HUNGARY

KATI MARTON, author, December 19, 2006
CZIKOWSKY: I have read and found your book (“The Great Escape”) immensely insightful. What are some of the uniqueness of Hungarian culture that helped guide these people who became destined to change our world?
MARTON: Hungarian culture is an orphan in Europe. The language is unrelated to any other (though it shares roots with Finnish and Turkish) but the culture, one of Europe’s oldest, is really kind of mysterious and unrelated to its neighbors, the Slavs and the Germans. This creates a sense of great isolation among Hungarians, combined often times with super-nationalism. What made the nine men I profiled extraordinary was in part that they were growing up at a time when the city of Budapest was really creating itself from three small provincial towns into a world-class capital. My nine figures were incubated by a city in full boom—a period of great opportunity and a hunger for the new on the part of their fellow Hungarians. It was a remarkable mix of both a secure atmosphere and explosive intellectual climate. The curtain rang down of this great Golden Age with the outbreak of World War I.