Carl Benedek (journalist)

Carl Benedek , actually Károly Benedek , (born May 30, 1889 in Budapest , † April 27, 1964 in Koblenz ) was a Hungarian journalist and author.

Life

Carl Benedek came from a middle-class family and was close to the circle around Oszkár Jászi . He earned a degree in Law at the University of Paris and a PhD in Political Science in Budapest. In 1910 he became a journalist specializing in international politics. He became known through his interviews with important statesmen, which corresponded to the interview portrait model ; this technique was later used by writers. His articles on international politics were published in many newspapers. According to his own statements, in the course of his life he met both Mussolini and Lenin and Hitler . He met Mussolini more often in 1914 after he had separated from the socialists and published his own newspaper. He met Lenin several times in 1915 and 1916 during his emigre days in Zurich , and in 1923 he drove with Hitler for eight days as a foreign reporter in a flying car and worked on an interview portrait of the putschist at the time .

During the first Balkan War and again under the government of Mihály Károlyi , he was press attaché of the Hungarian embassy in Bern . Between 1912 and 1919 he worked for the Viláy newspaper in Budapest, first as editor-in-chief of the foreign policy department and after the outbreak of World War I as a correspondent in Rome. In 1915 he settled in Switzerland as a correspondent and lived in Melide in Ticino. Between 1915 and 1918 he wrote regular news and war reports from the Italian-Swiss border for various agencies. From 1916 to 1921 he worked for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and mainly wrote articles about the various Balkan countries. Between 1919 and 1920 he wrote country reports that were published by the Radio Paris agency on the countries of the Balkans and Danube region. From 1922 to 1924 he was a correspondent in Vienna.

Between 1925 and 1938 he was chief correspondent for the New Vienna Journal in Paris , where he published a number of cultural and political articles under the prophetic column Between Two Wars . In addition, he has written numerous articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , the Neue Berner Tagblatt , the St. Galler Zeitung , Vaterland (Lucerne), the Tages-Anzeiger (Zurich) and other newspapers.

On January 18, 1940, because he was a representative of German and Austrian newspapers, Benedek was interned by the French political police as an enemy foreigner in the Le Vernet (Ariege) camp. Even after the German occupation of France, he was still interned in this notorious camp as a politically suspect. After two years of internment, he succeeded in 1942 to be confirmed as a correspondent in Spain for several newspapers in Budapest, whereby he received a visa for Spain, which he entered from France on April 18, 1942.

From Spain he helped old friends in Paris and former fellow prisoners escape from France to Spain, London and Algiers . The Gestapo found out about this and demanded that Spain be extradited to Irun , where German troops were located. The Spanish police arrested him in 1943 and took him to a cell in Santa Rita prison in Carabanchel to be handcuffed to the German authorities in Irun. The extradition was prevented by the intervention of the American Refugee Commission and the mediation of the US Embassy in Madrid, but Benedek remained in the torture prison for another year . Then he was allowed to choose a place of exile of his choice and decided on Córdoba . Here he had been appointed a member of the Spanish Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in the 1930s through a history of Hungary dedicated to the Royal Academy of Cordoba .

On December 2, 1944, he was deported to Córdoba and was no longer allowed to leave the city. It wasn't until twelve years later, in the spring of 1956, that he was able to travel freely through Spain thanks to a new Spanish-American residence contract. Shortly afterwards he received an exit visa with which he could return to Paris. His old residence permit was initially extended in the French capital, but Benedek could no longer find a job. For this reason, he decided to return to Austria in 1960. In 1964 he died in Koblenz while on a summer trip to Spain.

plant

Benedek also began to write historical works in the 1930s, for example on the discovery and publication of the correspondence between Talleyrand and Metternich and the sale of the secret files that were closed between Napoleon and Emperor Franz .

In his final years in Paris and during his stay in Córdoba, he devoted himself mainly to literary works or poetic creation, short stories and cultural studies. In Vienna he concentrated on a job he had begun in Cordoba, but died in 1964 before he had completed it. His wife Alice Benedek later translated the Hungarian manuscript into German; In 1990 it was published by Casimir Katz Verlag under the title The Iberian Heritage of Spain . The original manuscript was called The Riddle of Spain (a psychoanalysis of the Spanish people) . The work is an attempt, inspired by the teaching of the archetypes of CG Jung , a kind of psychoanalytical-völkisch historiography, a psychoanalysis of the masses . The focus is on the individualistic Iberians supposedly from Africa and their unchanged character in the course of their encounters with other peoples who had colonized Spain: Etruscans and Phoenicians in Tarshish , Carthaginians and Romans on the coast, Celts in Galicia , the empire of the Visigoths , the Franks in Catalonia , as well as Jews and Arabs before and after Arab rule in Spain.

Other published works include the Anglers ABC , published by Ullstein in 1934 : A handbook for simple fishing (authorship uncertain) and the posthumously published volume of poems Cseng a múlt… egy lélek dalol (dt: ringing past… a soul song, Budapest 1990) .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Cf. the entry in the Hungarian online lexicon Életrajzi: [1] (Hungarian)
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Diego Jordano Barea in [2] (Spanish)
3. ^ Carl Benedek: The Iberian legacy of Spain. The enigmatic history of a people. Gernsbach 1990, p. 21 (introduction)
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Prof. Dr. Paul Wimmer: in Carl Benedek: Das Iberische Erbe Spaniens, S. 17f. (Preface)
5. ↑ See the entry in the catalog of the German National Library