At 6 PM on February 5th, 2019, we host the forty-first installment of the VERITAS Debate Nights series at the VERITAS home office on Zsil Street. The title of the debate is Cultural Consequences in Hungary of the Collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Historians Pál Pritz and Gábor Ujváry familiarize the audience with the topic, while VERITAS Director Sándor Szakály leads the discussion.
Starting at 5:30 PM, the book premiere for The Treaty of Trianon and Hungarian Higher Education Vol. 1 precedes the VERITAS Debate Night event. László Szögi (professor emeritus of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Eötvös Loránd University [MTA-ELTE] University History Research Group) shares his thoughts.
Location: VERITAS Research Institute for History, Zsil utca (Street) 2–4, Budapest
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The simultaneous collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and of Greater Hungary fundamentally reshaped not only politics and economics, but also culture. As a result of the Treaty of Trianon, many majority Hungarian cities with rich historical pasts, intricate educational networks and priceless public art collections, as well as two-thirds of state schools, ended up on the other side of the border. Likewise, Hungarian colleges, including their entire faculty and student body, fled to what was left of Hungary. Meanwhile even the most significant institutions that remained in post-Trianon Hungary, for example, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian National Museum, also faced a hopeless situation. Even though a significant proportion of the Hungarian intelligentsia in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia repatriated to Hungary, which benefited the country greatly, their flight came at a tremendous loss to the trans-border Hungarians. In this bleak situation, a completely new cultural policy was needed. From the mid-1920’s, the Hungarian government emphasized culture policy, which – despite all hardships – engendered a golden period of vibrancy and vitality in Hungarian culture and science that lasted a quarter century (a.k.a. the “Interwar Era”).
