Zsigmond Kunfi

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Zsigmond Kunfi (1923)
Kunfi to the right of Branting in Stockholm (1917)

Zsigmond Kunfi (born April 28, 1879 in Nagykanizsa , Austria-Hungary ; died November 18, 1929 in Vienna ) was a socialist Hungarian politician and Minister of the Hungarian Republic and the Soviet Republic between 1918 and 1919.

Life

Siegmund Kohn grew up as the son of a little Jewish tax officer in the Hungarian provinces, his name was hungarian to Kunfi . He attended a school run by monks that conveyed a reactionary image of man. Kunfi, on the other hand, turned to French positivism . After completing his studies, he became a secondary school teacher in Temesvár and a vehement critic of the education system under the latifundial rule of the Hungarian aristocracy, "where the army of truant children is the strongest weapon of large estates". Kunfi joined the “ Sociological Society in Vienna ” and wrote essays for their magazine Huszadik Szádad (Twentieth Century), in which he developed his Marxist method and applied it to the history of literature, for example in an obituary for Mór Jókai . He became increasingly politically active in the Hungarian constitutional dispute in 1905/06, gave lectures for workers and appeared as a speaker. When he in the elections in 1907 that an open vote , the vote for the Social Democrats demanded Dezső Bokányi gave, he was out of the teaching profession dismissed . Kunfi now wrote as a journalist for the daily newspaper Népszava of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (MSZDP). Since 1907 he was her chief editor alongside the editor-in-chief Ernő Garami (1876-1935). Kunfi was a supporter of Karl Kautsky's politics . Kunfi published writings on Marxism and also wrote in the theoretical party magazine Szocializmus . He became a popular speaker for the party and tried to anchor the agrarian question and the nationality question in the Hungarian social democracy, which was shaped by the industrial workers. During the First World War , Kunfi was unaffected by the general enthusiasm for war and feared that absolutism would be cemented if the Central Powers won a military victory. He was the Hungarian delegate at the unsuccessful Stockholm Peace Conference of 1917 .

When the October Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, he emphasized the need for a coalition for the Hungarian situation at the time of what he saw as the inevitable overthrow of the monarchy. In the Hungarian October Revolution at the end of the war in 1918, Kunfi became a member of the Hungarian National Council and was minister in the first republican government of Hungary under Mihály Károlyi from November 2, 1918 to January 18, 1919, with the task of winding up the Hungarian Ministry for Croatia . In the subsequent government under Dénes Berinkey , he was appointed Minister for Education. Above all, however, he was the propagandist of the revolution and "fought abroad against violent peace, for the right of nations to self-determination, and inside Hungary against the violent ideology of the Bolsheviks", trying to maintain the revolutionary coalition in the centrist position . After Berinkey's resignation on March 20, 1919, he remained in charge and was commissioner for education in the Revolutionary Council of the Hungarian Socialist Council Republic . With Sándor Ferenczi, he appointed the world's first psychoanalyst to a medical chair. The council government of Béla Kuns was driven out of Budapest by Romanian troops in August 1919. Kunfi escaped arrest and fled to Vienna from the Horthy regime .

In Vienna Kunfi worked for the International Working Group of Socialist Parties and wrote as a senior editor in the Arbeiter-Zeitung of the SPÖ , which also provided him with a radio station in which he denounced the White Terror in Hungary and made it known worldwide. Kunfi turned, largely unsuccessfully, against the influence of Bolshevism on the social democratic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia . In Vienna Kunfi worked as a lecturer at the Vienna Workers' College and the SPÖ party school . In his later criticism of the course of the Hungarian Revolution, he emphasized the neglect of the nationality question by the revolutionaries as well as the "socialization of large estates, which made the Hungarian peasantry indifferent to the revolution".

Kunfi committed 1929 suicide . The news of his death led to spontaneous work stoppages in Budapest to commemorate his memory.

Fonts (selection)

  • Az általános választójog . Budapest: Világosság Könyvnyomda, 1912.
  • Jaurés, az emberiség és szocializmus nagy halottja . Budapest: Népszava-Könyvkereskedés kiadása, 1915
  • Az angol világbirodalom . Budapest, 1915
  • Reshaping the world. Selected essays by Siegmund Kunfi. Published by Julius Braunthal . With a picture of Kunfi's life by Zoltán Rónai . Vienna, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1930
  • Figures and events. Selected essays by Siegmund Kunfi. Published by Julius Braunthal. Partly translated by Andreas Gaspar. Vienna, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1930
  • A communista kiáltvány. Marx; Angel. Budapest: Népszava, 1945

literature

  • Péter Agárdi: Kunfi Zsigmond . Budapest: Új Mandátum, 2001
  • Ferenc Mucsi: Ágnes Szabó: Zsigmond Kunfi (1879–1929) . Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984
  • Tibor Erényi: Kunfi Zsigmond . Akadémiai Kiadó – Zrínyi Kiadó. Budapest, 1974
  • Kunfi, Siegmund. In: Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 2: J-R. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 763.

Web links

Commons : Zsigmond Kunfi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Zoltán Rónai: Kunfi's life picture . In: Siegmund Kunfi: The New Design of the World , Vienna 1930, pp. 5–12
  2. ^ Zsigmond Kunfi: Jókai . in: Huszadik Szádad , 1905. Translation in: Gestalten und Veranstaltungen . 1930
  3. ↑ Dezső Bokányi (1871–1940), see Hungarian Wikipedia hu: Bokányi Dezső
  4. ^ Entry Kunfi Zsigmond In: Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon
  5. ^ Paul Harmat: Freud, Ferenczi and the Hungarian Psychoanalysis Edition Diskord, Tübingen 1988, ISBN 3-89295-530-1 , p. 73
personal data
SURNAME Kunfi, Zsigmond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kohn, Siegmund (maiden name); Kunfi, Siegmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian socialist politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Nagykanizsa
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1929
Place of death Vienna