John Lukacs, RIP

The newspapers have just carried the obituaries of John Lukacs, historian and memoirist. He lived to be 95. In his youth he had been imprisoned by the Hungarian state, then allied with Germany, for disaffection, and perhaps for having a Jewish mother; he had sheltered from Allied air raids; he had deserted the Hungarian army and lived in hiding. He survived, and in the United States he flourished. The bibliography appended to the the collection Remembered Past runs to thirty-six page, the first six of books; and he published at least one book (The Future of History) after Remembered Past, six years after .

Those who have not read Lukacs would do well to start with Confessions of An Original Sinner or A Thread of Years. The Last European War (World War II before Japan entered) , and At the End of an Age are well worth reading. Budapest 1900 and Five Days in London are more narrowly focused; yet though I was never aware of an interest in Budapest at the turn of the last century, and would have said I had read enough books about 1940, I found them absorbing.

Lukacs had an excellent eye for the telling quotation--Confessions of an Original Sinner particularly shows this. His interests were broad, though Europe and North American interested him most. His judgments, to the extent I can judge them, seem generally sound. I don't really share his Anglophilia, but I believe I understand how one who lived through 1940 and 1941 in Central Europe--when England seemed a lone hope for Europe--might develop it.