Obituaries:

Francis S. Wagner (1911-1999) and
Peter Gostony (1931-1999)

by N.F. Dreisziger

Since the appearance of the 1998 volume of our journal, the Hungarian diaspora in the West has lost two prolific historians: Francis S. Wagner and Peter Gostony. They join a long list of our associates remembered in obituaries of the past.

Francis (Ferenc) Wagner hailed from an ethnically mixed region of East Central Europe where German, Hungarian and Slavic influences had mingled throughout the centuries. He was born in 1911, in the town of Korpona, in what today is south-central Slovakia. Since the Middle Ages, Germans had known this place as Karpfen, the Hungarians as Korpona, and the Slovaks as Krupina, which became its official name after the region was awarded to the Czechoslovak Republic in the wake of World War I. Perhaps appropriately, the young Ferenc had a keen aptitude for learning languages. As student he specialized in Slavic languages and cultures. He completed his education at the University of Szeged (today's József Attila University). He excelled in his studies, as well as in music and sports. He was granted his doctorate in 1940. Subsequently he taught high-school in Szeged and in Budapest. In the wake of World War II he entered the services of Hungary's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Slavic specialist. From 1946 to 1948 he headed the Hungarian consulate in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (before World War I, known as Pozsony or Pressburg). As is well-known, 1948 was the year when the communists consolidated their power both in Hungary and in the Czechoslovak Republic. Not surprisingly, Ferenc and his wife Irén left Eastern Europe that year and headed for the United States.

They arrived in New York early in 1949. There Ferenc shared the fate of many newly-arrived DP (displaced person) intellectuals, and for a while made his living through manual work. In 1952 he gained employment with the American government and, the following year, was offered a position with the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. No doubt, his fluency in several languages - and, by then, also in English - made him an attractive candidate for a post at this great institution.

Working at the Library of Congress had many advantages. One of these was ready access to the vast holdings of this world-renown library. This was of particular importance to someone who loved books, research and writing. Working for the L.C. was also prestigious and, no doubt, congenial. Dr. Wagner's only regret - as he told the writer of these lines in the Library's cafeteria during the mid-1970s - was the fact that he had to share an office, albeit a very spacious room, with several of his co-workers. He retired after 29 years of government service, in 1981, at age seventy. During the next decade he continued to work furiously, producing one book after another. In some of these books he collaborated with his daughter, Christina Maria Teresa Wagner (Mrs. R.H. Starley), a former White House staff member, now a freelance writer.

From the Hungarian point of view, Dr. Wagner's most important work was probably his Hungarian Contributions to World Civilization (Center Square, Penna.: Alpha Publications, 1977). Professor Steven Béla Várdy has described this book as a "lexicon of Hungarian achievements in the natural sciences, physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, economics, business, arts, music, politics, and sports."1 Dr. Wagner's last major monograph, which deals with the history of the United States, appeared in 1985.2

The years since the appearance of that work have not been kind to Ferenc Wagner. In 1990 his wife, Irén, was left paralyzed after a mishandled operation. Disturbed by her misfortune, he stopped writing. Then came his own prolonged illness. He died in April of this year.

* * *

Peter Gostony or, as he is known to Hungarians, Péter Gosztonyi, has probably been the most popular author-historian of the post-1956 Hungarian emigration. This is not surprising: he wrote about popular topics such as the history of the Second World War, the events of the 1956 Revolution, the life of Miklós Horthy, and so on. Most of these works were published in Hungarian, but there are others that appeared in German or French.3

Péter Gosztonyi was born in December, 1931, in Budapest. He had planned to be an economist but had to leave the Hungary late in 1956 because of his involvement in the Revolution. In emigration he continued his studies and earned his doctorate in Zurich. In 1963 he became the head of Switzerland's East European Library in Bern. From that time on, he produced study after study, monograph after monograph on subjects of military history, especially the role of Hungary in the Second World War and the story of the Hungarian Revolution. The factors that enabled him to produce so much were undoubtedly his insatiable curiosity combined with his inexhaustible energy. Working in a library probably also helped. Yet, on one of his visits to North America, he told me that what permitted him to write so much was in part the fact that he lived in a quiet small city instead of a busy metropolis.

After a successful career as a librarian and historian and over three decades of unceasing publishing, life became increasingly disappointing for Péter. He was unhappy when, after approaching age 65, his employer told him to take retirement. He was to be replaced by a Swiss-born East European "expert" who, according to Péter, did not know the difference "between Slovenia and Slavonia."4 He was also most unhappy about the results of the 1994 elections in Hungary, and what he perceived to be the fading memory of the 1956 Revolution there. His health also began to deteriorate. Under these circumstances he curtailed his lecturing and his involvement in the work of the Hungarian Literary and Fine Arts Circle of Switzerland (Svájci Magyar Irodalmi és Képzőművészeti Kör).

Péter Gosztonyi was both an eye-witness to and a historian of the Hungarian Revolution. His most relevant work on this subject was 1956: A magyar forradalom története [1956: The History of the Hungarian Revolution] (Munich: Griff, 1981). Yet his most notable works dealt with Hungary in World War II. His magnum opus on this theme was A magyar honvédség a második világháborúban [The Hungarian Army in the Second World War] (Roma: Katolikus Szemle, 1986), a nearly 500 page volume. Another work of his, the multi-volume Magyarország a második világháborúban [Hungary in the Second World War] (Munich: Herp, 1984) contains relevant shorter studies and documentary articles that he had published earlier.

Gosztonyi was one of the first historians to attempt a biography of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944. At first, Gosztonyi's book appeared in West Germany, in German: Miklós von Horthy: Admiral und Reichsverweser (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1973), but with the collapse of communism in Hungary, it was also published there in Hungarian translation: A kormányzó, Horthy Miklós [The Regent, Miklós Horthy] (Budapest: Téka, 1990).5 Though Gosztonyi's biography has been superseded recently by a more extensively researched monograph,6 it remains a significant work partly because it had sold a great many copies, and partly because those who do not read English - and cannot afford the price of a hardbound book produced in the USA - have no access to the more recent biography.7

What Francis Wagner and Peter Gostony shared above all was their love for history and historical writing. The former was a member of the post-World War II Hungarian emigration, the latter was a "fifty-sixer". Having met both of them but not having known either of them well, I have the impression that their demeanour and outlook on life reflected this difference. Nevertheless, besides their love for history, they had other things in common. Both of them were indefatigable workers. Both of them had a command of several languages. Both spent much of their lives working for world-famous libraries. And, by coincidence, each of them published two articles in our journal.8 With their passing, the Hungarian diaspora has lost two prolific authors. At the same time, our journal has lost two more members of that group of scholars which constitutes our pool of occasional contributors.

NOTES

1 Steven Béla Várdy, Historical Dictionary of Hungary (Lanham, Md., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), p. 762.
2 Francis S. Wagner with Christina Wagner-Jones,, Nation-Building in The United States; The American Idea of Nationhood in Retrospect (Center Square, Penna.: Alpha Publications, 1985), pp. 181f. The book was an expanded version of Dr. Wagner's earlier study: "Hungarian Contributions to American Culture," which was included in the September 30, 1975, issue of the Congressional Record.
3 Two of his papers I have translated for our journal, then known as the Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies. For details see below, note 8.
4These and the following observations are based on Éva Saáry, "Az utolsó levél: búcsú Gosztonyi Pétertől" [The Last Letter: Saying Good-bye to Péter Gosztonyi], Magyarság, 1 May 1999, p. 11.
5 This was followed soon by another volume, A kormányzó Horthy Miklós és az emigráció [Regent M.H. and the Émigrés] (Budapest: Százszorszép Kiadó, 1992).
6 Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918-1944 Boulder, Co,: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1994).
7 For my own assesment of Peter Gostony's writings on Horthy see my article: "Miklós Horthy and the Second World War: Some Historiographical Perspectives," in Regent Miklós Horthy, István Horthy and the Second World War, N.F. Dreisziger, ed. (Toronto and Budapest: the Hungarian Studies Review, 1996), pp. 6-9.
8 In the case of Francis Wagner these articles are: "Diplomatic Prelude to the Bombing of Kassa: Reflections and Recollections of a Former Diplomat," X, 1-2 (1983), 67-78; and "The Gypsy Problem in Postwar Hungary," XIV, 2 (Fall, 1987), 33-43. In the case of Peter Gostony they are: "Horthy, Hitler and the Hungary of 1944," II, 1 (Spring, 1975), 43-58; and "The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Viewed from Two Decades' Distance," III, 2 (Fall, 1976), 139-153.