Populists and urban

Populists and urban people are two opposing political and journalistic currents in Hungary, especially in the interwar period , which continue to have an impact in the political and intellectual field of Hungary to this day.

Urban

The urban ( Hungarian : urbánusok , originally from Latin urbs ~ "city", specifically meant Budapest ) represented a close reference to Western European culture and modernity. The most important organ of this group of writers, which was largely restricted to Budapest, was the monthly magazine Szép szó (~ "Beautiful Word"). The urban are also referred to as supporters of a "second Hungary". The terms “urban” and “westerners” overlap, but are not identical, as the term “urban” can be narrowed down to a particular literary trend. Likewise, the literary circle around the magazine Nyugat (~ "West") is not identical with the Urban, although there are personal overlaps here.

According to Gyula Borbándi, important urban areas are :

• Zoltan Gáspár
• Bertalan Hatvány
• Antal Szerb
• György Bálint
• Gábor Halász
• Béla Zsolt
• András Hevesi
• Ferenc Fejtő
• Pál Ignotus
• Attila József
• Gyula Krúdy

Populists

Political-intellectual antagonists of the urban population were the populists (ung .: népiek , from nép ~ people), also known as “landlords”, “people of the people” or “folk stumpers”. These thinkers of a “third Hungary” saw themselves as mouthpieces for the rural population; They called for an agrarian reform and relied on a new cultural upswing, an upswing supported by the rural population and the peasant (Hungarian) traditions.

According to Gyula Borbándi, important populists are:

• Gyula Illyés
• Peter Veres
• József Darvas
• László Németh
• Géza Féja
• Imre Kovács
• Zoltán Szabó
• Ferenc Erdei

Budapest and Hungarian culture

The urban population saw the emergence of a modern Hungarian civilization as embodied in the metropolis of Budapest , while for the populists Budapest represented the epitome of the decline of Hungarian culture. In the political disputes and political rhetoric, the opposition between the two intellectual currents is still felt today. Right-wing and right-wing extremist political forces in Hungary still use the typical arguments of the populists.

See also

• Hungarian literature
• Mihály Babits
• Cleavage Theory
• Peasant movement
• Cosmopolitanism
• populism

literature

• Gyula Borbándi: Hungarian populism . In: Studia Hungarica, Volume 7, Munich 1976
• Istvan Eörsi: The return of atavisms. In: Die Zeit , No. 42/1999, October 14, 1999.
• A. Oplatka: Entrenched in wagon castles. Populists and urban people - a political-literary dispute . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 9, 1999, p. 82
• Máté Szabó: Urbanists versus Populists. The plurality of oppositional discourses as the starting point for the polarization of the post-socialist party system. In: Berliner Debatte Initial , Volume 20, No. 3, pp. 74–87.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} http://epa.oszk.hu/01500/01536/00006/pdf/UJ_1974_1975_131-147.pdf
2. ↑ Borbándi, for example, names the Nyugat literary figure Attila Jószef as both populists and urbanists and Gyula Illyés as populists, ibid.
3. ↑ Ibid.
4. ^ Translated like this at http://www.siebenbuerger.de/zeitung/artikel/kultur/9410-tagung-in-eisenstadt-das-dorf-in-den.html
5. ↑ So at http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=954&count=81&recno=7&sort=beitraeger&order=up&epoche=17
6. ↑ See also http://www.europa.clio-online.de/site/lang__de/ItemID__158/mid__12205/40208771/Default.aspx