Gusztáv Gratz

Gustav Gratz

Gustav Adolf Gratz [ ˈɡustaːv ˈɡrɒʦ ] (born March 30, 1875 in Gölnicbánya , Zips County , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary ; † November 21, 1946 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian publicist, journalist, politician, historian, economist.

Life

Gustav Adolf Gratz was the child of a German and Hungarian speaking German Protestant pastor family who had moved from northwest Hungary to the Spiš . Gratz attended the Saxon high school in Igló , then, when his father accepted the invitation of the Cluj evangelical congregation and the family had moved to Cluj, the Unitarian upper high school in Cluj and the Saxon high school in Bistritz for a year .

After graduating from high school in Cluj, he studied law at the Universities of Cluj and Budapest and completed his studies in Cluj in 1898.

From 1896 he worked for the Pester Lloyd , from 1898 a correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung , and at the same time a Budapest reporter for the Wiener Zeitung Die Zeit , from 1906 he switched to the Neue Freie Presse . In 1900 he co-founded the magazine Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), for which he was an editor until 1903. In 1901 Gratz and his like-minded people founded the Társadalomtudományi Társaság (Society for Sociology). The magazine and society set themselves the goal of eliminating the backward social conditions in Hungary and of advocating agrarian reform and the expansion of the right to vote. But soon differences arose between the conservative and the radical elements. In 1903 Gratz resigned from the editorial office and in 1906 he broke with the radical group of the Society for Sociology. In 1906 he acquired the parliamentary mandate of the Leschkirch constituency in Transylvania and was active in the group of representatives of the Transylvanian Saxons until the collapse in 1918 .

From 1912 he held the post of managing director of the National Association of Hungarian Industrialists (Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetsége). During the First World War he was a member of several war economic centers. As a liberal economist, he resolutely advocated the idea of ​​an economic alliance between the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In 1917 Gratz was appointed head of the trade policy section in the joint foreign ministry. From June to September 1917 he held the office of Hungarian finance minister, then in turn, as head of section on the part of the monarchy, he led the economic negotiations in Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest , which earned him great political prestige. After the establishment of the Soviet Republic in Hungary in 1919, he went to Vienna and joined the Hungarian anti-Bolshevik committee. From November 1919 to January 1921 he was the Hungarian ambassador in Vienna, after which he took over the post of Hungarian Foreign Minister until April 1921.

Gratz advocated the restoration of the Habsburg monarchy and the cooperation of the successor states of Austria-Hungary. As a staunch legitimist , he took an active part in both of Charles I's unsuccessful attempts to return as King Charles IV of Hungary in 1921 and was therefore arrested after the king had had to leave the country forever. Although he was released after ten weeks in prison and the trial against the participants in the restoration attempt had never been convicted of the crime of rioting, the unfortunate outcome of King Charles' second attempt to return meant an interruption in his political career. Even after that, he had not lost touch with political life and the public. He regularly wrote editorials for Pester Lloyd and participated in the work of the International Chamber of Commerce. He worked for several industrial companies that belonged to Hungarian interested parties. From the mid-1920s onwards he was chairman or board member of more than 40 banks and industrial companies. In 1924 he took over the chairmanship of the Hungarian German National Education Association (UDV), which he held until 1938. Jakob Bleyer , the actual spiritus rector of the Germans in Hungary , but who did not have the confidence of the Hungarian government, became the executive vice-president of the UDV . Gratz's election as president was seen as his political rehabilitation.

The association depended entirely on the Hungarian government. Gratz considered his task at the head of the association to be the mediation between the government and the German minority in Hungary. In this sense, he advocated native-language teaching and the educational opportunities of the German ethnic group in Hungary, but fought every attempt to organize Germanism in Hungary politically, which from the mid-1930s onwards led to harsh contrasts between him and the young generation, who were heated in the ethnic group led. When the Hungarian government made the ethnic German direction socially acceptable in 1938 with the approval of the Volksbund der Deutschen in Hungary , he stepped down from the head of the UDV. From 1926 he was a member of parliament, initially pro-government, then from 1936 with a mandate from the Civil Freedom Party. In the House of Representatives and in his articles he criticized the anti-liberal and anti-democratic tendencies of his time. In June 1939 he became editor-in-chief of the liberal daily Pesti Napló . In the last years of the war he was called in to a secret commission which was supposed to undertake the preparations for the future peace conference. In April 1944 (after the occupation of Hungary by the Third Reich in March 1944) he was deported by the Gestapo to Mauthausen concentration camp . After his release in July 1944, he first lived with one of his daughters in Sulz near Vienna , then in Budapest.

From 1925 he published the Hungarian Economic Yearbook , which provided information on the state of the Hungarian economy, but also made historical and political contributions. It was published in abbreviated form in English from 1939 (The Hungarian Economic Year Book) . His great history was published in three volumes from 1934–1935, in which he worked on the - primarily political - history of dualism and the revolutions of 1918–1920. The fourth volume, which deals with the interwar period, was only published in 2001. In recognition of his journalistic activities and historiography, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences selected him as a corresponding member in 1941.

Fonts (selection)

The Foreign Economic Policy of Austria-Hungary (1925)

• Nemzetközi jog (international law). Budapest 1899.
• Alkotmánypolitika (constitutional politics ). Budapest-Pozsony 1900.
• Az általános választójog és Tisza István gróf. (Universal suffrage and Count Stefan Tisza). Budapest 1905.
• Általános választójog és nemzeti politika (Universal suffrage and national politics). Budapest 1905.
• Az általános választójog szociológiai szempontból (Universal suffrage in sociological terms). Budapest 1906.
• A bolsevizmus Magyarországon (Bolshevism in Hungary). Edited and introduced by Gustav Gratz. Budapest 1921.
• Politikai és gazdasági liberalizmus (Political and Economic Liberalism). Budapest 1922.
• together with Richard Schüller : The external economic policy of Austria-Hungary. Central European plans. Vienna / New Haven 1925.
• Európai külpolitika (European foreign policy). Budapest 1929.
• together with Richard Schüller: The economic collapse of Austria-Hungary. The tragedy of exhaustion. Vienna / New Haven 1930.
• On the question of the German-Austrian customs union. Budapest 1931.
• A dualizmus kora. Magyarország története 1867–1918 I-II (The Period of Dualism I-II History of Hungary 1867–1918). Budapest 1934.
• A forradalmak kora. Magyarország története 1918–1920 (The time of the revolutions. History of Hungary 1918–1920). Budapest 1935.
• German-Hungarian problems. Budapest 1938.
• Magyarország a két háború között (Hungary between the two wars). Budapest 2001.
• Eyewitness from three epochs. The memoirs of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gustav Gratz (1875–1945) (= Southeast European Works, 137). Edited by Vince Paál and Gerhard Seewann . Publishing house Oldenbourg, Munich 2009.

literature

• Günter Schödl: Trianon Hungary and German minority policy. To the “Memories” of Gustav Gratz . In: Südostdeutsches Archiv XXVI./XXVII. Volume 139-151.
• Günter Schödl: Hungarian politics beyond nation-state and nationalism: Gustav Gratz (1875-1946) . In: Günter Schödl: Forms and Limits of the National. Contributions to international integration and nationalism in Eastern Europe . Erlangen 1990, pp. 137-188.
• György Gyarmati: Gratz Gusztáv a Monarchia felosztásának következményeiről (Gustav Gratz on the consequences of the division of the monarchy). In: Történelmi Szemle, 1995/1, pp. 83-115.
• Vince Paál, Gerhard Seewann (Ed.): Eyewitness of three epochs. The memoirs of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gustav Gratz (1875–1945) (=  Southeast European Works , 137). Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58594-0 .