start from scratch and evolve in order to find his voice. He rejected everything that was previously given, ready-made, or stereotyped in order to be free to find himself. This sense was also strong in Bartók and goes handin-hand with a questioning of authority. The most one could say when trying to pinpoint Ligeti’s style of composition is simply that he has none. His music has represented constant growth and change, looking at each piece as a new endeavor and using whatever compositional method was needed to communicate effectively the idea at hand. His lifelong pursuit was to continuously seek out what was new and real to him in that moment.

Randall Scotting: Hungarian Modern Classical Composers Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata of 1951 is a set of eleven short pieces that begin in the first movement with one pitch and add a note of the chromatic scale in each progressive movement until the eleventh, which uses every note available to the composer in the scale. “In 1951 Ligeti recognized that his task was to leave his former style and to create his own expressive means and language from elementary musical material.”18 Ligeti completely redefined his style by exploring in this way until he had, for himself a language for communication that felt personal and “true” instead of simple regurgitation. Others have also experimented with these small, even “micro-movement”, forms such as Kurtág in his piece Kafka Fragments, Bartók with his six volumes of Mikrokosmos for piano, and even Arnold Schoenberg with his modern music landmark Pierrot Lunaire, but few have limited themselves to such basic building blocks as Ligeti. An interesting duality occurred in Communist era Hungary. There were no public performances of dissonant music, yet to maintain pace with the innovative progression of classical music in general, composers did still write utilizing dissonance. These discordant pieces were also performed, but for small appreciative and understanding audiences in a private home rather than a public concert hall. This encouraged an obvious distinction between the public and private lives of Hungary’s artist citizens. One example of Ligeti’s specific compositions written with

17 Kerékfy, Márton (2008). ‘A “new music” from nothing’: György

18 Kerékfy, Márton (2008). ‘A “new music” from nothing’: György

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his own voice in a modern way but with a folk song influence is Gyümölcs fürt, from the Harom Weöres dal. With this simple and mysterious song Ligeti gives voice to the breeze. As with the Musica Ricercata, he demonstrates an economy of means and utilizes only five pitches (C, A flat, D flat, F, and G) and provides simple movement in the melodic line with the use of smaller notes, known as “grace notes,” between pitches. This creates an understated but absolutely effective depiction of the wind shaking a cluster of fruit that hangs from a tree. Ligeti was a master of innovation; his opera le Grand Macabre is an excellent example with its political themes and cacophonous overture and interludes utilizing nothing but honking car horns for minutes at a time. One of Ligeti’s main characters, Prince Go-Go, is a petulant young ruler, concerned only with his own basic needs and satisfaction. He mandates high taxes to pay for his personal luxuries, he has a secret service that periodically delivers intelligence messages, and he makes tongue-in-cheek reference to “our dear nation”, all modeled after Ligeti’s own political views and the gross abuse of power he saw in Hungary’s Communist government. With another small jab to the censors, in the original German language version Ligeti named two key figures Clitoria and Spermando19 The opera is full of ironic overtone and ambiguity all-the-while dealing with a most serious subject matter, death and mortality, in a playful and humorous way. The Lux Aeterna is a Ligeti

composition for unaccompanied chorus, entirely different from le Grand Macabre in its displays of innovation. Close knit harmonies and compact pressure are particularly powerful as a musical depiction of the “light eternal”; this music is completely atmospheric, concentrated, and intense. It is specifically felt rather than listened to, it is understood as much by one’s racing heart rate and visceral sense as it is by the ear drums. Perhaps the height of Ligeti’s innovation can be evidenced in his Poeme Symphonique, a composition that does not even use traditional instruments or musicians. Instead, it is written for 100 ticking metronomes, all triggered at the same time by a mechanical switch. Ligeti is unafraid to explore and create new boundaries, posing the question for the audience, “what is music?”, seeking inherent beauty, form, and pattern, in what might seem to be at first easily discounted as only chaos. Ligeti’s new ideas of music certainly paved the way for out-of-the-box thinking and compositions by other composers who followed, like recent Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Reich with his famous piece Clapping Music20 or his rhythmically driving and meditative Music for Pieces of Wood.21

19 for the English language version, these characters’ names were

21 The simplicity of two pieces of clacking wood is a very

subdued to Amando and Amanda.

“Ligetian” concept.

20 As you might guess, this piece is for an ensemble of performers who clap for minutes on end creating various and subtle permutations in their rhythmic patterns.

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György Kurtág (1926- ) and the Gang György Kurtág is another Hungarian composer who uses the power of simplicity to make his statement. “Short but meaningful” would easily describe a movement of his work Kafka Fragments. His music is like a short meditation encouraging heightened awareness in the listener with the use of small but poignant musical gesture. Kurtág is also unafraid to explore microtonal scales and new uses for creating sound with the voice and instruments. There are many other important composers of Hungarian decent or with ties to Hungary that unfortunately I have space only to mention. Haydn (lived and worked in the employ of Hungaro-Austrian Royalty), Beethoven (who famously gave concerts in Budapest), Schubert (who was influenced by the uniquely Hungarian style of music known as Verbunkos22), Liszt (who is one of Hungary’s most famous composers and who was himself interested in collecting songs of the peasant people, though it never came to fruition). Many others visited Hungary to perform or conduct including: Mahler, Wagner, Berlioz, Brahms (whose Hungarian Rhapsodies are well known worldwide), Delibes, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss.23

22 Verbunkos was an 18th Century Hungarian dance music that was often used specifically during military recruitment events, which were quite frequent at the time. 23 Benjamin Rajeczky, et al (2001). The New Grove Dictionary of Music, Hungary: Art Music, & Hungary.

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Look at My Heart Great art concerns itself with the larger human emotions and experiences: love, hardship, our own mortality. Hungarian music plants its focus in this realm. The uniting power of misery or the sadder side of life is an emotion we as humans can all relate to and understand on many levels. Oppression is experienced by people the world over. This truth in song is tangible in Hungary because of its long and riddled history with external occupation and warfare, as well as internal political strife and corruption that continues to segregate Hungary from the rest of the world and isolate its resources and wealth from Hungary’s own people. This leads to a specific and unique Hungarian identity in art song, which is not necessarily the case with the song of other countries such as France or Germany where it can tend to be much more metaphorical, mythical and romanticized and less connected to a prominent reality experienced by the people. Though Cabaret music from World War II Germany does deal with political topics, making bold statements against the reigning regime, it does so in a popular, rather than a classical musical realm, and lacks the connection to history and to the people that is felt in Hungarian folk music. Hungarian music is different in that it is not about being voyeuristic or ostentatious with the shout of “look at me”, rather, it calmly states “look at my heart.” The prevailing mood imparts, “this is how I am feeling, you can look in at my life for a minute if you want to feel it too”. It is very internal, and as such, no obstructions exist for the audience to sense the truth of a deeper understanding

and connection. While searching for examples of Hungarian folk songs I came across something interesting, the Hungarian Suicide Song. The actual title of the song in Hungarian is Szomorú vasárnap (Gloomy Sunday) and the lyrics talk of the untimely death of a loved one and the singer’s contemplation of suicide. Composed in 1933 by the Hungarian Jew Rezso´´ Seress, this song has become incredibly famous, or rather infamous. I feel that Szomorú vasárnap is a contemporary folk music of sorts, it tells of hard times and the modern experience, of the sad truth and the reality of what Rezso´´ő Seress was feeling.

Though melancholy, this work has captured the imagination of countless artists and has been recorded dozens of times since the 1930’s by such notables as: Billie Holiday, the Kronos String Quartet, Branford Marsalis, Sarah Brightman, Björk, Sarah McLachlan, Sinéad O’Connor, Elvis Costello, Ray Charles, Mel Tormé, and the famous AfricanAmerican operatic bass Paul Robeson. It has also inspired several movies and novels, and is mentioned in the poetry of Charles Bukowski. In addition, it has been performed in many languages including Vietnamese. Why so much interest in this old song? The urban myth, partly propagated by an intentional marketing

Szomorú vasárnap száz fehér virággal vártalak kedvesem templomi imával. Álmokat kergetõ vasárnap délelõtt, bánatom hintaja nélküled visszajött. Azóta szomorú mindig a vasárnap, könny csak az italom, kenyerem a bánat.

Gloomy Sunday, With a hundred white flowers, Beloved one, In the chapel I waited, In prayer, That Sunday morning I was chasing my dreams, Yet the chariot of my sorrow returned without you, Forever since then so sad are all my Sundays, Tears are my drink, And the bread I eat is sorrow.

Szomorú vasárnap Utolsó vasárnap kedvesem gyere el, pap is lesz, koporsó, ravatal, gyászlepel. Akkor is virág vár, virág és - koporsó. Virágos fák alatt utam az utolsó. Nyitva lesz szemem, hogy még egyszer lássalak. Ne féj a szememtõl, holtan is áldalak... Utolsó vasárnap.

Gloomy Sunday On my last Sunday Beloved, oh come to me, There’ll be a priest too, a coffin, on a platform, a shroud. Also then flowers will await you, Flowers and – a coffin. Beneath flowering trees I will take my last ride. And my eyes open wide For a last glance upon you. Don’t be scared of my eyes, Still in death I will bless you… Last Sunday.

(Jávor László, text)

(Translation by A.W. Tüting)

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AY 2008-2009 campaign, says that anyone who listens to it all the way through will commit suicide. The legend came about in part because Seress, who was taken for forced labor during WWII but survived the Holocaust, committed suicide by jumping out of his apartment window in Budapest at age 68. It is not particularly surprising that there would be a Hungarian suicide song. The depth of emotion and the complicated experience of the people in this country are multifaceted, and it is palpable in every aspect of society. There is something incredibly poignant about this song - it is a real testament to the power of music to make us feel, in this case, perhaps too deeply and addressing what we may want to avoid. The simple heartfelt beauty of Gloomy Sunday is admirable, along with its ability to capture in music the honest experience of enduring hard times.

The Cultured Nation In Hungary there is a true and real pride of the people in their culture, significantly their unique music and dance. Dance Halls and their emphasis on reconnecting once again with folk music emerged in the 1970’s and they hold a visible place in the cultural scene of Budapest. This movement owes its roots to Bartók, who popularized folk music for all Hungarians and brought it in to a collective conscience. Going to a dance hall in Hungary is something that is for all ages, including many of the Hungarian youth, who participate in this aspect of their culture. The opera by Ferenc Erkel, Bánk Bán and its rousing and patriotic aria Hazám

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Randall Scotting: Hungarian Modern Classical Composers Hazám (My country, My country), is something that every Hungarian knows; there is a collective understanding and shared sentiment of the Hungarian people represented. The opera itself is really something special, and it can only be seen in Hungary. The orchestra plays folk music inspired tunes, including an entire interlude in Csárdás form.24 The staging includes folk dance and the orchestra has a unique addition, a very typical Hungarian folk instrument called the Cimbalom (similar to a hammer dulcimer) which is featured prominently for an entire act. The financially ailing arts community in the United States could take a lesson from Hungary. Every concert to which I have been has been sold-out months in advance and the eager audience has rewarded the performers with numerous clapping ovations. Hungarians certainly value the arts!

Conclusion: My Own Journey Back to Basics “In order to feel the vitality of this music, one must… have lived it” – Bartók Experiencing Hungarian life has helped me to better understand Hungarian music: a Christmas season with all its nuance and depth, other rich and uniquely Hungarian occasions like Luca’s Nap or All Saints’ Day and their accompanying folk tales and traditions (the fodder of song texts), even sharing in the traditions 24 The Csárdás is a typical Hungarian dance named after the old Hungarian word for pub, “Csárdá”.

of pre-meal pálinka, Hungarian wine, and palacsintas has helped me to feel and understand the music I am learning and performing. It may sound simple, but when my only previous experience with goulash was a jeer within a German operetta mentioning “goulash juice,” it was an experience of truth to enjoy real goulash and to come to know something other than the stereotype. Astonishingly, the research and performing I have done has led to many more questions than answers. A constant path of discovery which started with the folk gems of Bartók and Kodály has now led me to a further web of curiosities so that I might better understand their work: Ottoman influenced folk song, Romanian and Slovakian Folk Song, knowledge of folk dance, etc. Doors to new exploration are now open in many different directions. This time in Hungary has also been one of self exploration and deeper inward personal understanding. I am always working to make my creative communication as honest as possible, and I think that is why I was initially drawn to Hungary and to these composers. I saw in them a kindred sense of artistry. My personal mission is to connect to a broader world and to better understanding it through shared experience, and all my research and work has been to enhance the practice of performing, hopefully not only for myself, but also for an audience. The greatest success for me comes when I know I have given an audience a gesture of simple truth and deep reality. Performing is a living museum of sorts and my research, in order to make

my own personal museum’s current exhibition more interesting, has involved attending concerts as much as going to libraries. Seeing displays of dance, music, opera, and art has added to my store of understanding. Knowing Hungarians and something of their experience has been, and will continue to be invaluable. Being aware of people whose grandfather’s were heroes from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and hearing their stories, makes singing these songs more real. Knowing something of the complicated past and present that makes Hungary what it is, understanding and sharing that with others, as Bartók and so many others did, through song – that is my real purpose.

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A Selected Bibliography of Source Materials

Selected Recordings

Brown, Julie (2007). Bartók and the Grotesque, Studies in

Tiszta forrás (Pure Springs): Hungarian Folk Tunes and their

Modernity, the Body and Contradiction in Music,

arrangements (2002), song, Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály: various,

Royal Musical Association Monographs 16. Vargyas, Lajos (1983).

Hungaroton Classic, 18252, Hungary.

Hungarian Ballads and the European Ballad Tradition, volumes 1 &

Works by György Kurtág (1995), song & chamber music, György

2, Akadémia Kiadó, Budapest.

Kurtág: András Mihaly, Erika Sziklay, István Antal, et al,

Frigyesi, Judit (1998). Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century

Hungaroton Classic, HCD 31290, Hungary.

Budapest, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bánk Bán, (2000), opera movie, Ferenc Erkel: Tamás Pál conductor,

Benjamin Rajeczky, Desző Legány, János Kárpati, & Bálint Sárosi

Hungarian State Opera, Éva Marton, Andras Molnar et al, Hungary.

(2001). The New Grove Dictionary of Music, Hungary: Art Music,

Hungarian Folksongs for voice and piano (2007), song, Béla Bartók:

& Hungary: Folk Music. Vargyas, Lajos (2005). Folk Music of the

Herczku Ágnes, Djerdj Timea, Kincses Margit, Hungarian Heritage

Hungarians, Akadémiai Kiado Budapest. Collected and ed. by János

House (Hagyományok Háza), (HHCD016), Hungary.

Demény et al (1971) Béla Bartók Letters, Faber and Faber, London.

Blue Beard’s Castle (2002), opera, Béla Bartók: Ivan Fischer conductor,

Manga, János (1969). Hungarian Folk Song and Folk Instruments,

Budapest Festival Orchestra, Laszló Polgár, Ildikó Komlósi, Phillips

Kossuth Printing House, Budapest. Kerékfy, Márton (2008). ‘A “new

Classic, 470 633-2.

music” from nothing’: György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata”, Studia

Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Vol 8 - Le Grand Macabre (1999), opera,

Musicologica, Volume 49, Numbers 3-4/September 2008, Akadémiai

György Ligeti: Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor, London Sinfonietta,

Kiadó, Budapest.

Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, Charlotte Hellekant, Jard Van

Bartók, Béla (1976). “The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music”.

Nes, Laura Claycomb, Derek Lee Ragin, et al, Sony, B00000ICMU.

Béla Bartók Essays. ed. Benjamin Suchoff. Faber & Faber, London.

Le Grand Macabre (2004), opera, György Ligeti, Elgar Howard

Bartók, Peter (2002). My Father, Bartók Records, Homosassa,

conductor, Gumpoldskirchner Spatzen, ORF-Symphony Orchestra,

Florida. Danielle Fosler-Lussier (2007). Music Divided: Bartók’s

Dieter Weller, Ernst Salzer, Johann Leutgeb, Laszlo Modos, et al,

Legacy in Cold War Culture (California Studies in

Wergo Germany, B000025RRC.

20th-Century Music), University of California Press, Berkeley.

György Ligeti Edition Vol. 4 - Vocal Works (Madrigals, Mysteries,

Tim Janof (2004). Internet Cello Society Interview with Janos Starker:

Adventures, Songs)(1997), song & chorus, György Ligeti: Esa-Pekka

http://www.cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/starker2/starker2.

Salonen conductor, The King’s Singers, Philharmonia Orchestra, et

htm Zsuffa, Joseph (1987). Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist. University of California Press, Berkeley. Gillies, Malcolm (1990). Bartók Remembered, Faber and Faber, London.

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al, Sony, B0000029P3.

Italian Influence on the Hungarian Renaissance

Sarah W. Lynch ............................................................................................... The Frick Collection 1 East 70th Street New York, NY 10021 lynchsw@gmail.com

Kiscelli Museum 1037 Budapest Kiscelli utca 108 Dr. Péter Farbaky

............................................................................................... In researching the Hungarian Renaissance and its relationship to artistic and intellectual developments in Italy, I have observed the developments in visual styles from the court-centered works in the Matthian period (1458-1490) through the sixteenth century with a particular emphasis on the period from 1490-1526 when Hungary was ruled by the Jagiellonian dynasty. A mixture of Hungarian traditions and Italian innovations allowed the Renaissance to flourish in a manner unique to Hungary. This paper gives a brief overview of Renaissance art in Hungary from Matthias’s reign until the mid 16th century, using three prominent examples to illustrate different styles and stages of development: the Bakócz chapel in Esztergom, the town hall in Bártfa (Bardejov, Slovakia), and the castle at Sárospatak. I conclude with a short description of my research and time spent in Hungary.

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Introduction I would first like to thank the Fulbright committee for their support, without which this year would have been impossible, and my advisor, Dr. Péter Farbaky, for his advice and support. I would also like to thank my fellow grantees as without their good humor and encouragement, I may never have left the library. My research has been on the art of the Hungarian Renaissance mainly focusing on the Jagiellonian period, 1490-1526, although similar styles and trends continued throughout the sixteenth century. Today I would like to give a brief overview of the period beginning with the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490), and then discuss three prominent examples of Renaissance architecture that this grant has allowed me to see in person: the Bakócz chapel in Esztergom, the town hall in Bártfa (Bardejov, Slovakia), and the castle at Sárospatak.

The Matthian Period, 1458-1490 Although there had long been connections between Hungary and Italy, one of the most fruitful collaborations between a Hungarian ruler and Italian thinkers and artists undoubtedly occurred under Matthias Corvinus, who ruled from 1458 to 1490. The king’s interest in Italian-style art, literature, and court ceremony noticeably increased with his

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Sarah Lynch: Italian Influence on the Hungarian Renaissance marriage, in 1476, to Beatrix of Aragon, a Neapolitan princess. Hungary was the first place for the ideals of the Italian Renaissance, both intellectual and artistic, to appear north of the Alps. Unfortunately, few artistic monuments from this early period survive. Only fragments remain from the castles of Buda and Visegrád. Today Matthias is perhaps best known for his library, which consisted of between 1500 and 2000 volumes,25 making it one of the largest in Europe. Matthias did not come from a royal family; his father, János Hunyadi, had been a powerful magnate and successful military leader, but he still lacked the heritage of many of the nobility who served him. In order to support his royal position, Matthias adopted many of the vestiges of power used by other rulers without prestigious family trees, including Federico de Montefeltro, the duke of Urbino, and Lorenzo de Medici, the unofficial leader of Florence, with both of whom he was in close contact. Additionally, both these rulers were responsible for sending artists and art objects to the Hungarian king. Contemporary Italian humanist thought emphasized that nobility, and hence legitimacy in office, was not a right of birth, but was gained through education, intellectual achievements, and an understanding of what would be today called ‘high culture’. Matthias,

who had had a humanist education in his youth, therefore made sure that his interest in literature and learning was well known. He had a studiolo, a private office in which the owner would display objects of intellectual and monetary value, and symposiums, structured, intellectual conversations on a specific topic, were held at his court and at other centers of learning around Hungary. In the written account of one symposium, held at the house of János Vitéz between 1468 and 1472, on the topic of theology, the king was presented as the wisest of the debaters.26 This flattering portrayal was common among the intellectual Italian magnates, and whether or not the symposium ever took place, or if it happened in the way described is unimportant compared with the image of the king it presented. Additionally, to enhance his image as an enlightened ruler, in the manner of many Italian magnates, Matthias presented himself in the guise of various historical and mythological figures. To his political and military enemies, he drew on imagery of Attila the Hun, becoming a sort of Attila Secundus, the scourge of Europe. For the intellectual classes, he presented himself as Alexander the Great, the conquering, learned leader. His role as the defender of Christianity against the Turks was embodied by Hercules metaphors.27 Works illustrating

these metaphors were commissioned from a host of Italian artists, including Mantegna, Filippino Lippi, Verrocchio, Caradosso, Ercole de’Roberti, Pollaiolo, and perhaps even Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli.28 Italian artists also came to his court, and when he commissioned work on his palaces at Buda and Visegrád, he hired Italian architects to direct the work, and imported Italian artists to execute sculptures and building plans. However, although Matthias had an interest in Italy, classicism, and the newest intellectual and artistic developments from south of the Alps, the king maintained an interest in and loyalty to Hungary’s own Medieval traditions. Matthias continued to commission buildings in the Gothic manner, for example, St. Elizabeth’s in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia) (figure 1),29 and even the Buda and Visegrád palaces continued to use Gothic structural elements. Matthias’s use of a mixture of Gothic and Renaissance forms was not accidental. Some, certainly, can be attributed to Hungarian masons’ lack of familiarity with Italian design and building methods, but the use of Gothic styles had a specific purpose as well. The king presented himself as being possessed of Classical virtues and Renaissance culture, as well as the strength and courage of a chivalric Medieval knight.30 gherese”, Il veltro: rivista della civiltá italiana, vols 1-2, January-April,

Klára Pajorin, “I simposi degli umanisti” in Uralkodók és

1993, p. 13.

Uralkodók és Corvinák = Potentates and Corvinas: Az Országos

Corvinák= Potentates and Corvinas: Az Országos Széchényi Könvytár

Scafi, p. 13.

Széchényi Könvytár Jubileumi Kiállítása a Lapításának 200. Évfordulóján

Jubileumi Kiállítása a Lapításának 200. Évfordulóján = Anniversary

Antal Kampis, The History of Art in Hungary, trans. Lili Halápy,

= Anniversary Exhibition of the National Széchényi Library, Budapest,

Exhibition of the National Széchényi Library, Budapest, May 16 – August

London, 1966, p. 114.

May 16 – August 20, 2002, p. 16.

20, 2002, p. 117.

27 Alessandro Scafi, “La cittá ideale del Filarete e il Rinascimento un-

State?” in Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism of Central Europe, eds.

János Bak, “The Kingship of Matthias Corvinus: A Renaissance

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This duel identity of the king and, indeed, of Hungary continued throughout the early modern period.

Gothic and Renaissance in Hungary and Europe Before I go on, I would like to give a general characterization of the concepts of Gothic and Renaissance in art history. In general, Gothic structures are identified by a few certain characteristics, namely, pointed arches, an exaggerated verticality, elements grouped in threes, and an interest in negative space. Renaissance architecture developed from an attempt to re-create the building styles of ancient Rome. It is generally characterized by rounded arches, columns decorated Tibor Klanczay and József Jankovics, Budapest, 1994, p. 45.

with classical orders, elements groups in twos, and an emphasis on symmetry and balance. Hungarians had particular ways of mixing these two styles together. Certain all’antica ornaments, to use the Italian phrase for classicizing elements, were imported into Hungarian Renaissance architecture, and were found all over the country. One particular element, is the window and door frame of the type found in figure 2, in this case from a house in Lőcse (Levoca, Slovakia). This frame is found throughout the Hungarian lands, but with variations based on local building traditions. Medieval door frames, such as that in figure 3, were typically formed with a sloping surface which ends the framing element, about half way down the window. When Hungarian masons adopted the new Renaissance-style cross windows, they often used the Italianate frame, but

included three openings in the window, or had the frame elements end half way down the window rather than at the bottom as was characteristic in Italy and, for example the Bakócz chapel (figure). Window frames and classical ornamentation, however, are merely decorative elements, and the major structural feature that distinguishes Gothic from Renaissance building is the construction of the opening elements, that is the door and window frames, regardless of how they are ornamented. In the medieval building tradition, elements such as door and window frames were carved from the same stones as the walls (figure 4), while in Italian buildings, walls were constructed and door and window frames were added separately, usually made from a different material than the wall itself (figure 5). On projects without an Italian master, early attempts

at building ‘Renaissance’ structures in Hungary, Italianate styles were applied merely as decorative elements, and, due to the rigidity of Hungarian guild structure, the fundamental Gothic building techniques, that is the carving of the opening elements from the same stones as the walls, remained the same.31 The adoption of Italian Renaissance styles was not, as it happened in Florence, a simple matter of the old pushing out the new. At first Italian elements were associated only with the court, as only Matthias had significant access to Italian artists. However, works of a religious nature, in particular church painting and architecture, continued to be executed in the Gothic style, as this was traditional. North of the Alps, religious painting 31

Rózsa Feuer-Tóth, Renaissance Architecture in Hungary, trans.

Ivan Feherdy, Budapest, 1981, p. 21.

FIGURE 1 ST. ELIZABETH’S CATHEDRAL, KASSA

FIGURE 2, WINDOW ON A HOUSE IN LÔCSE

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was seen as Gothic, and although there are occasional exceptions, such as the Italian-style frescoes at Esztergom from the early fifteenth century, when people went to church, they expected to see Gothic architecture and painting. Additionally, although by 1500 Italian artists and styles were prevalent in courts and cities around Europe, rulers still used Gothic elements to emphasize certain political points. In the German speaking lands in particular, there was a revival of knightly, medieval values. This found its expression particularly in chivalric poetry and the emphasis on armor, although, since the development of firearms, it was militarily obsolete.32 Hungary, which had strong ties with the German cities and Austria, as well as a large

German-speaking minority, continued to use Gothic art for political and spiritual purposes. In 1486, Matthias Corvinus had himself portrayed in the Gothic manner at Ortenberg castle, today in Bautzen, Germany, where his rule was unpopular.33 The Gothic decorative elements helped to emphasize a continuity with the past and legitimize his rule.

Bakócz Chapel In stark contrast to the Ortenberg relief is a monument in Hungary intended to emphasize its patron’s suitability for a prominent role in Italian politics. The 33

Bogusław Czechowicz and Mateusz Kapustka, “Hope and

Pragmatism: The Rule and Visual Representation of Matthias Corvinus in Silesia and Lusatia” in Matthias Corvinus, the King: Tradition and

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister, and City: The Art of

Central Europe 1450-1800, Chicago, 1995, pp. 68-69.

Renewal in the Hungarian Court, 1458-1490, Budapest Historz Museum, Budapest, March 19 – June 30, 2008, p. 81.

Bakócz Chapel (figure 6) in Esztergom is probably the best known monument of the Hungarian Renaissance, and one of the few remaining whole structures from the period. It is significant, however, not merely for its survival, but also as one of the great masterworks of the period, characterized both by its overwhelmingly Italian form, and the use of traditional Hungarian building materials. Cardinal Thomas Bakócz came from obscure origins to great power both in the Church and in more worldly capacities. At various times he was Bishop of Győr, Bishop of Eger, Archbishop of Esztergom, a member of the royal council, and finally Cardinal in 1500. He later became the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. He was both a thoughtful scholar and humanist, a patron of the arts, and a skilled politician who was motivated by

a desire to start a powerful dynasty.34 His political connections were numerous, and in 1505 he was encouraged by the Emperor Maximilian I to seek the papacy. The same year, news that Michelangelo had begun work on a monumental tomb for Pope Julius II reached the Cardinal. 35 Bakócz was inspired to create a monument to himself that would not only express his judgment as a patron of the arts, but also his political ambitions. The following year, in 1506, the foundation stone was laid for the chapel. The chapel was not fully completed until 1519 when the white Carrera marble altar, carved by Andrea Ferrucci and 34

The Register of a Convent Controversy (1517-1518): Pope Leo X,

Cardinal Bakócz, the Augustinians, and the Observant Franciscans in Contest, ed. Gabriella Erdélyi, Budapest and Rome, 2006, pp. xix, xxi. 35

Miklós Horler, The Bakócz Chapel of Esztergom Cathedral, trans.

Lili Halápy, Budapest, 1987, p. 18.

FIGURE 3 DOORWAY IN BESZTERCEBÁNYA FIGURE 4 DOORWAY FROM THE CASTLE AT TRENCSÉN (TRENCˇIN, SLOVAKIA)

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shipped from Italy, was installed (figure 7).36 Although Bakócz would narrowly miss the papacy in the election of 1513, the prelate went on building the chapel. The chapel is remarkable for many reasons. Although there had been a strong interest in Italian art and architecture in Hungary for almost a century when Bakócz began building, Bakócz was the first non-royal patron to embark on such an ambitious Italianate building project, and the first person of any sort to construct a building entirely in the Italian style, not merely use classical elements as decorations in a fundamentally Gothic building. Other non-royal humanist patrons, such as János Vitéz and Jannus Pannonius, had merely collected books, commissioned paintings, and held symposia. Matthias’s commissions at Buda and Visegrád, perhaps because they were

renovations of older buildings rather than new structures, did not adopt an Italian-style ground plan, although they incorporated Renaissance decorative motifs. The Bakócz chapel was the first centrally-planned chapel built in Hungary. The central plan was a key element of Renaissance architecture in Italy, and was described by Alberti and used throughout the peninsula. Stylistic links can be found with the chapel of the sacristy in Santo Spirito in Florence, which was built between 1483 and 1487 by Andrea di Salvi, but the decorative style is reminiscent of contemporary Rome.37 Records are scant, but the name of Iohannes Fiorentinus is associated with the workshop at Esztergom, and he may have been responsible for the carving and decorative work in the chapel.38 37

Horler, p. 24.

Horler, pp. 25-26.

Rózsa Feuer-Tóth, p. 23.

FIGURE 5 THE BAKÓCZ CHAPEL, ESZTERGOM, DOOR TO THE SACRISTY

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However, despite the similarities to contemporary Italian architecture and decoration, there are two elements of the chapel which are specific to Hungary. The first is the use of local Hungarian red marble to cover the entirety of the chapel. The use of red marble to cover walls had a long tradition in Hungary, but marble covered chapels were not yet common in Italy. In Hungary red marble was used in building elements and projects of particular importance. It was used by King Imre (1196-1204) in his castle in Óbuda, now known only by description, which had a red marble floor and portals, or doorways decorated with red and white marble, and white marble lining the walls. Additionally, red marble covers the porta speciosa in Pannonhalma, built around the 1220s, and it may have even covered the walls of the original church at Esztergom. Later, it was used by Frederick III for

his funerary monument in Salzburg.39 Although it had a symbolic content similar to that of porphyry, which was used in Italy wherever it was available, red marble was a specifically Hungarian material, unknown in Italy. The other particularly Hungarian element of the Bakócz chapel is the bronze lettering around the cornice and in the drum of the dome. Although numerous Italian buildings, chapels, churches, and palazzi had monumental inscriptions, the insertion of bronze letters was a technology that had been used by the Romans but was subsequently lost in Italy. In Hungary however, the knowledge of the technique survived, and was employed with some frequency throughout the middle ages.40 39

Pál Lővei, “‘Virtus, es, marmor, scripta’: Red Marble and Bronze

Letters”, Acta Historiae Artium, vol. XLII, 2001, pp. 41, 44-46. 40

Lővei, pp. 46-52.

FIGURE 6 THE BAKÓCZ CHAPEL, ESZTERGOM, ALTAR BY ANDREA FERRUCCI

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There is one other Hungarian element to the chapel. Although there were certainly Italians involved in the design and building of the chapel, and although the decorative elements, proportions, and execution are all unmistakably Italian in nature, the basic structure of the walls reveals some discrepancies. In some places different elements are carved from different pieces of stone, while in others opening elements are carved from the same piece of stone as the wall itself. For example, in the back of the choir stalls the engaged columns are visibly distinct pieces of marble from that of the wall panels between them (figure 8). On the door to the sacristy, however, the wall and door frame are carved from the same piece of marble (figure 9). It would be too much to read certain things into figure 9. The chapel survived the Turkish wars, even if the attached cathedral did not, and

when the cathedral was reconstructed, the chapel was dismantled and rebuilt, piece by piece, in a different location. It is possible that seams in the door frame and surrounding wall were made at that time and were not part of the original construction, but the lack of seam between the edge of the door frame and the wall is clearly visible; they were carved from the same piece of marble. The discrepancy between these two parts of the chapel is symptomatic of construction in Hungary at this time. The chapel was undoubtedly under the supervision of an Italian architect, but the labor would have been a mix of Italian and Hungarian workers, and elements of the Hungarian guild system, which did not distinguish between different parts of the building practice in the same way as Italian guilds, persisted.

The Town Hall at Bártfa and the Castle at Sárospatak The Bakócz chapel is perhaps the most famous example of Italian Renaissance-style architecture produced in Hungary in the sixteenth century, but it is not the only one. After the death of Matthias Corvinus in 1490, many of the court projects were continued by the succeeding Jagiellonian dynasty, but many of the Italian and local artisans who had been working in the Buda workshops had to move on and find other work. In addition to Italians, the court had attracted builders, sculptors, painters, and joiners from around Hungary, and many carried the new styles with them as they returned home or to other centers of artistic production. Two of the most important

centers to develop were in Kassa and Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napolca, Romania). The guilds in these cities influenced building styles in northern Hungary and Transylvania. However, although many of the artisans had worked with Italians, or were familiar with the work being produced in Buda and at Esztergom, they did not simply adopt the new styles wholesale. Rather, the tightly organized nature of guild life and the desires of patrons who were not likely to have had great familiarity with Italian building ensured the continuation of Gothic styles in Hungarian art and architecture well into the sixteenth century. Although much of the work of the Kassa and Kolozsvár guilds has been altered or destroyed, there are a few important monuments that survive. One of the most important is the town hall in Bártfa (Bardejov, Slovakia), a town north of Kassa. FIGURE 9, THE TOWN HALL AT BÁRTFA

FIGURE 7 DOOR FRAME IN THE BAKÓCZ CHAPEL, ESZTERGOM

FIGURE 8 THE BACK OF THE CHOIR STALLS IN THE BAKÓCZ CHAPEL, ESZTERGOM

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The town hall (figure 10) was the first public building to take into account the Renaissance style without the help of any Italian artists or craftsmen, but it shows a significant amount influence from local building traditions. Constructed between 1508 and 1510 by one ‘Master Alexius’, the contract for the building stipulated that it have Italian windows, but the resulting structure is a mix of Gothic and Renaissance styles.41 At first glance, the hall is hard to identify as Renaissance, especially to anyone familiar with contemporary Italian buildings, such as the Palazzo della Cancellaria in Rome. However, it contains distinctive features which break from Hungary’s Gothic traditions. There are several highly decorated Renaissance-style door frames inside the building (figure 11), a coffered 41

Feuer-Tóth, p. 24.

ceiling, cross windows with only two openings and classical frames (figure 12), and a porch in an Italianate style (figure 13). However, the sloping roof with its Gothic embellishments, lack of any sort of classical framework applied to the exterior, and repeated use of traditional Gothic motifs, such as the broken-branch door frames (figure 14) and balustrade, and the triple window in the Renaissance porch indicate a persistence of local building styles. In contrast to the Bardejov town hall, the castle at Sárospatak, owned by the Perényi family, was remodeled under the direction of an Italian architect, Alessandro Vedani, who came from Lombardy and worked at Sárospatak from 1534 until his death. This architect was responsible for remodeling the vöröstorony (red tower) (figure 15) and building a new wing with a three light arcade (now

enclosed) (figure 16), and numerous decorated door and window frames throughout the structure.42 Fortunately, the castle still stands, largely in its original state. Several of the door frames and other embellishments were moved in a later renovation, but they still survive. Motifs popular in the Matthian and Jagiellonian periods, such as rosettes and dolphins, continued to thrive at Sárospatak, but there was still no attempt to impose a unifying order to the entire façade of the castle as was almost inevitable in Italy at this period. Although construction was supervised by the Italian Vedani, Péter Perényi requested masons from Kassa and Krakow to help build and fortify his castle,43 indicating the sort of mix of backgrounds to be expected in building projects in Hungary at this time. 42

Feuer-Tóth, p. 27.

The Renaissance in Hungary was not a homogeneous movement characterized by a steady progression from Gothic to Renaissance, nor was it invariably backward looking or unwilling to experiment. Both Hungarian designers and Italian architects in Hungary proved themselves willing to work creatively with new and old elements, to accommodate the strict guild codes and to build in many styles. Different political and social concerns as well as a differing level of access to actual examples of Italian architecture and Italian artists resulted in an uneven and idiosyncratic development of Renaissance style throughout the Hungarian lands. The picture of the Hungarian Renaissance, so often imagined from abroad, as that of a wholesale transplant of Italian ideas and arts to Hungary, is simply untrue. The uniform and authentic Italianate style of

FIGURE 10 DOOR FRAME AT THE TOWN HALL, BÁRTFA

FIGURE 11 WINDOW FRAME FROM THE TOWN HALL, BÁRTFA

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FIGURE 12 WINDOW FROM THE CHURCH IN CSÜTÖRTÖKHELY (SPIŠSKÝ ŠTVRTOK, SLOVAKIA)

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Sarah Lynch: Italian Influence on the Hungarian Renaissance

the Bakócz chapel is the exception rather than the rule. The Bártfa town hall is nearly contemporary, but could hardly be more different in aspect, although both were built from the ground up with clear intentions to imitate the Italian manner. In contrast, the Sárospatak castle is a belated renovation and extension, and in many ways comes closer to the Italian ideal than Bártfa, having more elaborate and finely carved ornamentation executed and arranged, at least in the new wing, in a more organized and Renaissance fashion. Despite its limited embrace of the Italian manner, the town hall in Bártfa must have served the patron’s purpose in its expression the wealth and sophistication of the prosperous mining city.

Research in Hungary The primary difficulty in studying the Hungarian Renaissance is the scarcity of material to work with. From the perspective of a foreigner, in particular, it can seem that there is little more than a few fragments from the Buda castle and the Bakócz chapel in Esztergom. Indeed the destruction of the Turks, the Habsburgs, and other invading forces, as well as well as occasional disputes between Hungarians themselves, has damaged and destroyed invaluable resources for the scholar of art. Research in Hungary, then, as well as extensive travel in areas like Slovakia and Transylvania is necessary to develop a full understanding of the period. I have been lucky enough to visit many of the important sites around Hungary and Slovakia, including not only the

above mentioned monuments, but also, among others, Kassa, Lőcse (Levoca), Frics (Fričovce), Eperjes (Prešov), Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica), Pozsony (Bratislava), Sáros (Šariš), and Késmárk (Kežmarok) in Slovakia, and Siklós, Pécs, Pácin, Eger, Vác, Tata, Nyírbátor, and Pécel in Hungary. These travels have allowed me to learn what is not possible in a library; how wide spread the used of Italian motifs was in Hungary, even in domestic architecture without a public or religious function. I now have a better understanding of the scale and function of these works, and the manner of their execution. I have also, of course, spent a good deal of my time in Budapest in the library. The other great challenge to the would-be student of the Hungarian Renaissance, is the Hungarian language itself. Indeed, some foreign scholars, who work in the

field of Central and Eastern Europe have studied the subject only cursorily, because they do not know the language, or otherwise, they have studied the subject without knowing Hungarian because all of the primary resources for the subject, archives, letters, documents, books, and so forth, were written in Latin in that period. It is only the secondary literature that is in Hungarian, and much of that is available in either German or English. However, there are a few things, journals, some books, older travel literature that may describe a palace or building since destroyed, that are in Hungarian, and that are necessary for the serious student to read. For this reason, and to ease my transition to life in Hungary, I have been studying Hungarian with some success. Although conversations are still laborious, my Hungarian reading is useful, not only in the library, but on a day to day basis

FIGURE 14 FIGURE 13 PORCH ON THE TOWN HALL, BÁRTFA

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DOORWAY FROM THE TOWN HALL, BÁRTFA

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AY 2008-2009 as I navigate Budapest and other parts of the country where my research has taken me. Even my rudimentary spoken Hungarian skills have proved useful in the areas formerly included in the Hungarian crown, and I have often found that speaking just a little Hungarian has opened doors, both literal and figurative. On one occasion, and attendant at a church, pleased with my attempts to speak Hungarian, opened the sacristy, which was not normally open to the public, and on another occasion, a guard in a castle allowed me to photograph a chapel, that normally did not permit visitors to used photography. My experiences in Hungary have been both personally and professionally rewarding and enriching. I will return to the United States better prepared to embark on further research on the Renaissance in Central Europe.

226 FIGURE 15, THE CASTLE AT SÁROSPATAK, RED TOWER ON THE RIGHT

Sarah Lynch: Italian Influence on the Hungarian Renaissance Bibliography Bak, János, “The Kingship of Matthias Corvinus: A Renaissance

The Register of a Convent Controversy (1517-1518): Pope Leo X,

State?” in Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism of Central Europe,

Cardinal Bakócz, the Augustinians, and the Observant Franciscans in

eds. Tibor Klanczay and József Jankovics, Budapest, 1994.

Contest, ed. Gabriella Erdélyi, Budapest and Rome, 2006.

Czechowicz, Bogusław and Mateusz Kapustka, “Hope and

Scafi, Alessandro, “La cittá ideale del Filarete e il Rinascimento

Pragmatism: The Rule and Visual Representation of Matthias

ungherese”, Il veltro: rivista della civiltá italiana, vols 1-2,

Corvinus in Silesia and Lusatia” in Matthias Corvinus, the King:

January-April, 1993, pp. 11-26.

Tradition and Renewal in the Hungarian Court, 1458-1490,

Uralkodók és Corvinák = Potentates and Corvinas: Az Országos

Budapest Historz Museum, Budapest, March 19 – June 30, 2008,

Széchényi Könvytár Jubileumi Kiállítása a Lapításának 200.

pp. 77-87.

Évfordulóján = Anniversary Exhibition of the National Széchényi

Feuer-Tóth, Rózsa, Renaissance Architecture in Hungary, trans.

Library, Budapest, May 16 – August 20, 2002.

Ivan Feherdy, Budapest, 198. Kampis, Antal, The History of Art in Hungary, trans. Lili Halápy, London, 1966. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Court, Cloister, and City: The Art of

All photographs are the author’s.

Central Europe 1450-1800, Chicago, 1995. Lővei, Pál, “‘Virtus, es, marmor, scripta’: Red Marble and Bronze Letters”, Acta Historiae Artium, vol. XLII, 2001, pp. 39-55. Miklós Horler, The Bakócz Chapel of Esztergom Cathedral, trans. Lili Halápy, Budapest, 1987.

FIGURE 16 ARCADE OF THE CASTLE AT SÁROSPATAK

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“But, really, what do you think?:” The Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures as a Fulbright E.T.A.

Robyn Dyan Russo ............................................................................................... Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057 www.georgetown.edu Northern Virginia Community College Loudon Campus Sterling, VA 20164-8699 www.nvcc.edu robyndrusso@gmail.com

Pázmány Péter Catholic University Institute of English and American Studies H-2087 Piliscsaba-Klotildliget http://www.btk.ppke.hu/ Fulbright Educational Advising Center Hungary-1082 Budapest, Baross utca 62. www.fulbright.hu/advising www.fulbright.hu/advising

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The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Budapest faces a two-part job: teaching at a Hungarian university and advising at the Fulbright Center. Each job requires patience in negotiating the cultural differences in style of teaching and learning – a difference that covers far more than just the language barrier alone. In this paper, I discuss both the challenges and rewards of teaching and assisting Hungarian students, and offer my ideas for how to best bridge these differences.

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Introduction

As the students looked up from their pages, I put on my best Cheerful-FirstDay-of-School-Voice and asked: “Well, what do you think?” The circle of students, 15 advanced-level English majors who had signed up for my class on Contemporary American Women Writers at Pázmány Péter University, stared out the windows. They looked at the wall. They looked to the paper I had passed out, on which a poem by Native American writer Louise Erdrich was printed. They looked everywhere but at me. Figuring it was typical first-day nerves, I tried to prod the students with more specific questions— who do you think the speaker is? Is she happy or sad about this outcome? What about this title? Each attempt was met with more wall-staring, with deeper plunges into silence. Trying to keep the jovial ring in my voice, I gave one more attempt: “It’s not a trick question, guys. How about this: let’s just start with your opinion. Did you like this poem or not? Did it make sense? Really, what do you think?” Finally, one brave student timidly offered a response: “Well, what do you want us to think?” he asked. And with that simple question, I was reminded, vividly, how wide a gap I would be crossing as an American-born and educated teacher working with students accustomed to an entirely different pedagogical style. As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) grantee to Hungary for the 2008-09 school year,

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Robyn Russo: Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures I originally expected that my biggest challenge would be a language barrier (having arrived in-country with exactly one essential phrase of Hungarian: kérek egy kávét). Yet, in my work with students at both Pázmány and at the Fulbright’s Educational Advising Center, I soon learned that the cultural differences in ideas about teaching and learning were much more important. In the following pages, I will discuss my experiences teaching and advising in Hungary. I will focus on the challenges of teaching across the aforementioned cultural divide, my strategies for successful teaching in this area, as well as how this challenge helped me re-evaluate and strengthen my teaching philosophy. As the teaching of writing, both in the classroom and in the advising center, became central to my work, I will also pay special attention to my work to improve student writing and explain cross-cultural differences in composition practice.

The ETA Role in Budapest

Before I begin the explanation of my more personal experiences as an ETA in Budapest, I want to take a moment to explain more general role and responsibilities of the ETA in Budapest. Unlike many of the other student or teacher positions, the ETA in Budapest actually has a dual role: teaching classes in English at a local university and advising students who wish to study in the United States at the Fulbright Advising Center.

The main universities in Budapest take turns hosting an ETA, and this year, I was placed at Pázmány Péter, a Catholic university which has a strong English and American studies program. Pázmány Péter has two campuses, one in downtown Budapest, and the other in the suburb of Piliscaba, where the English and American studies program is housed. The ETA usually teaches a variety of courses at his or her host institution, and I was asked to teach three sections each semester: a conversation practice, and one course each on American history and American literature. The Fulbright Educational Advising Center, located on Baross utca in Budapest, shares space with the Fulbright Commission Offices. The ETA’s role at the Advising Center is to help students at any stage in the process of applying to study in the United States, from the initial inquiry to preparing for standardized testing to writing application essays and applying for funding. The ETA also runs weekly workshops on essay writing as well as a Friday afternoon workshop to prepare for the TOEFL test. Essentially, this role is to be the resource person on the American higher education system, a system which has some very distinct differences from Hungarian education, and, particularly, a system which has quite different entrance requirements from those of Hungarian universities.

Teaching at Pázmány Péter

I felt quite lucky to have been placed at Pázmány Péter University, even before I arrived there: by early summer 2008, I was already receiving kind messages of welcome from my supervisor, Cser András, and other colleagues with the Institute of English and American Studies (the department in which I teach). Pázmány Péter has hosted Fulbright ETAs in the recent past, and thus was very helpful in explaining what I would need for my year with them. András gave me a lot of leeway in choosing my course subjects: the topics, readings and methods of assessment were entirely up to my discretion. As a visiting teacher, I wanted to offer courses that would be both of interest to the students and would be something they might not otherwise have the chance to take. In my communications with Hungarian colleagues while still in the States, I learned that Pázmány did not offer many courses on contemporary American subject matter – which, fortunately, happens to be my specialty, as my M.A. thesis had focused on late 20th-century authors. With the input of my colleagues, I settled on a course schedule that included a two-semester series of courses on Contemporary American Women Writers, covering the period from 1950 to the present day over the fall and spring semesters, as this subject that was of particular interest but that full-time Pázmány professors did not have the experience to teach; a history

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AY 2008-2009 course on Civil Rights history for the fall, a subject other history teachers had found students very interested in; a course on the history and contemporary issues in American journalism for the spring; and two conversation practice sessions. András had assured me that I was to teach my classes as I did in the States, as this would be helpful for the students, particularly those who hoped to study abroad or work in international schools or companies in Hungary. Before arriving in Hungary, I had a general idea about the differences in pedagogical practices between the United States and European higher education. I knew that the U.S. system tends to emphasize a participatory style of learning, particularly after the introductory level classes. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions, and lecturing is rare; indeed, as a humanities student, very few of my undergraduate courses included lectures and none of my graduate coursework did. Also, for humanities students, students tend to write original essays instead of sit for exams for assessment. I knew that European higher education tended to be the opposite: more lectures and tests, and less discussion and original writing. Still, on the first day of class, I approached my seminar sessions most worried about whether the students would understand me at all. I was pleased to find that all of my students had a very strong command of the English language; indeed, after having taught for three semesters in a community college department which included many English language learners, I found

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Robyn Russo: Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures many of my Hungarian students to have a better command of the language that my students back in the U.S. However, I was soon to learn that how crucial it was to negotiate the difference between a lecture-based and a discussion-based pedagogy. In my first fall conversation classes, for instance, I came armed with exercises similar to those I had used in my work in a basic/remedial English writing course at my community college in Virginia – some drills on issues like subject-verb agreement, practice games on word choice, worksheets on irregular conjugation and punctuation. My conversation students could easily complete this work, and it soon became clear more grammar practice was not what was needed. So, I turned to the students and asked them what they wanted. Nearly unanimously, the students said they wanted to talk as much as possible. It seemed a bit ironic: they seemed so reluctant to speak at all, and yet, this is exactly what the students said they wanted. With some more discussion, I observed that the lecture and test-based pedagogy they were used to in core courses also carried over to their spoken English. Part of what makes them reluctant to speak is the fact that while they do indeed know the correct word or grammar choice, they were rarely asked to spontaneously and quickly use that knowledge in an unscripted, “real-world” way. That is, they had no problem correcting misused words on a test or filling in rows of complex grammar, but were much less comfortable when asked

to speak for one minute about what they did over the weekend. As such, I saw that I would be the best resource for my students by creating a classroom where talking was necessary, and where all students felt comfortable talking. I diverted from my original syllabus, instead moving to a studentcentered pedagogy by creating a new assignment of Conversation Leader. This assignment required each student to serve as the leader of a class discussion by bringing in some topic for discussion, giving a short presentation, preparing questions and acting as a discussion facilitator. The assignment proved successful, as it gave students the freedom to talk about topics of interest to them – we have had everything from discussions about fashion trends to global warming and vegetarianism in our classes. To fill out the rest of the class, I also brought in timely current events topics, focusing on American media, to give students some cultural information along with the speaking practice. For instance, in the lead-up to the November 2008 U.S. Presidential elections, students were very interested in the American candidates, so I brought in up-to-date news stories about the campaigning. Other activities I have used in class to spur extemporaneous speaking include: • using a quick-summarize game, where students are given newspaper front pages and have to quickly summarize the stories out loud • playing games that require quick oral responses, such as Celebrities

(students write celebrity names on strips of paper, then take turns pulling names and describing the celebrities in English, in a race to collect the most wins for their team) or Taboo • doing mock job interviews and mock talk-show interviews • bringing in selections of contemporary American music and talking about the songs and songwriters Finally, I made my final assessment not a test – for the students already take many of these – but a debate project. In this assignment, students needed to pick a controversial issue and present each side of the debate around it. The assignment also included every student, not just the two presenting at any one given time, by requiring the audience of the debate to ask question. This forced students to do some quick-thinking and use their English skills spontaneously, resulting in some very entertaining and educational conversations. The pedagogical differences, however, were even more challenging to negotiate in the history and literature classes I taught. As the anecdote in my introduction attests, simply trying to teach as I had taught in America would not work. Particularly with regards to student writing, there was too great a difference in the basic scaffolding of the students’ skill set. For instance, in an upper-level humanities course in the United States, I could say that I wanted a thesis-driven essay, and all students would understand what I meant (even if they did not always succeed in producing

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AY 2008-2009 them!). But in my Hungarian classrooms, the more basic ideas of what it means to have an argument, to do a close reading of a text, to show an original critical thought were completely new concepts. This is not to criticize the Hungarian higher education standards, however, or to suggest that Hungarian students are somehow deficient. Indeed, as a community college teacher focusing on first and second-year composition classes, I have often found a similar gap in knowledge with beginning writing students. And yet, after recently completed an M.A. where I was constantly writing long, original research papers, these basic concepts of critical thinking and analytical writing are so ingrained in my mind that it can be difficult to break down what they mean. As such, working with I saw my work with Hungarian student writers as a great opportunity to re-examine my methods of teaching writing. To better understand where my students needed assistance, I began my fall courses with short response papers, directed by prompts, to assess their writing strengths and weaknesses. Immediately, I began to see what would be considered a major weakness in the American conception of college-level composition: students in both the history and literature classes were presenting me with summaries. Often, their papers proved a high level of comprehension, but showed little to no analysis. They could tell me what was in a text, but not how it created meaning, why an author chose to create a text as such or what it

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Robyn Russo: Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures could tell us about the socio-cultural and historical context in which it was written. For instance, in my Civil Rights History class, an assignment on the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed many papers which stated that King used much Biblical imagery. And yet, when I pressed the class on why a politician would make this choice, I was met with silence. After these observations in my own classroom, I wanted to learn how the students were assessed and taught in a larger university context. Luckily, my colleagues were very open and willing to share their classroom experiences. I sat in on departmental meetings about the future of the basic essay writing courses offered by the English department, and learned that many of my colleagues faced similar frustrations. Perhaps most useful was observing the English department’s Szigorlat, or final oral exams, at the end of the fall semester. Here, I watched students tackle a list of 40 questions, comprising hundreds of texts which students needed to be able to speak about. And, as I watched them answer questions, I was impressed by two things: the students had knowledge of a staggering amount of material, but that this volume meant students were indeed offering mainly summary, rarely expressing critical thought. They could offer plenty of facts about Jane Eyre, for example, but they could not make a connection between those facts and the larger contexts, such as colonialism and nationalism, which informed that novel. Again, my point here is not, however,

to make a judgment call on the Hungarian style of learning and assessment. Certainly, the lecture and oral exam method does have some advantages – I think one would be hard-pressed to find American students who could speak on as many texts as the students I observed in the Szigorlat, for instance. Yet, I still felt that, in the modern marketplace, the ability to think critically about a subject and express that thought in writing is the most vital. Indeed, I have always thought that it matters not so much whether my students can remember the names of characters in a novel but whether they remember how to look carefully at a piece of text and draw an original conclusion, for this is the type of skill which matters far more in the world outside the classroom than a list of facts. Additionally, as my colleagues’ responses and department meetings revealed, this is also the type of writing Pázmány wants from its students. As such, I began to work a lot more composition teaching into the second half of my fall classes — and, when planning the syllabi for my spring courses, I decided to take a different approach. Borrowing from some of the ideas by American composition theorists I had studied such as Nancy Sommers, Laura Saltz, Peter Elbow, Mariolina Salvatori, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, I began working with exercises that broke down the concepts of good writing that instructors often take for granted. For example, I began using excerpts from Graf and Birkenstein’s book The Say/ I Say: Moves that Matter in Academic

Writing in both my history and literature classes. This unique book offers templates for creating academic arguments. As someone who prizes original thought and creativity, I had been quite skeptical of the idea of writing templates, at first, but after using chapters successfully in basic writing courses with non-traditional adult students in the U.S., I found that they were quite useful for de-mystifying the types of moves an experienced writer does unconsciously. For instance, one set of templates explains how student writers can introduce their point of view on an issue by treating it as a response to a larger academic conversation, suggesting templates such as: • One implication of X’s treatment of ___________ is that _________. • In discussions of X, one controversial issue has always been_________. On one hand,__________ while on the other hand________. My own view is____________ • When it comes to the topic of _________, most people think_______. However,_______ (Graff and Birkenstein 22-24). In each class, I used Graff and Birkenstein’s templates alongside material from our course texts. In this way, I was able to further discussion on the course topic, while also helping students better understand how to produce successful academic writing.

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AY 2008-2009 Another successful writing/critical thinking exercise I used came from Salvatori’s book, The Elements and Pleasures of Difficulty. In this book, Salvatori suggests that teachers take a different approach to the difficult moments in texts, asking students to focus on the areas they do not understand, as opposed to only focusing on those that they do. She uses a tool she terms “difficulty papers,” in which a student pinpoints a moment in the text that does not make sense to them. The student then tries to use outside knowledge, questioning, close reading of the text and research to take apart the difficult piece. Instead of calling for one “answer,” the assignment tells students to write down any and all possible explanations and questions they have about the difficulty. In this way, students learn to think in a more complex way, moving past the elementary notions of “right” and “wrong.” Particularly for my Hungarian students, these assignments have been useful because they encourage questioning in a new way. One of the most important observations I had made while observing the end-of-term tests was that the exam-heavy pedagogy made students very fearful of giving a “wrong” answer. As such, my Hungarian students seemed much less inclined to reveal when they were having trouble with a text, sensing that difficulties or misunderstanding would mark them as a weak student. By enforcing the idea that difficulties were useful and assigning papers where students were encouraged to talk about what was confusing, our classroom discussions became much more interesting and effective. Instead of hiding

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Robyn Russo: Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures the difficult parts of the text, we got the chance to explore them. But perhaps one of the most useful changes I made for the second semester teaching was inspired by my work as a graduate student at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. There, I assisted directing Professors Randall Bass and Eddie Maloney with research and development of many educational technology tools, but one of the most interesting, to me, was our work to create the Georgetown Digital Commons (www.digitalcommons.georgetown. edu), and, particularly, our use of blogs in classroom settings. One of the arguments Bass and other scholars working in the study of teaching and learning use for blogging in the classroom is that it makes student work public. In a way, this mimics what working academics do: we present our work publicly to colleagues, accepting criticism and inviting dialogue. Scholars in this area also argue that the public nature of the blog makes students more accountable for the work they do, just a professor is accountable for the article she publishes in a scholarly journal. As such, I built two course blogs, using the popular free blog hosting site, www. wordpress.com for my spring courses on Women Writers and American Journalism. The blogs had a twofold purpose: firstly, they could serve as course management system, allowing me to upload readings for my courses and post supplementary material, and secondly, they served as a space for students to post weekly responses. While the blogs are password protected, meaning that

only those students in the class can access them, the public nature of the responses spurred an immediate improvement in writing: students know their peers will see the work, and thus, they treat the responses more seriously. Because I also required that students post the writings before class begins, and make the responses a significant portion of their grade, it also provided a natural segue into class discussion. Now, instead of cold-calling on a student to analyze some text, I could introduce a topic by pointing to a response a student had on a blog. In this way, students’ confidence in their thoughts and theories was boosted: I could say “Eszter had something interesting to say about the character’s name,” or “Zoltán had a good analysis of this Washington Post story,”, thus inviting students to share in a way that was more comfortable. The result has been both improved responses and much livelier in-class discussion. Finally, one vital part of my teaching philosophy has been the responses I provide to student writing. Instead of dedicating the majority of my time to marking grammar errors or focusing only on a grade, I try to provide substantive feedback by writing back to the students in a letter format. In these responses, I focus most of my energy on trying to help the students clarify their argument, raise places where their support is weak, and show them new angles for examining their topic. Instead of “correcting,” then, I try to treat the responses as a conversation, which I believe makes the student feel more in control of their writing process than merely offering a grade. I use the blog to post comments

on their weekly responses, and I assign outlines due more than a month before their final essays, on which I try to provide about a page of commentary. Because of the extremely busy schedules of the typical full-time Hungarian professor, this type of feedback simply is not feasible in many other classes. But as a Fulbright teacher, I have a less-stressful schedule, and so I feel it is important to take the time to offer intensive feedback whenever possible. Over my year here, this has been one of the things my students are most excited by, and many have told me that the responses I have offered have been the most useful feedback they have ever received. Certainly, I know that there is always room for improvement in teaching, but I feel as if my students have made some great strides in my year here. What is perhaps less measurable than their progress on essays, but no less important, is the increased curiosity I have seen in the subjects I teach. Several students, for instance, have told me that they wish to use one of the authors I have introduced in a thesis project. As they had not had exposure to many of the texts I use – particularly the more contemporary ones – I am glad that I was able to bring these new ideas to Hungarian students and open a window on texts that they enjoy. One student from the first half of me Women Writers class, who could not fit the second half of this class into her spring schedule, even asked for the readings to complete on her own “for fun,” a statement which any teacher would agree makes one quite happy!

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Advising at the EducationUSA Center For the ETA in Budapest, however, teaching at a university is only half of the assignment. In addition to the three classes I teach, two days every week are spent at the Fulbright EducationUSA Advising Center. Here, I have a variety of responsibilities. I run weekly workshops on both essay writing – covering all of the varieties of essays used for admission to U.S. colleges, universities and scholarship programs – and the TOEFL exam. I also assist students with borrowing materials or using the three computers in the Advising Center to study for the full range of standardized admissions tests: TOEFL, SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT and individual subject tests. I assist students with locating appropriate study programs in the U.S. and in obtaining more details about the schools. Additionally, I have traveled with my colleagues at the Fulbright Commission to smaller Hungarian cities, including Veszprém and Kaposvár, to offer information about both the Fulbright and study in America in general, and I have helped organize and participated in our International Education Fair, held at the Fulbright Center during the late fall. As in my writing classrooms at Pázmány, I found that the bridging the cultural differences in writing style was a significant part of my work. Perhaps even more so than a classroom essay, the admissions essays and personal statements required for U.S. schools are quite different than anything a Hungarian

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Robyn Russo: Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Across Cultures student would have completed previously. These essays require a student to “sell” himself to a school, a concept which Americans might think as confidence, but which seems more like bragging to the Hungarian student. Because these essays are very specialized, based on both the student and the program to which the student is applying, I tried to use my time in the center to give students as much one-on-one assistance as possible, often sitting with a student and commenting on the essay alongside him or her, to make the purpose of the essay more clear. Because writing a successful essay often takes many drafts, I have also made myself available online to visitors, giving them to chance to submit essays via e-mail when they cannot make it in during my limited office hours. Writing is also quite important on both the TOEFL and other standardized tests, so I also tried to offer many ways for students to receive feedback on this writing as well. One thing I try to emphasize in the opposite styles of organization used in Hungarian and American writing styles: while the Hungarian student is used to writing which works up to a final conclusion, the American system these exams expect prizes a clear topic sentence which presents an argument at the very beginning of the essay. For students both in the workshops and who come to use the practice software in our computer room, I always offer them the option of saving their writing and receiving my feedback, to give some more individualized instruction.

Another project I undertook as the ETA in the Advising Center has been the implementation of a GRE workshop. I had noticed that more and more students were coming in to borrow materials or use the center’s practice computers for GRE (Graduate Record Exam). Additionally, because of the American system of funding for higher education, where students tend to pay for their undergraduate education but win fellowships or assistantships to cover graduate education, it is often easier for foreign students to obtain the needed funding at the graduate level. The GRE test, however, is required for nearly every program, and it is quite daunting, even for a native speaker. With the assistance of Natalie Bowlus, a Fulbright Student Grantee studying math in Budapest this year, I put together a GRE workshop. Together, Natalie and I selected the most useful sections of practice books to compile a large packet of study information, made lists of key words, and created a presentation on study and test-taking strategies. While this program was in its test stage this year, and only offered once, the students who attended found it useful, and I hope that the assembled materials and presentations can now be used in future years by the Advising Center, particularly because there is no similar workshop offered in Budapest. Finally, as the in-house American, I find that some of the most useful assistance I can offer visitors to the center is the more informal kind. Many students enter with only the vaguest idea of what life in the United States is like, or what the

college experience is there. I often find myself offering practical information on everything from public transportation in New York to the climate in the American South. They are “little details,” to be sure, but they can be very much appreciated by a student facing a list of potential schools in cities they know nothing about. I am happy to report that, even in this very difficult recession year, I have seen some great successes from students who regularly use our services. One student, for instance, won a highly-competitive scholarship to spend a year abroad studying business at New York University, and another landed a sport in an elite medical school exchange. These are just two examples, but they do illustrate how exciting it can be to help Hungarian students reach their educational goals.

Conclusions My time as an ETA, both at Pázmány Péter and the Advising Center, certainly has presented challenges, but each has also presented an invaluable learning experience. When I return to the states in August to begin full-time teaching work at Northern Virginia Community College, I will be entering classrooms with large numbers of non-native English speakers and beginning students who are not familiar. The practice of teaching cross-culturally here in Hungary, of learning to understand and appreciate the differences in pedagogy which go far deeper than language alone, has made

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me a much more aware, self-reflexive and flexible instructor. While it might sound clichéd, I truly can say that my Hungarian students have been the best teachers I could have asked for. Today, nearing the end of my second semester teaching, when I turn that beginning question of what do you think? to my classroom, I get a much more lively answer — a change that has as much to do with their hard work and willingness to try new learning styles as my own planning. And, in addition to the more formal, professional lessons I am taking away, the wonderful relationships I have formed with Hungarians have also expanded my thinking and opened my mind, be that the evenings I spent discussing literature with my Pázmány colleagues over wine or the lunches I have shared with the Fulbright Center staff. I feel I am leaving Hungary having made progress with many Hungarian students – and having made much personal progress as a teacher.

Works Cited/Referenced Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: Moves that Matter for Academic Writing. New York: W.W. Norton and

The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady

Company, 2006.

Salvatori, Mariolina R. and Patricia A. Donahue. The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. New York: Longman, 2004.

Georgetown

Digital

Commons.

www.digitalcommons.

georgetown.edu

Maxwell Staley ............................................................................................... Central European University Nádor u. 9., 1051 Budapest, Hungary www.ceu.hu maxstaley@gmail.com Adviser: Matthias Riedl

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The article addresses the social milieu from which the poet and journalist Endre Ady emerged. In doing so, it explores the possibility of applying an interpretation to Hungarian Modernism similar to that of Carl Schorkse and later scholars of fin-de-siécle Vienna. The question is whether the shared historical experience of a Hungarian cultural elite can serve as an interpretive starting point for Ady’s writing. In order to answer the question, the paper first discusses the preponderance of downwardly mobile provincial gentry and Calvinists in the Hungarian intelligentsia. It then explores the work of Ady, who was from a Calvinist, gentry background himself, arguing that Ady’s unique blend of iconoclasm, patriotism, and spirituality may be seen as a result of his social origins.

Introduction Endre Ady, the most influential poet of the pre-WWI period, came from an impoverished Protestant gentry family in the East of Hungary. How, then, can this fact be seen to have affected his journalistic and poetic output, which so polarized his country? Without a vast array of biographical materials, this is a difficult question to

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AY 2008-2009 answer. It is interesting, however, that Ady was not alone in coming from the gentry, or from a Protestant background, among his contemporaries in the Hungarian cultural elite. In fact, individuals with this pedigree were rather over-represented in his generation, which emerged in the early twentieth century as a powerful voice condemning the status quo. It would be interesting, therefore, to investigate the the histories of the various social categories--gentry, Protestant, intelligentsia--from which Ady the individual emerged. To do so, even without finding causal relationships, could provide insights into both Ady’s work and the phenomenon of Hungarian modernism as a whole, although the latter obviously involved individuals from many other backgrounds. Also, such a project would be similar to Carl Schorkse’s in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, a paradigmatic study of Central European modernism. In fact, it is that work, as well as later responses to Schorkse’s thesis, which provide the theoretical framework for the project. This paper, after a preliminary discussion of the Schorske thesis and its possible ramifications for research on Hungarian modernism, explores the social history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. It discusses the role of the gentry, and especially their predominance in middle-class positions after the Compromise of 1867. It also investigates the role of Protestants in the gentry and intelligentsia, as well as the relatively marginalized progressive sector of that group. Following that is a discussion of Ady’s work, including journalism

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Maxwell Staley: The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady and poetry. The focus is on his political progressivism, religiosity in his work, as well as his unapologetic (though still left-wing) nationalism. Overall, preliminary research suggests that the enhanced role of the partly Protestant gentry in the Hungarian modernist arts scene (as opposed to the Viennese case, which was dominated by the Jewish bourgeoisie) did affect the manifestation of modernism in Hungarian art. This influence can be seen in Ady’s work--not only because he was the leader of his generation of writers, but also because his works combination of progressivism, religiosity, and nationalism may be interpreted as an expression of the social and political makeup of Hungary’s intelligentsia.

2. Theory: The Schorske Thesis and Beyond

Any work dealing with Central European modernism must at some point deal with the Schorske thesis and its implications. His book, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, is actually a collection of essays discussing the different manifestations of Viennese modernism. It is both a biography of the city itself, and a group biography of the Viennese liberal bourgeoisie, whose “triumph” in the middle of the nineteenth century (fatefully later than in the French and British cases) quickly gave way to crisis, when the ascendant group found itself

surrounded by hostile forces. Their opposition was both social (especially in the form of Social Democracy) and ethnic (both Slavic and German); in essence, the groups which the bourgeoisie wanted to “educate” and turn into good liberals took power before their education was done44. The most shattering result was the rise of Karl Lueger’s anti-semitic Christian Social Party, which took power in the capital itself, despite imperial resistance. Schorske argues that the aesthetic phenomenon of Modernism was the Viennese bourgeoisie’s response to that crisis. Perhaps the two most important essays in the volume are the chapters on the Ringstrasse and on Freud. The former portrays the city during the height of bourgeois ascendancy, when the triumphant liberals rebuilt the city in their image--curiously through the use of historicist architecture. As Schorske says, “The practical objectives which redesigning the city might accomplish [i.e. the rationalization of city planning, or bringing the city into capitalist modernity] were firmly subordinated to the symbolic function of representation.”45 The second essay crystallizes the generational revolt that occurred after the liberals’ precipitous fall from power--the sons of the builders of the Ringstrasse rejected political liberalism and turned inwards towards their psyche. Thus Freud’s discovery of the ahistorical “psychological

man” mirrored the development of arts that explored the subtleties and intensities of psychic states. His idea of oedipal revolt46 also mirrored the generational revolt against the liberalism manifested in the Ringstrasse47. Overall, the book places Viennese culture in a politico-historical context, while giving a psychological interpretation to the individual manifestations of Modernism. The Schorske thesis was highly influential, not least because of its attractive internal symmetries. It would be tempting to simply try to apply it to the Hungarian context--perhaps the downwardly mobile gentry provided the intelligentsia with whatever insecurities it needed in order to challenge the aesthetic status quo. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge the challenges to the Schorske thesis that have arisen in more recent scholarship. Much of this scholarship is collected by Steven Beller in Rethinking Vienna 1900. His introduction to the collection describes a number of criticisms, both theoretical and empirical, that have been made against the thesis. For one, he says it is “surprisingly clear that Schorske’s idea that Austrian liberalism had ‘failed’ was far too pessimistic.”48 On the theoretical side, he challenges Schorske’s “ironic dialectic” by pointing out that much of the drive towards modernization came from the state, which was supposedly the opponent 46

Schorske, 183.

Schorske, 25.

1981. 117.

Steven Beller, “Introduction,” in Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking

Vienna 1900. New York: Berghahn, 2001. 13.

Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. New York: Vintage Books,

Schorkse, 26.

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AY 2008-2009 of the fin-de-siécle bourgeoisie: “Vienna 1900 becomes thus the beginning of a new century rather than the final crisis of the old, and the relationship between politics and culture a far more positive one” than in the Schorske model49. Lastly, Beller suggests that the ideas of the “failure of liberalism” and the inward turn make sense mainly within the smaller context of the Viennese Jewish intellectual elite, although Schorske obviously had more general aspirations in his work50. Despite all the criticisms contained in the book, however, all the authors share with Schorske the common project of placing Modernist art in a political and social situation, which is not always typical for cultural or art history, which can often be (and sometimes has the right to be) solipsistic. Schorske’s thesis, as well as the modifications contained in Beller’s collection, give some clues for moving forward in a political and social analysis of Hungarian Modernism. In fact, Ilona Sarmany-Parsons’ essay on the depiction of women in art, which is contained in the Beller volume, directly deals with the problems of applying the thesis to other centers of Modernism in the region. In the essay she points out that earlier scholars of Czech, Polish and Hungarian modernism have focused too narrowly on their own national context, and have thus overemphasized the French rather than Austrian influence on their art51. Her central point is that depictions of women 49

Beller, 14.

Maxwell Staley: The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady in Hungarian art were mainly positive and traditional52--in sharp contrast to the sexual anxiety revealed by the “demonic” women of decadent art and the connection between “terror and female beauty” in Schorske’s interpretation of Gustav Klimt53. The implication is that Hungary was too marginal, in both socio-political (the progress of women’s rights lagged) and cultural (ignorance of Western trends) terms. Thus, a direct transposition of the Schorske thesis, or of any interpretation of Viennese modernism, is entirely untenable. Nonetheless, many authors have tried to develop similar studies of Budapest around the turn of the century. Peter Hanak’s work is the most prominent example, although his work was mainly comparative54. It nonetheless contains important research, such as an examination of Budapest’s urban reconstruction project, which followed the Viennese example but had its own implementation. Another example is Judit Frigyesi’s Bela Bartok and Turn-ofthe-Century Budapest, which is, as the title suggests, more of an attempt to put the composer in context than to comprehensively interpret Hungarian Modernism as a historical phenomenon. It is admirable for its reconstruction of the radical intelligentsia in Budapest which produced Bartok, but many of its sections on topics other than music have been seriously questioned. The general reaction has been that, while a gifted musicologist, Frigyesi makes generalized,

uncritical, or unsupported assertions about topics such as the political context and the poetry of Ady55. Nonetheless, Frigyesi’s discussion of organicism and the use of folk culture in modern art is essential to an understanding of the theoretical background of Hungarian Modernism56. Still, a comprehensive interpretation of the socio-political situation that produced the movement as a whole is missing--perhaps because the attempt is futile. And yet, in spite of the limitations suggested by earlier research into Central European Modernism, placing Endre Ady’s social background in a historical context can be useful. That is, it is important to historicize the meaning of Ady’s noble, Calvinist, and progressive identifications, rather than simply looking for signs of them in his poetry. This implies that a social history of the Hungarian intelligentsia is in order.

To be sure, Ady’s singularity makes it difficult to reconstruct the social milieu from which he emerged. For example, simply writing a history of the gentry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century would not be sufficient to explain Ady’s background. In short, no analysis of a single “identity” belonging to Ady

would do justice to the complexity of his work. Nonetheless, a historical analysis of the Hungarian intelligentsia reveals some interesting connections. In short, the gentry and Protestants were over-represented in both the political and cultural elites of Hungary. While this is perhaps predictable, given the historically superior position of the nobility, what is interesting is that in Hungary the gentry eventually occupied roles in society normally associated with the bourgeoisie. It seems that the relatively unique social structure of Hungary--nearly five percent of the population was noble, comparable only to Poland and Spain57--played a role in the formation of the class which would produce Hungarian Modernism. Since the intelligentsia was not an exclusively bourgeois, largely Jewish group, it is natural that artistic Modernists would not express the same kind of anxieties about their political context. As stated above, the gentry took up many intelligentsia positions normally associated with the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. Earlier in Hungarian history (i.e. before the revolution of 1848), the entire nobility, including both the landed aristocracy and the less privileged gentry, constituted the entire Natio Hungaricum58. In Peter’s words, the provincial gentry formed the “backbone of the nation.”59 However, after the abolition of official feudal privileges in the 1848 revolution, as well as due to economic trends, a large

Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Hungary,” The Slavonic and East

3. The Hungarian Intelligentsia: Gentry, Protestants, Progressives

Mihaly Szedegy and Mihaly Maszak, “Bartok’s Place in Cultural

Laszlo Peter, “The Aristocracy, the Gentry and Their Parliamentary

Beller, 19.

Sarmany-Parsons, 228.

History,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientarium Hungaricae, T. 41,

Ilona Sarmany-Parsons, “The Image of Women in Painting: Cliches

Schorkse, 221.

Fasc. 4 (2000), pp. 457-465.

European Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 77-110. 79.

and Reality in Austria-Hungary, 1895-1905,” in Steven Beller, ed.,

Peter Hanak, The Garden and the Workshop. Princeton: Princeton

Frigyesi, 51.

Peter, 77.

Rethinking Vienna 1900. New York: Berghahn, 2001. 220.

244

University Press, 1999.

Judit Frigyesi, Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 30.

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AY 2008-2009 proportion of the lower nobility found itself in a downwardly mobile trend, and thus began to fill the growing middle ranks of the modernizing society60. One such spot was the rapidly expanding state apparatus, and the nobility quickly filled the ranks of the bureaucracy61. Meanwhile, the entire nobility more or less rejected commercial endeavors, leaving that sector of society open to the urban minorities in Budapest--so much so that they viewed capitalism as an essentially Jewish concept62. Besides their economic and social roles within Hungarian society, the gentry had a specific cultural and political status as well. As Peter I. Hidas points out, the upper sectors of the untitled nobility, which he calls “gentry” to differentiate them from impoverished nobles, were among the better educated members of society, and were more “susceptible” to Western ideas. Furthermore, this was the segment of the nobility that was most Protestant.63 Hidas seems to hint that this segment of the nobility was simply closer in mentality to the bourgeoisie than to the stereotypically extravagant, Catholic upper aristocracy. This does not mean, of course, that the gentry supplied Hungary with its entire intellectual class, and a number of caveats are in order. In 60

Mario Fenyo, “Literature and Political Change: Budapest, 1908-

1918,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 77, No. 6 (1987), pp. 1-156. 15. 61

Fenyo, 16.

Fenyo, 24.

Maxwell Staley: The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cosmopolitan city of Budapest still had an “overwhelmingly Jewish and German intelligentsia,” as well as a petty bourgeoisie that was culturally vibrant64. A second caveat is that the gentry certainly did not wholeheartedly embrace the radical artists of Hungarian modernism around the turn of the century--in fact, they were rather more likely to reject it. As Fenyo says, the gentry were far more likely to identify with Istvan Tisza’s conservatism than with radicals such as Oszkar Jaszi or even progressives like Mihaly Karolyi65. In fact, Frigyesi alleges that the lower echelons of the nobility, with their nostalgia for their past social preeminence and aggressive defense of their status as the truest members of the nation, represented best the chauvinistic and Romantic tone of conservative Hungarian politics66. People like Endre Ady were thus the exception to the rule. Nonetheless, it must be significant that the nobility, which had once constituted the entire political “nation,” now dominated much of the middle sectors of society. Additionally, the fact that many middle-class positions were filled through downward rather than upward mobility surely had an effect on the political and cultural environment. Possible implications of these conditions on the work of Modernist artists, and Ady specifically, will be explored below.

Peter I. Hidas, The Metamorphosis of a Social Class in Hungary

Frigyesi, 49.

Fenyo, 129.

Press, 1977. 64

Frigyesi, 52.

see Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest. Northern

University Press, 2005, for a discussion of the ethnic makeup of the various confessions in the Hungarian capital. 68

During the Reign of Young Franz Joseph. New York: Columbia University

246

It is significantly more difficult to find sources on the role of Protestantism in the Hungarian intelligentsia. There is no English language treatment about Hungarian Protestantism as such, or on Protestant educational tendencies, which seem to have been more rigorous than those of Catholics, as the above reference from Hidas suggests. Nonetheless, it is clear that many of the most important Hungarian figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from the Protestant (especially Calvinist, as the Lutheran community was mainly German67) minority. In addition to Ady himself, Hungarian Protestants could claim as their own such figures as Lajos Kossuth and Sandor Petőfi. As Joseph Remenyi says, “among the political leaders of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, some of the most resourceful were associated with Protestantism.”68 And, as Peter points out, Protestantism was predominant in only one group--the lower nobility, especially in the Eastern regions of the country69. Given the enhanced role of the gentry in the middle classes, as well as the apparent intellectual strength of the Protestant minority, it is no wonder that Ady emerged from provincial poverty to become the leading light of

Joseph Remeny, “Endre Ady, Hungary’s Apocalyptic Poet (1877-

Hungarian literature. Determining how his background influenced his work, however, is a thornier, complex question. The final important aspect of the Hungarian intelligentsia is its role within the Hungarian political scene. As stated above, the gentry represented a rather conservative sector of society--an important fact, considering that the nobility as a whole essentially dominated Hungarian politics right up to the end of World War I--another significant contrast with Austria. A detailed exposition of the Hungarian political situation around the turn of the century is not necessary-suffice it to say that it was conservative and ethnically chauvinist. Frigyesi’s contention that Hungary was “relatively liberal”70 compared to Germany, Italy, and Austria is baffling--perhaps she used the absence of mass conservative parties in Hungary as the criterion, rather than the extent of the franchise, which was quite limited in Hungary. Not only was the government unrepresentative, but opposition within Parliament was difficult. The only way opposition could function within Parliament was through obstruction--so whenever a seriously contentious issue arose, government business was simply paralyzed71. It was in this context, and indeed in response to the situation, that the radical intelligentsia emerged in urban centers around Hungary. One of the most famous manifestations of radicalism in early twentieth-century

1919),” Slavonic and East European Review, American Series, Vol. 3, No. 1 (May, 1944), pp. 84-105. 87.

Frigyesi, 52.

Peter, 86-87.

Peter, 95.

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Maxwell Staley: The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady

Budapest was the “Sunday Circle” of intellectuals that organized around Gyorgy Lukacs during the war. Lukacs is best known as one of the foremost theorists of Marxism, but he only committed to that orientation towards the end of the war. His pre-Marxist career is the subject of a full-length, Englishlanguage monograph by Mary Gluck. She describes the activities of Lukacs and his colleagues as a “cultural rebellion.”72 Indeed, the group focused on aesthetic criticism for the most part. Other figures, like Oszkar Jaszi, were working on politics from a radical perspective, but it is Lukacs’ group that has gained more attention over the years, probably due to Lukacs’ later prominence. What is interesting is that Gluck describes the group, with its Modernist yet anti-Positivist orientation, in terms similar to Schorske’s portrayal of their Viennese contemporaries. For example, she has an entire chapter devoted to an analysis of the phenomenon of cultural radicalism as a generational rebellion, with the “post-liberal” sons rejecting the philosophy of their liberal fathers73. Finally, she describes the “inward turn” towards aesthetics of the group as a result of a combination of political commitment and social alienation: “Liberal beliefs in Hungary represented the disembodied ideals of a marginalized and dislocated social group, not realistic alternatives to actual government policy.”74 Gluck’s analysis makes it seem as though something very

similar to the Viennese case was occurring in Budapest. But the Sunday Circle was mainly a group of urban, bourgeois intellectuals--a group more relevant to the current analysis is the first generation of Nyugat writers, of which Ady was the most prominent. It was a literary journal founded in 1908, partially by Ady himself. It is difficult to express the importance of the journal--which means “West” in Hungarian--to Modernist Hungarian literature. Indeed, Fenyo says that Nyugat was more or less “identical” with the “artistic revolution” in early-twentieth century Hungary75. The writers of Nyugat set out not only to challenge existing aesthetic norms and bring Hungarian literature into the twentieth century, but also to rebel against the established political order. Gluck quotes the writer Ignotus as calling the quest of the Nyugat writers a “war of freedom... from a political regime which attempts to justify its intrusion into literature with the catchword that it is protecting the inner purity of Hungarian art.”76 While Ady has been described (and called himself) a decadent77, it is clear that the writers of the Nyugat were intimately engaged with the realities of Hungarian political life. Fenyo has a telling quote in his monograph: “Aladar Schopflin was to comment: “Nobody had more to do with the revolution of the Hungarians than Ady, not even those who made it.”78 Aesthetics and politics were thus fundamentally

Fenyo, 10.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. 10.

Gluck, 113.

Gluck, 77.

Fenyo, 30.

Gluck, 105.

Fenyo, 104.

Mary Gluck, Georg Lukacs and His Generation: 1900-1919.

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connected. Frigyesi described the core of the writers’ project as the “search for an art that would express moral essence.”79 This idea was borne out in the journalism and poetry of Endre Ady.

4. Ady: Criticism, Religiosity, Patriotism It would be unwise, within the limitations of this essay, to be too intrepid in asserting a causal relationship between Ady’s social context and the content of his literary output. It is enough to suggest that Ady was no cosmopolitan aesthete, rather an intensely spiritual, devoted patriot, and that this seems like a natural response to the political and artistic situation in Hungary, given his background. While participating in a marginalized progressive sector of the Budapest intelligentsia, he nonetheless constantly asserted his own “Hungarianness;” although he constantly criticized the religious authorities, spiritual symbolism imbued his poetry. In Ady’s work there exist intimate connections between his calls for progressive change, his own religiosity, and his patriotism (which occasionally made use of “proto-Magyar” legend). As Lee Congdon says, “Ady’s mission... was to summon his countrymen to national regeneration and to present them with a vision of the new Hungary.”80 This regeneration would be both spiritual and political, and it would preserve rather

than diminish the Hungarian national character. The most notable aspect of Endre Ady’s journalism is it’s consistent progressivism and criticism of the status quo. Ady’s vision of Hungary comes across as altogether negative. For example, in one article on a recent speech by a conservative Hungarian, he marvels, “Is such delicious, reactionary audacity possible today anywhere in Europe outside Russia?”81 He constantly calls for political change, looking to the West for inspiration--the title of Nyugat encapsulates that tendency best. In general, he compares his home country to the West (especially in his articles written in Paris), and finds Hungary backwards. Most interestingly, he constantly berates the ruling classes of Hungary, in spite of his own noble background. Later in the same article, he criticizes the nobility while insisting that they are on the wrong side of history: “The real state of affairs is that not even the thousand-year-old bias, savagery, foreignness and brutality of the Hungarian ruling classes have been able to defraud the Hungarians of Europe and of history.”82 Complaints about the backwardness of the nobility can also be found in his poetry, particularly in “Song of the Hungarian Jacobin.” In it, he laments, “How long must we be ruled by blackguards,/ poor, chicken-hearted millions, we?/ How long must the Hungarian people/ like caged and captive

Frigyesi, 114.

Lee Congdon, “Endre Ady’s Summons to National Regeneration in

Country: a Selection of Articles and Studies, 1898-1916. Trans. G.F.

Endre Ady, “The Domain of Magnates and Bishops,”The Explosive

Hungary, 1900-1919” Slavic Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 1974) pp. 302-

Cushing. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1977. 189-193. 189.

322. 317.

Ady, 191.

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AY 2008-2009 starlings be?”83 This excerpt reveals that, despite his criticisms of the status quo, he believes in Hungary’s ability to rise out of backwardness. Thus his condemnations are not aimed at the Hungarian nation as a whole, but at those who have held it back. Indeed, as the article above shows, he regards such reactionary forces as “foreign.” A second important characteristic of Ady’s writing, which may have been connected to his Calvinist background, was its religious content. While it is difficult to find explicit references to Ady’s personal religious beliefs in his journalistic writings, it is clear that he was a deeply spiritual individual. His poetry teems with religious symbolism and spiritual fervor. The religious importance of his work was clear to his contemporaries, with Bartok calling his work “prophetic poetry.”84 Remenyi says that, despite all the sensuousness of his work (and life), “his yearning for God shows a stormy soul in search for peace.”85 In this sense, the religious aspect of Ady’s poetry is simply a personal spiritual quest, or another aspect of Ady’s famous intensity. The case is more complex, however, as Ady consistently uses religious symbolism and language throughout his work, even in explicitly political or patriotic works. For example, in “The Magyar Messiahs,” he compares the plight of the Hungarians to the passion of Christ, only without

Maxwell Staley: The Social Context of a Modernist Poet: Endre Ady a point: “A thousand times the perish,/ unblest their crucifixion,/ for vain was their affliction,/ oh, vain was their affliction.”86 Such a religious/nationalistic metaphor was common in the region-especially Poland--but Ady’s point is less to sanctify the nation than to lament the uselessness of the suffering in Hungarian history. Thus, his political iconoclasm and critical patriotism (discussed below) are combined with religious language. On a more optimistic note, Ady often used religious language to animate his poems about hopes for both personal renewal and a progressive future for Hungary, for example in “On New Waters:” “You bards of faded grey will not inspire me,/ let tavern-stench or Holy Spirit fire me.”87 The juxtaposition is meant somewhat humorously, but the point here is that Ady, in spite of his anti-clericalism, in fact identified spiritual renewal with national rebirth and progressivism. Remenyi says that, because Ady “was a Calvinist, his deviation from inherited values and from the accepted design of contemporariness was unpleasing, often repugnant to the people to whom he belonged by tradition and upbringing.”88 Indeed, Ady was constantly attacked by defenders of mainstream values. Apparently, they missed one of the most essential characteristics of Ady’s corpus, which is its consistent allegiance 86

Endre Ady, “The Magyar Messiahs,” In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’:

The Poetry of Hungary. Trans. Anton N. Nyerges. Chicago: Atlantis83

Endre Ady, “Song of a Hungarian Jacobin,” In Quest of the ‘Miracle

to the Hungarian people. As we have seen above, his progressive attacks were aimed at “foreign” oppressive elements, while his unorthodox aesthetics and religious language were meant to bring about positive change and “regenerate” the nation. Thus, the last aspect of Ady’s work to be explored here is nationalism--a quality which separates Ady from other aesthetes, decadents, and cosmopolitan Modernists. Of course, Ady’s nationalism was highly self-reflective and critical, as he flatly states in a confessional article: “I am very strongly Hungarian, it is true, though naturally I pursue this characteristic of mine with ruthless criticism.”89 His Hungarian identity and patriotism are inseparable from his progressive spirit. Nonetheless, one should not fall for the temptation of assuming that he was a pure progressive, who loved his country only insofar as he wanted to improve it. In fact, Ady consciously used nationalist language in an attempt to fuse ideas about the primitive origins of the Magyar people with Western freedoms and culture. As Congdon says of Ady’s co-optation of “ancient” Magyar songs in the name of his political ideas, “the courage and spirit of the proto-Magyars would invigorate the progressive Western ideas of which he sang.”90 Whether such a project is at all tenable is up to debate. Still, it does not seem that Ady wanted to justify such an attempt through a coherent intellectual argument. It was enough to produce

poetry of symbolic and emotional power. In one poem, he compares the Hungarian soul to that of a wild stallion, an apparent reference to the nomadic origins of the Magyars: “If you should see on Magyar mead/ a bloody stallion flecked with foam,/ cut loose his lariat, for he is/ a soul-- a somber Magyar soul.”91 (403) The tone is elegiac, not chauvinistic, and it emphasizes the bonds limiting the Hungarian people--and those bonds are in fact the conservative elements who are chauvinistic nationalists. Elsewhere, Ady denies the nobility’s right to exclusive Hungarian identity, saying that “They nominated themselves Hungary,” but that they “wrecked everything” due to their arrogance and greed92. Thus, Ady’s central argument was that the true spirit of the Hungarians lay with the common people, and progressivism was good for the common people--thus, to be progressive was in fact to be a true Hungarian. In addition, he often spoke of both Hungary’s current situation and coming change in religious terms. Ady was a Calvinist of gentry background, participating in the progressive part of an intelligentsia with a large number of Protestants, and living in a society where a downwardly mobile nobility occupied many middle-class positions. May we apply a Schorske-like interpretation to this artist and his environment? For one, Ady’s Calvinist upbringing surely 91

Endre Ady, “The Tethered Souls” In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’: The

Poetry of Hungary. Trans. Anton N. Nyerges. Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur,

Centaur, 1996. 412. 89

Endre Ady, “A Confession Concerning Patriotism” The Explosive

1996. 403.

Stag’: The Poetry of Hungary. Trans. Sir Maurice Brown. Chicago:

Atlantis-Centaur, 1996. 413-414. 414.

Poetry of Hungary. Trans. Anton N. Nyerges. Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur,

Country: a Selection of Articles and Studies, 1898-1916. Trans. G.F.

Frigyesi, 170.

1996. 408.

Cushing. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1977. 277-279. 277.

Selection of Articles and Studies, 1898-1916. Trans. G.F. Cushing.

Remenyi, 92.

Budapest: Corvina Press, 1977. 248-251. 249.

250

Endre Ady, “On New Waters,” In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’: The

Remenyi, 87.

Congdon, 309.

Endre Ady, “The Explosive Country,” The Explosive Country: a

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influenced the religious content of his work, in a way that might have not been the case for someone raised in the mainstream Catholic Church. Secondly, the aesthetic turn of the Nyugat writers bears resemblance to their Viennese counterparts, although Ady’s insistent nationalism and use of proto-Magyar

myths suggests a less cosmopolitan response to the dual challenges of aesthetic frustration and political marginalization. Demonstrating that this is the result of the intelligentsia’s more noble, and less Jewish, makeup would require more research.

Photograhic Journey through Time and Space

Shandor Hassan

............................................................................................... Mai Manó Ház 1065 Budapest, Nagymező u 20. www.maimano.hu Advisor: Orsolya Kőrösi

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As a photographer in Budapest Hungary I have worked on several projects that reflect my continued interest in the development and transformation of Urban space and the relation to culture, society, architectural space and its histories. Also by looking at the history of Hungarian photography and artistic activities, particularly of the early 20th century, I have traced roots of my own artistic expression and the influence that art and artists in Hungary (and tangential movements in Europe) have influenced the arts in the United States.

Introduction The time as a Fulbright student/researcher has been focused on the continuation of my photographic and artistic work. The photography and artistic activity that I have done here involve several modalities or approaches to making works, four of which I will present in this writing and talk, all are part of my continued exploration of the making of images and art works with photography as well as instillation and multi-media. The particular interest in the work of Hungarian photographers and artists of the early 20th century has been part of my general studies during the Fulbright academic

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AY 2008-2009 year. The Bauhaus and DADA art movements which it seems intersected, are most interesting to me both in my own practice as a photographer, but also in my work in design and furniture, and in object assemblage and instillation work, and the evolution and influence that it has had on the art in contemporary American art and its history until now. The primary research/work, however, here in Hungary for the Fulbright term has been in my own artistic production.

Synopsis In Hungary I have spent my time in making several groups of photographic work, and experimenting with some new ways of making photographs. I have attended the libraries of the Mai Mano Haz and the Laszlo Moholy Nagy school to look at books of Hungarian photographers and other various artists, attending art exhibitions, museums, and spending time with artists. In this paper and discussion I will present five bodies of work with a brief description of the work, or reflection on its meaning and what it is inspired by. Pleas note that all photographic projects that are presented are in progress, that most have been made for the purpose of a book style editing, and for exhibiting as prints at a latter date, or are just experiments. The form of presentation now, i.e., the computer and projection suits the purpose of presenting to an audience the work in its current state of development.

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Shandor Hassan: Photographic Journey Through Time and Space

Hungarian Photographers and artists Direct and Indirect Influences There are many very significant artists and photographers of Hungarian origin that have had influence on art in Europe and in the United States, Of the most noted and well documented are the photographers, Andre Kertesz, Brassai, Robert Capa, Cornell Capa, George Makacsi, Gyrogy Kepes and Laszlo Maholy Nagy. All of these individuals have had an enormous and lasting impact on artistic and cultural history, and their works are published and available, and have been fundamental to the direction of photography and art in contemporary times, and inadvertently in defining new styles of art, fashion, film and culture in general. The last two Nagy and Kepes, were not exactly photographers but experimenters in art and also in the science/practice of art making in a “new” era of technology and production, and were considered originally more as painters. The influence they had was not only in their own experimentation as artists, and as photographers, but also in the field of education. In the United states they both become founders and key figures of higher education in the United States after leaving the Bauhaus in Germany which was closed due to the rise of the Nazi Party. Moholy Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, latter known as the Institute of Design, Kepes

also tought their and went on to teach art at other institutions, and latter in 1968 was the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT which became significant in various forms of arts related and scientific research. (more detail) These moves had lasting effects on approaches to art making that go beyond any borders of medium or style, and both were interfacing with scientific ideas and thought, and in both cases took on the subject of light as not only a tool but as the subject for work and research. It is particularly the practice of Laszlo Moholy Nagy that I have made some attempts to get closer to by looking at his works and reading some of his writing. I am not presenting any scholarly presentation on his works here, however. As an artist I have made some reference in the works of scans and computer generated collage; the fourth group of work that I will present and describe in my overview. In the least I am thinking about how art is a means to communicate complex ideas about space and time, how light is a subject itself in art making, and how art is about research and experimentation throughout the life of artists work and can interface with a multitude of ideas. I hope that I have done some experimentation while here in Hungary, that may advance my work into new and other directions, and that the interest in the direction that Moholy Nagy took, and the interest I have in new forms of photographic art making will continue in the future work and research that I make.

I have also have re-visited the work of Thomas Barow, who studied photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago formally the “New Bauhaus” founded by Moholy Nagy. Thomas Barrow was my professor at the University of New Mexico where I studied photography. While Barrow did not study under Moholy Nagy he was clearly influenced and made specific reference to him in his work. I include some samples/ illustrations that also help to define the influences that Moholy Nagy had on other artists and educators. University of New Mexico was the first school in the United States to offer a Masters of fine arts in Photography, Thomas Barrow was there nearly from the beginning of its inception, and was and is quite influential as an educator of photographic-arts. I raise this only as an example in the way in which art and culture and education are traveling, and tracing my own connection to the work and ideas of Moholy Nagy before I new what his art and life were about. And here now I am just scratching the surface. There are numerous American artists and art movements that were influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus, and the DADA artists/movement. It seems in contemporary times Moholy Nagy among other powerhouses, among them people like Joseph Albers who taught at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was also from the Bauhaus in Germany, as well as Kepes at MIT they represent a force and influence on American Art and Culture that is important to consider.

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AY 2008-2009 It seems that Moholy Nagy had the awareness of that potential, as he writes in the introduction of his (guide book to the education of young artists) The New Vision: Now a new Bauhaus is founded on American soil. America is the bearer of a new civilization whose task is simultaneously to cultivate and to industrialize a continent. It is the ideal ground on which to work out an educational principle, which strives for the closest connection between art, science, and technology.

Shandor Hassan: Photographic Journey Through Time and Space And As Moholy Nagy says himself regarding the idea of discussing art and experiencing art: One can never experience art through descriptions. Explanations and analyses are at best an intellectual preparation. They may, however, encourage one to make a direct contact with works of art.

The fallowing projects are more or less chronological:

PROJECTS 1. WAR This collection of photographs came about during a tour that I made for a start up company that has developed a tour, for American tourists, fallowing the 101st Airborne, based on a documentary HBO series called Band of Brothers. The tour fallows the training of American troops in the US initial trip to England and continues to the landing at Omaha beach through France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Austria, to the Dachau concentration camp and the final destination of the Eagles Nest in Austria. The photographs I made for the tour company was for the purpose of the website and promotion of the tour, and as a record and were in color.

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The work that I did for myself on this tour and as I have edited it, addresses the ”idea” of the tour as story of war in a different way. Through the various modes, of museum displays, films, archives, and actual historic places/locations that were visited. This work developed into an abstracted idea of war, as an experiment of its time, and to the effort of understanding the scale that WWII had on human life, geographical landscape and territory, technological advancements, and on the global level and the aftermath that this has on our lives now. Including the isolation of parts of Europe, the Nuclear Arms Race, and the sharp and harsh distinction between Communism and

Capitalism that separated Europe in new ways, and the divisions between nations that define our current situation in history and political life now. The photographic work also, makes direct reference to the idea of war photography in general. By chance the tour fallows the path that the famous Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa made as he covered the “story” and as he writes about it in his book Slightly Out Of Focus. This has a particular significance for me as I have been a teacher and associated with the International Center of Photography that was founded by his brother Cornell Cape in 1974 and houses the archives of Robert Capa. I was involved in the exhibition of his work this is War at the ICP. WAR (the images I present here) is a mythical remembrance, a story of lost time, something that feels and smells familiar, that has the resemblance of our own world but might belong to someone else in that it is fading, and is a way to think on the gap between the generations dividing this memory. The museums and space from which the photographs are derived are part of our collective experience, and our memories are held there, as in books we can revisit the idea of war, but not know what it was like unless we actually touch it. But what we can touch is the way that war has shaped the very way that life is lived now in front of us, and how territory and ideas are formed to construct what we might call a country or a national identity. These photographs are an attempt to address these issues.

2. Budapest: Taxonomies The sites that I am interested in, that these photographs represent are in the process of being transformed by the human hand in one way or another, either by labor/ construction workers, but also by the individual effort to repair or to make ones own improvements to the environment/city infused with the architecture itself. These are the markings of a transforming environment. They are also collectively an organic movement in the spaces, representing evolution in time and space. The photographs together are not typological or a real taxonomical categorical organization of the city of Budapest; they are intended as an impressionistic type of “Taxonomy” and means to relate the information of an urban landscape to each other and to making a new way to describe and define the monuments of a place, they are archeological and anthropological, and in these works I am acting as a collector of things. Construction sites are especially fascinating as they are the actual locations of the building of a city. Fundamentally this collection of work comes to the terms of architecture and built spaces. It is a way to uncover what is architectural space without focusing on the physical buildings of Budapest. It is the remainders and refractions of the buildings that I am interested in, whether from the new structures being formed, or the old deforming into something else, and maybe back into the earth itself. Architecture is in this sense all

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AY 2008-2009 things related to built environment that participate in the creation of that space, and includes things that non builders are involved with. How and where is the center of the mechanism of the construction site? In the world of these images the entire city becomes a kind of construction/ destruction environment, constantly under transformation, and leaving clues and pieces of its history. As well these photographs attempt to address my interest in the arts of painting, sculpture, photography and architecture. They are elements that I am collecting, some I would like to have in their miniature form. It is for this reason I make these photographs, to engage in the materiality of our world and try to further understand the meaning of human natures relationship to the things we make, and the things we fix, and ultimately the environment we live in.

anthropology |ˌanθrəˈpäləjē| noun the study of humankind, in particular • (also cultural or social anthropology) the comparative study of human societies and cultures and their development. • (also physical anthropology) the science of human zoology, evolution, and ecology. archaeology

|ˌärkēˈäləjē| (also archeology)

noun the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.

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Shandor Hassan: Photographic Journey Through Time and Space

2. Forgotten Land The photographic work Forgotten Land is a means of looking at time and space, both in relation to place itself but in relation to the passing of photographic history, where photographs become a kind of place, a virtual place. At once it is an attempt to recall a kind of memory of the way that Black and white photography has been an influence on me in how I first learned to see with the camera, and on our collective understanding of the history of our world fused with photographic history. It is partly an attempt to go back in time by using a modality that does not need to be used, as we have for numerous years color and now other forms of “image Capturing”. It is an effort to move into the future using digital technology, and into the past. Fundamentally the work is about landscape and environment, abstracting it, fusing architectural environments, sky, ground and projection monitors, to investigate the idea of where and what is landscape, and from what direction do we inhabit this environment. The abstraction is both reference to various photographers especially of Hungarian origin that have relocated us in time and space with the way that they chose to photograph, where ground becomes subject and, the relationship of things in the photo transforms, where views become flattened and space is no longer about the perspective, in three dimensions but in a more vast concept of space that involves time the fourth dimension. In the title I am addressing the loss of a

connection to nature, to earth, and to place. These are efforts to metaphorically address what we as humans are doing with our land, and to our earth. Have we forgotten our connection to it, how to live in it? And how to be part of it? It is also a means for me to address the idea of the loss of a land for a people, an idea that at once people had inhabited a space and called it a home, and now it is forgotten, but forgotten means in fact that somehow it is remembered as it is passed through generations.

extensions of our lives, and brains. They are part of the complex tools that store and reflect our fundamental technological selves. They are also then reflective of the interior workings of our brains and the inner workings of a kind of hyper and molecular urbanism that is driving the way to our global interconnectedness at any instant. These shards and pieces in the reversed scans are objects that might as well be from our own brains, not any less then machines that our brains have fabricated.

3. Scan-grams and Composite

The collage works, are comprised of images from the Internet, including NASA, and New York Times, and other photographs from the websites, as well as a fusion of my own archive of photographic work, scans of objects and drawings, and the inclusion of text. This began as a reference to the works of various American artists, including Thomas Barrow who I mentioned earlier, Ed Ruche, and other American artists that included advertising/billboard like text in their work, and the collage and DADA art works that made word play and collage works.

The scan-grams are a technological exploration, and in part a computer assisted reproduction of the process of the photogram. Photograms were ways that without a camera, artists like Moholy Nagy worked with light as a tool and subject. The works scan-grams are looking at the interior of technological spaces. These are both documents of objects that we may or may not recognize. By making them “negative” they become part of a world of outer space, which is my interest in both the scans and the collages. They are both scientific in appearance and in feeling, also organic in the way that they are now somehow likened to living objects, or organisms. The scans are of parts of the bodies of cameras, and from computers, from televisions, machines that we have come to accept as natural

The uses of text in images are a way to abstract language and to re address certain sets of accepted ideas about language of technological, political, theoretical, and philosophical. They challenge the notion of some ultimate authority that language may have or how sources such as the New York Times may use words in their combination to create types of signage and be incredibly influential in the notion

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AY 2008-2009 that there is some authority that might be controlling any given situation. But perhaps also this challenges the notion of religious authority that suggests if something is written and formally conceived then it has great power over our actions, whether it is through advertising or through the means of political control. The computer as a tool inherently addresses a new idea of infinite space, and arbitrary dimensionality. The computer allows for an enormous scale, in miniaturized form, and acts as a kind of model/plan for potentially larger printable works; ones that go far beyond the screen. The idea of this projection in space is of interest in its collision with where information can be derived from. The computer like our mind is a type of synthesizer of all things, and ultimately a sampler. In this way computer collage that I am exploring is about the collision of the machine as it intercepts the conduits of massive amounts of information.

Hungarian Folk Funk: Photography, Found Objects, Instillation/ Sculpture HUNGARIAN FOLK FUNK is a multi media instillation of found objects assemblages, constructions and photographic works that are mined from the Budapest landscape and histories. In this work I am fusing physical and psychological terrain. This work references the material transformations and entropic manifestations in urban

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Shandor Hassan: Photographic Journey Through Time and Space space, and addresses the issues and collisions of the primal and the technological in a time of spiritual and political flux. The instillation project is a means to explore the interaction of various modes of art making. In this project I am incorporating the scanned works, the digital projection of images from the project Forgotten Land, and the collection of objects, and mixed media assemblages that I have found and made. The project Hungarian Folk Funk is both collected from the Urban Environment in Budapest and from the various ways that I have made work here. The instillation in its entirety relates to my interest in film and theatricality in the landscape and includes narrative elements. The total space is a kind of deconstructed film project, or theatrical space. My experimentation with using the multi media modes is a way to get further into the idea of what is landscape? As a place belonging to Earth, and as a human history: a social-political environment that belongs to human evolution, control, and national identities. The terms Folk and Funk have references to cultural aspects and movements that I have been influenced by in America and in other parts of the world. Folk is a reference to the music, art, architecture and food that is derived from folk culture, coming from the people and often the small” village” life. It is a challenge to the idea that art, architecture and such is formed out of the Elite society.

Funk refers to several thing in American culture, music, that developed from the black American blues tradition, as well as becoming a movement in 70’s art culture called California Funk, the word itself describes emotional mood, smell/stench, or something being particularly cool. Folk and Funk have had particular meaning in my life as an American in growing up in California. Hungary I believe has its own qualities for these words; in the instillation Hungarian Folk Funk I am overlapping my own experience with Folk Funk as an American, but also in the fact that I come from Hungarian Romanian and other eastern European Jewish lineage. The issues of nationalism are fundamentally ideas that are expressed in our landscape and our relation to earth, technology and survival. As territory is what defines a country and a language, and some notion of who one is supposed to be. The instillation references various modes of time, actual time as in the present of what is in front of us in the instillation and the human interpersonal drama that pre occupy us; geological time as in the transformation of things and structures because of the earth’s movements, and the cosmic time which is beyond our ability to comprehend but what we must accept.

Lumen

place where numerous artists, curators, architects, English translators and locals go to have a coffee or a soup. As well the café walls serve as the photo gallery and an exhibition is held monthly; inviting various photographers from throughout the world Lumen is an international meeting place. The collective is a group of photographers who meet and present various topics on photography as well as discuss relevant issues; they present their own work and the work of other photographic artists. Peti Laszlo runs the café, and the photographic group by Geregely Laszlo. The Laszlo brothers has in effect included me into their family and friends and to the life of the café. I have volunteered my services and abilities in building various cabinets for the gallery, as well as giving my advice on the running of the business end of the café, and the cultural aspects of the Photo group. I have presented my work to the group and have participated in numerous discussions at the café about photographers work. In this way lumen has been an ongoing conversation, both with photography, small business in Hungary, and in the daily lives of various artists and in Budapest. The Lumen group has both been a source of friendship and family, as well as a sociological window into one aspect of the transforming Hungarian culture.

The photo-gallery and café and photo collective group known as Lumen has been a significant part of my time here in Budapest and has in many ways acted as my affiliation. Lumen as a café is a

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J. William Fulbright William Fulbright was born on April 9, 1905 in Sumner, Missouri. His mother was a teacher. William inherited his mother’s curiosity for the world. He was educated at the University of Arkansas where he was awarded the B.A. degree in Political Science in 1925. He applied for, and was granted, a Rhodes Scholarship. Fulbright’s passion for knowledge began at Oxford and never really ceased. When Fulbright returned to the United States he was an exceptional student at George Washington University Law School. In 1936, Fulbright returned to Arkansas where he was a law professor and three years later, from 1939 to 1941 the president of the University of Arkansas - then the youngest university president in the country. In 1942, Fulbright began his career in politics - entering Congress at the age of 37. Being both passionate and astute he went on to a 30-year term in Washington. He was entering Congress in January 1943 and becoming a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Fulbright stood up for his beliefs - even if it was politically risky. In the mid-’50s, he opposed Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, he was the only Senator who vote against an appropriation for McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In this highly politicized environment, Fulbright was constantly calling for sympathy and understanding. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright worked hard to understand the nations that dealt with the United States. He never fell prey to the stereotypes of the cold war. He resisted to popular tendency of his times to belligerence and treated Soviet leaders with respect as he sought to reach understanding between peoples. It is in this spirit that the House adopted a Fulbright resolution encouraging participation in what would later become the United Nations.

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Senator Fulbright always stood by his convictions. He faced opposition in the Senate. Yet despite popular opposition, Fulbright never gave up hope for a better world. “If one believes that we are aggressive inherently, it makes it almost impossible to feel that we will ever get over this tendency to periodically destroy ourselves, our accumulated wealth and our lives. Or, is this tendency to aggression environmental, a result of experience and training? Of course, I belong to that school.” This last statement goes without saying, as does Fulbright’s position in American history as one of the country’s great humanitarians. In 1963, Walter Lippman wrote of Fulbright: “The role he plays in Washington is an indispensable role. There is no one else who is so powerful and also wise, and if there were any question of removing him from public life, it would be a national calamity.” Fulbright’s humanity was a constant throughout his career. Nowhere is this clearer than the educational program that bears his name. The Senator believed that “education is the best means - probably the only means - by which nations can cultivate a degree of objectivity about each other’s behavior and intentions…. Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.” Without the conviction and passion of Senator J. William Fulbright there could be no Fulbright Program. He received numerous awards from governments, universities, and educational organizations around the world for his efforts on behalf of education and international understanding. In 1993 he was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The Hungarian Government awarded him the Silver Cross of the Republic of Hungary in 1994. Senator J. William Fulbright died on February 9, 1995 at the age of 89.

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