John Lukacs

John Lukacs (born 31 January 1924 as János Albert Lukács in Budapest , died 6. May 2019 in Phoenixville , Pennsylvania ) was an American historian of Hungarian origin.

Life

János Albert Lukács began studying history at the Catholic University of Budapest . Due to the anti-Semitic laws in Horthy Hungary - his mother was Jewish and his father Roman Catholic - he was not drafted into the Hungarian military during World War II , but had to do forced labor in the Hungarian labor service. After troops of the Wehrmacht occupied Hungary in March 1944 , he deserted and thus escaped deportation to Auschwitz by the Eichmann Command and its Hungarian helpers. In 1946 he graduated with a doctorate and emigrated to the United States because of the growing threat from the Hungarian communists . He saw himself as a victim and opponent of communism throughout his life .

John Lukacs worked as a history teacher at Chestnut Hill Catholic College for Girls in Philadelphia and, at the end of his career, as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and was also the author of many historical studies and statements on contemporary history. He was also a frequent guest professor at leading North American universities (but received - and wanted - no reputation ), and finally, after the political changes in Eastern Europe, even at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.

In the politics of the day in the 1950s he was a conservative critic of McCarthyism because he criticized its populism . Much later, in the 1980s, he also turned against then US President Ronald Reagan for the same reason . In his research on National Socialism , Lukacs was a sharp opponent of David Irving and his twisted history from the start . In research on the course of the Second World War, he valued Winston Churchill's historic achievement in the resistance to the war of aggression of the Germans in 1939 and wrote the study Five Days in London, May 1940, about his epochal achievement in 1999 . With the book about the blood-sweat-and-tears speech , published in 2008, he again emphasized the important role played by Churchill. In assessing the German war aims and the war aims of Adolf Hitler , Lukacs expressed his own pronounced views; so he saw the German attack on the Soviet Union as an alternative operation to the actually anti-British war aims. Lukacs had privileged access to the archives of the US diplomat George F. Kennan , as he was friends with this, and was able to write a Kennan biography in 2007; he had already published the joint correspondence in 1997, during his lifetime (1905–2005).

Lukacs liked to describe himself as a reactionary and lateral thinker among the American historians, the majority of whom ignored him; only the Intercollegiate Studies Institute issued several papers with him. He has published his political articles in the New York Times Magazine and Esquire , as well as in William F. Buckley's National Review and Emmett Tyrell's American Spectator .

Lukacs lived in Schuylkill since 1953 and also wrote on the regional history of Pennsylvania .

In 2002 he was accepted into the American Philosophical Society .

He died in May 2019 at the age of 95.

Fonts (selection)

Five Days in London, May 1940, 1999

• The Future of History . New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011 ISBN 0-300-16956-6
• The Legacy of the Second World War . New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010 ISBN 0-300-11439-7
• Last rites . New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-300-11438-6
• Blood, toil, tears, and sweat: the dire warning , New York: Basic Books, 2008 ISBN 9780465002870
• Gyula Krúdy : Sunflower . John Lukacs: Introduction, New York Review of Books, New York 2007 ISBN 9781590171868
• George Kennan : A Study of Character . New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007 ISBN 0-300-12221-7
• June 1941: Hitler and Stalin . New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006 ISBN 0-300-11437-0
• Remembered Past: John Lukacs On History, Historians & Historical Knowledge: A Reader , Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005
• Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred , New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005
• Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian , New Haven Conn. : Yale University Press, 2002
• Five Days in London, May 1940 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999
• Hitler. History and historiography . From the American. by Helmut Dierlamm and Norbert Juraschitz, Munich: Luchterhand 1997 ISBN 3-630-87991-8
• George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946: the Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence , Columbia, Mo .: University of Missouri Press, 1997
• The story goes on. The end of the twentieth century and the return of nationalism . From the English by Friedrich Griese. Munich ; Leipzig: List, 1994 ISBN 3-471-78057-2
• Churchill and Hitler. The duel May 10 - July 31, 1940 . From the English by Norbert Greiner , Stuttgart: Dt. Verl.-Anst. 1992 ISBN 3-421-06535-7
• Hungary in Europe. Budapest at the turn of the century . From d. American. by Renate Schein u. Gerwin Zohlen, Berlin: Siedler, 1990 ISBN 3-88680-349-X
• Confessions of an Original Sinner , New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990. (autobiography)
• Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900–1950 , New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981
• The disempowerment of Europe. The last European war 1939–1941 . From d. American. trans. by Wulf Bergner , Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978 ISBN 3-12-910920-X
• Cold War history . Approved by the author. Translated from d. American. by U. Bethke, Gütersloh: S. Mohn 1962

Web links

• Literature by and about John Lukacs in the catalog of the German National Library
• John Rodden, John Rossi The Lettered Reactionary , in: The American Conservative , December 2009
• 2005 Schuylkill Oral History Project interview (PDF; 197 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Munkaszolgálat, see Hungarian Wikipedia hu: Munkaszolgálat
2. ^ Member History: John Lukacs. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 6, 2019 . 
3. ↑ John Lukacs, iconoclastic historian, dead at 95, accessed on May 6, 2019