Missions: Remembering Hungary's "Great Generation"

September 2002 · Historically Speaking 23 Missions: Remembering Hungary's "Great Generation" Lee Congdon Not long ago, the newsreader for a major television networkpublished a best-selling book in celebration of America's "greatest generation," die members ofwhich suffered dirough die Great Depression and fought total wars in Europe and die Pacific. I knowofnodiingto suggestdiatreaders of the book questioned the concept ofa "generation," though as die late Noel Annan pointed out in a portrait ofhis generation of English intellectuals, many professional historians do. In a study ofthe "generation of 1914," for example, Robert Wohl concluded diat generational interpretations ofthe past or presentobscured more than dieyrevealed. He was dierefore critical ofJosé OrtegayGasset's El tema de nuestro tiempo, the first notable attempt to formulate a theory ofgenerations. Ortega's reflectionswere inspired in part by Spain's "generation of'98," which numbered amongits members such luminaries as Azorin (José Martínez Ruiz), Pío Baroja, and Miguel de Unamuno. Shaken by die Spanish-American War, these and other writers dedicated themselves to Spain's national regeneration; diey possessed, diat is, a sense ofmission. "If," Ortega wrote, "the essence of each generation is a particular type of sensibility, an organic repertoire ofinnermost predispositions, it follows diat each generation possesses its own vocation, its historical mission." Karl Mannheim recognized the importance ofOrtega's work, butas a sociologisthe chose to adopt a more scientific approach to what he called "die problem ofgenerations." Nevertheless, he too believed diat diey were summoned to solve social, political, and intellectual problems presented by"destiny," a term he freighted with Heideggerian meaning. Although hewrote his essayon generations in Weimar Germany, Mannheim was born in Hungaryin 1893 and was always conscious of his own generational identity, he belonged to whatHungarians call die "second reform generation " (the first prepared die 1848 Revolution ) or the "great generation." Its members wereborn between 1875 and 1905 and initially they, like the Spaniards of '98, believed that diey had a mission to regenerate die nation. It was Endre Ady (b. 1877), a member of the déclassé gentry, who, with his electrifying New Verses of 1906, awakened Mannheim's generation to consciousness. When the poet died in 1919, one of his friends praised him for mat service: "With his new cadences, symbols , and accents, [Ady] forged a spiritual unity out ofall those who [wanted a new Hungary butwho] would never have been able to unite on the basis ofeconomic interest, class affinity, or political conviction." Thanks to Ady, who (mistakenly) believed/m de siècle Hungary to be a "wasteland" ofbackwardness and injustice , Mannheim was more aware ofbelonging to a generation dianto asocialclass. Indeed, he came to believe diat he and other intellectuals were socially "unattached," that they "floated freely" above classes. Such a view, he knew, pitted him against his first mentor, Georg Lukács. Seven years Mannheim's senior, Lukács joined the Communist Party in 1918 and escaped toAustria die followingyear, afterdie short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed . In 1923 he published HistoryandClass Consciousness, his brilliant study ofMarxist dialectics. Mannheim found much toponderin Lukács's work, but he could not accept the claim matproletarian class consciousnesswas the key to history's advance. In his judgment, classes demonstrated littlewillingnessto compromise , while generations remainedin a state of continuous reciprocity. The latter were therefore more likelyto achieve the synthesis of competing interests and worldviews that Mannheim regarded as preferable to the revolutionaryvictory ofa single class. ForMannheim, then, generational analysis was an alternative to class analysis, a less one-sided means ofunderstandingdie pastand giving direction to the present. At the same time, it was a declaration ofintellectual independence from Lukács, whose wartime "Sunday Circle" he continued to regard as one of die formative experiences ofhis and his generation 's life. In 1915, Lukács and the poetdramatist Béla Balázs (b. 1884) began to invite carefully-screened men and women, almost all of whom were assimilatedJews, to wididraw from a world at war in order to discuss die Permanent Things; Mannheim was among the first to accept. He was soon joined byodiers, including four who subsequendy enriched die field of art history: Arnold Hauser (b. 1892), author of a magisterial social history of art; Frederick...