Ilona Duczyńska

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Helene Marie "Ilona" Duczyńska (born March 11, 1897 in Maria Enzersdorf , Austria-Hungary ; died April 24, 1978 in Pickering , Ontario , Canada ) was a Hungarian- Canadian resistance fighter , journalist , translator and historian .

With her husband, the Hungarian-Austrian economic historian and economic and social scientist Karl Polanyi , she had a daughter, the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi-Levitt (* 1923).

After her marriage to Karl Polanyi, she took his family name and was sometimes also known by the name Ilona Polanyi . During her time in Vienna she also carried the pseudonym Anna Novotny .

Life

Ilona Duczyńska was born on March 11, 1897 as the daughter of Alfred Justus Ritter von Duczynski († 1907 in the USA ) , who came from a noble Polish military family, and a Hungarian mother in the Lower Austrian municipality of Maria Enzersdorf, a municipality in the south of Vienna . Her father's ancestors emigrated to Austria in the first half of the 19th century and were partly involved in the defeat of the Hungarians in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49 . The father was mainly active as a railway official, but also tried his hand at an inventor, with a special affinity for aircraft . At a young age, he also brought his daughter closer to flying, as shown by regular visits to the Vienna Technical Museum , which opened in 1918 . The poet Ferenc Békássy comes from the maternal family .

After Ilona Duczyńska had left the Lyceum as an opponent of the war at the end of 1914 and made up her secondary school diploma in the summer of 1915, she was introduced to the Hungarian resistance fighter and anarcho-syndicalist Ervin Szabó in the same year . This created a connection for them to the left-wing intellectual Galilei circle. From autumn 1915 she studied mathematics and physics at the ETH Zurich , where she made friends with people from the Russian Marxist Social Democrats, such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , his wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaja and Angelica Balabanova . She maintained close contacts with the Polish and Russian revolutionaries who, among other things, took part in the Zimmerwald Conference in the small Swiss community of Zimmerwald and who were considering a reorganization of the Socialist International . However, she interrupted her studies again in 1917 and then moved to Vienna, where, in collaboration with Franz Koritschoner, she became a leading left-wing radical in Vienna and later also in Budapest .

From autumn 1917 she was officially active in the revolutionary strike movement and was arrested during the January strike in 1918 and sentenced to several years in prison in September 1918. Their detention lasted only a few weeks in late October 1918, it was in the Aster Revolution freed from captivity and was in November 1918, co-founding the Kommunisták Magyarországi partja (KMP), which, on German translated, the Hungarian Communist Party (KPU) and Communist Hungarian Party (KUP). Just one week before the party was officially founded, on November 17, 1918, she married Tivadar Sugar , who was about the same age and whom she knew from the Galileo Circle.

After the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic , she worked in the Foreign People's Commissariat in 1919 and in May 1919 was on an unofficial assignment in Switzerland, where she worked as a journalist in the interests of the Soviet Republic. She was mainly involved in journalistic work on the social democratic newspaper Volksrecht in Zurich . In April of the following year she worked in the Comintern apparatus in Moscow , but came back to Vienna in autumn 1920, where she worked on behalf of her Hungarian party. After ideological disputes, she was expelled from this very party in 1922 and subsequently joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAP) and belonged to the editorial team of the Austrian Economist . Also in 1922 she divorced Tivadar Sugar and married Karl Polanyi the following year , with whom she had a daughter Kari that same year . The family lived in poor conditions, as Karl Polanyi donated his salary to the numerous refugees, from 1924 to 1933 in Vorgartenstrasse 203 in Vienna's 2nd district .

After July 15, 1927, she was the leading representative of the left opposition and was involved in the founding of the newspaper Der Linke Sozialdemokrat . After she was also excluded from the SDAP in 1929, she continued her studies at the Technical University of Vienna , which she had broken off in 1917, until 1936. At the same time she worked in the Funke group under Leopold Kulcsar and his wife Ilse Barea-Kulcsar and joined the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) after the February fights in 1934 . Furthermore, she was involved in the cooperation in the Autonomous Protection Association , as well as in the establishment of an illegal radio group. From the autumn of 1934 she appeared as an editor in Der Sprecher , the newspaper of the Vienna City Administration of the Schutzbund, before she was also a member of the Vienna City Administration from the beginning of 1935. From May 1935 she was a member of the five-person office, using the pseudonym Anna Novotny . In February 1936 she followed her husband, who had already gone to Great Britain in 1933, and her young daughter Kari, who emigrated to Great Britain the following year, and carried out public relations work for the victims of KL imprisonment in Austria. In 1937 she was again expelled from a party in connection with the Moscow trials .

From 1940 she worked in the British war industry, where she is reported to have even been a pilot in the Royal Air Force . Later, she was awarded the title Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society honored, being mainly at Farnborough Airport in Farnborough in the county of Hampshire should have been active. From 1943 to 1946 she participated in the Hungarian exile movement of Mihály Károlyi and wanted to travel to the United States herself in 1947, but was banned from entering the United States because of her communist past. For this reason the family settled in Canada, where Duczyńska was mainly engaged in social science and historical journalism. She outlived her husband, who died in 1964 and who still had a successful career as an economic historian, economist and social scientist and university lecturer in the USA and Canada, by 14 years. Ilona Duczyńska, who had contacts with the Hungarian dissident group, above all Ágnes Heller , died on April 24, 1978 at the age of 81 in the city ​​of Pickering on Lake Ontario .

Works (selection)

  • Ilona Duczyńska: The Democratic Bolshevik. On the theory and practice of violence . 1975.
  • Ilona Duczyńska: Theodor Körner. On outposts. Selected writings 1928–1938 . 1977.

Translations into English (selection)

Works by József Lengyel

  • József Lengyel : From beginning to end [and] The spell . Peter Owen Publishers , London 1966.
  • József Lengyel: Prenn Drifting . Peter Owen Publishers, London 1966.
  • József Lengyel: The Judge's Chair . Peter Owen Publishers, London 1968.
  • József Lengyel: Acta sanctorum, and other tales . Peter Owen Publishers, London 1970.
  • József Lengyel: Confrontation . Peter Owen Publishers, London 1973.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The thought leader from Vorgartenstraße , accessed on April 14, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Duczyńska, Ilona
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Duczyńska, Helene Marie (full name); Novotny, Anna (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-Canadian resistance fighter, journalist, translator and historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Maria Enzersdorf , Lower Austria , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1978
Place of death Pickering , Ontario , Canada