István Bibó
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István Bibó (born August 7, 1911 in Szeged , Austria-Hungary , † May 10, 1979 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian lawyer , legal scholar and politician during the reign of Miklós Horthy and after the Second World War .
Life
Istvan Bibó came from the small Hungarian educated class of aristocratic origin. The political fate of his home country Hungary, which lost around two thirds of its former territory in the Trianon Peace Treaty in 1920, shaped his historical interest. He studied history, international law and legal philosophy at the University of Szeged as well as in Vienna , Paris, The Hague and Geneva and did his doctorate on the question of sanctions in international law. Together with the economist Béla Reitzer and the sociographer and populist Ferenc Erdei , he joined the Márciusi Front (“March Front”) founded in April 1937 , a movement of left-wing intellectuals that promoted the solution of the agrarian question through land reform in favor of the dispossessed peasantry Democratization of the Eastern European states calls for. During the period from 1933 under Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, Hungary came closer and closer to National Socialist Germany due to economic crises and revisionist propaganda .
Bibó began his professional career as a civil servant at the court and in 1938 he joined the Hungarian Ministry of Justice. In 1940 he became a private lecturer in political science at the University of Szeged. On June 27, 1941, Hungary joined the Axis powers in the war against the Soviet Union . During the Second World War, Bibó began in December 1942 with a larger study on the principles of a future peace treaty in Europe with the desire to overcome the weaknesses of the Peace Treaty of Versailles and to lay the foundation for a stable political order in Eastern Europe. The core of his study was the suggestion of a fair demarcation that should be based on ethnic-linguistic, not historical-political, criteria. According to Bibó, it is not historical or moral arguments, but the right of peoples to self-determination that should determine a future peace order. Part of this work did not appear until 1946 with the title "The misery of Eastern European small states". From 1943, the Hungarian government contacted the Allies. When these contacts became known to the Germans, they occupied the country on March 19, 1944 and set up a collaboration government under Döme Sztójay , which immediately began to deport the Jewish population. When the Arrow Cross took power, Bibó helped Jews flee by issuing passports. In the summer of 1944 he remained politically active and wrote the "Peace Offer" to the Hungarian middle class on behalf of the Hungarian workers. An attempt within the Márciusi Front to find a new way between the liberal-capitalist and communist model of order. In October 1944 he was temporarily detained. The Soviet Union conquered and occupied Hungary from November 1944 to March 1945.
In February 1945 Bibó was accepted into the provisional national government of Hungary set up by the Soviet Union in December 1944, where he was head of the department for bills in the Ministry of the Interior at the side of Interior Minister Ferenc Erdei and assisted in the drafting of the electoral law and thus the parliamentary elections on 4 November 1945 prepared. He temporarily held the post of Minister of the Interior, but resigned in protest against the expulsion of the Hungarian Germans and disappointed with the slow progress of democratization in Hungary. At the end of 1945 he wrote a study entitled “The Crisis of Hungarian Democracy” and warned against the political actions of the communists. From 1946 he taught as a professor at the chair for political science at the University of Szeged. When the Communists, supported by the Soviet occupying power, came to power, Bibó was banned from teaching in 1948. From 1950 he worked as a librarian at the Budapest University Library .
In October 1956 Bibó took part in the reorganization of the National Peasant Party ( Nemzeti Parasztpárt ; NPP), which from November 1, 1956 called itself the Petőfi Party. In the government of Imre Nagy he became Minister of State in the coalition government. Through his political memoranda (“The Situation of Hungary and the World”) Bibó became a symbol of spiritual resistance. On November 4, 1956, at the US embassy in Budapest , he asked for support for the Hungarian government. During the Hungarian uprising and the invasion of the Soviet Army, he was the last minister to leave the Hungarian Parliament on November 6, 1956. Instead of getting to safety, he waited for his opponents and in the meantime wrote his declaration “For Freedom and Truth”.
Bibó was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment in August 1958. After his amnesty in 1963 he returned to the library of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. In 1979 he died of a heart attack.
Fonts (selection)
- The German hysteria, causes and history. Written between 1942 and 1944, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1991; Hungarian title: A német hisztéria okai és története (1944). In: István Bibó, Összegyüjtött munkai Európai Protestáns Magyar Szabadegyetem. Bern 1982, Volume 1, pp. 107-183.
- István Bibó: The misery of Eastern European small states , written 1942–1943, first published in 1946. New Critique Publishing House, October 2005, ISBN 3-8015-0254-6 .
- István Bibó: On the Jewish question. Using the example of Hungary after 1944, Frankfurt am Main, 1990 , Verlag Neue Critique, 1989 ISBN 3-8015-0230-9 .
- István Bibó: Deformed Hungarian character - Hungarian history on the wrong track , 1948: Kakanien revisited, case study 2002 (PDF; 325 kB).
literature
- Eva Haraszti-Taylor : The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: a collection of documents from the British Foreign Office . Nottingham: Astra Press, 1995, pp. 376-378 (short biography).
- Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine: Esprits d'Europe. Autour de Czeslaw Milosz , Jan Patocka and István Bibó. Essais sur les intellectuels d'Europe centrale au vingtième siècle. Calmann-Lévy, Paris 2005; again TB "Folio", ibid. 2010 (the book received the Prix de l'essai européen)
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bibó, István |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian politician, member of the Imre Nagy government |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 7, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Szeged , Austria-Hungary |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 10, 1979 |
| Place of death | Budapest |