Duczynska, Ilona (1897–1978)

Austrian-born author and political activist, critical of both the passivity of Social Democracy and the brutality of Bolshevism, whose lifelong commitment to Socialist ideals reflected the complexities of Central European political life between the two World Wars. Name variations: Ilona Polanyi or Polányi. Born Helene Marie Duczynska in Maria Enzersdorf, Lower Austria, in 1897; died in Pickering, Canada, on April 24, 1978; daughter of Alfred Ritter von Duczynski and Hélen Békássy ; married Tivadar Sugár; married Karl Polányi, in 1922; children: (second marriage) one daughter, Kári (b. 1923).

Born in a pleasantly situated suburb of Vienna in 1897, Ilona Duczynska grew up in a family dynamic that was in many ways a reflection of the complex and troubled Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Her father, a railway official of noble Polish descent who was unhappy with his lot in life, immigrated alone to the United States in 1904, dying there three years later. Her mother, who had been born into the proud Hungarian gentry class, had become estranged from her family as a result of a marriage that had been opposed from the start. These family tensions would mark Ilona for life, making her feel humiliated and rejected, feelings that were quickly transmuted into a hatred of the upper classes. Duczynska's combative temperament emerged early, and by the age of ten she already knew that in future years she would always be an individual who would choose to stand "against the world."

By the time she had entered her teens, Ilona had adopted her dead father's social radicalism, including the advocacy of atheism, anarchism and the belief that a systematic application of truths derived from the natural sciences could solve all of humanity's age-old problems. The start of World War I only made Duczynska more radical, and she was expelled from her lyceum as a subversive for having denounced the war. After receiving her leaving certificate by mail in the summer of 1915, Duczynska enrolled at the college of technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Here she was quickly drawn to the most radical antiwar circles, almost exclusively composed of Russian and Polish revolutionaries living as exiles in Switzerland. She became one of the youngest and most ardent supporters of Vladimir Lenin's Zimmerwald circle, which denounced the Social Democratic leadership of the various warring nations as "Social imperialists" and traitors to the ideals of Marxism.

In the spring of 1917, although still recovering from tuberculosis, she returned to a Vienna that was suffering from widespread malnutrition and a profound sense of war-weariness. Soon she traveled to Budapest in her mother's native Hungary, determined to make history by ridding the nation of its increasingly unpopular prime minister, István Tisza. She had been practicing with firearms while in Switzerland and was convinced that she could singlehandedly change the course of history by assassinating Tisza (she was obviously inspired by the death of Austrian prime minister Count Carl Stürgkh, who had been assassinated in a Viennese restaurant in October 1916). Fortunately, Tisza resigned before Duczynska could carry out her plans.

By this time Duczynska had become a member of the Galileo Circle, an influential group of progressive Budapest intellectuals. Within the larger circle, a small group including Duczynska who styled themselves revolutionary Socialists printed clandestine antiwar pamphlets, and Duczynska managed to throw bundles of these over the wall of a military barracks. The secret police soon got wind of the group's activities, and in January 1918 Duczynska and several of her colleagues found themselves under arrest. In June of that same year, she and her lover Tivadar Sugár were sentenced to prison terms (she received two years in jail, he three). The collapse of the Habsburg state in the autumn of 1918 resulted in the release of all political prisoners, and Duczynska and Sugár were freed. Duczynska immediately entered into the political turmoil of the day, becoming a founding member of the Communist Party of Hungary. Though there was little time for private life, within days of her release from prison she decided to marry Sugár, but the match was ill-fated and the couple went their separate ways within weeks of the nuptials.

Having barely escaped death in the influenza epidemic then sweeping the world, a still-recovering Duczynska volunteered to serve the newly established Hungarian Soviet Republic that was fighting for survival in the spring and early summer of 1919. In May 1919, she went to Zurich to serve as that revolutionary state's press representative in Switzerland, where Duczynska hoped to favorably influence both Swiss and world opinion. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed in the summer of 1919, Duczynska's Swiss friends hid her in a peasant's home so as to evade police sweeps clearing the country of undesirable foreign radicals.

The next phase of her career began in the spring of 1920 when she and several Russian revolutionaries long resident in Switzerland undertook a protracted and dangerous trip to Moscow, where they volunteered their services to the fledgling Soviet state. Within days of her arrival, the young revolutionary found herself at the center of world history in the making. Chosen to work alongside the famed revolutionary Karl Radek, she helped the Soviet leadership to prepare for the second world congress of the Communist International (Comintern). Impressed by her dedication to the revolutionary cause, Comintern leaders decided to send Duczynska to Vienna to work in the headquarters of the exiled Hungarian Communist Party. Smuggled over the border, Duczynska found refuge in Hinterbrühl, in the outskirts of Vienna, where the famous educator Genia Schwarzwald operated a free guest house for her friends and impoverished intellectuals.

Soon after arriving at Hinterbrühl, Ilona met a Hungarian-born intellectual 11 years her senior, Karl Polányi. While the two shared the same ideals of building a better social order, Karl and Ilona differed in many ways. He was introverted and indeed had long been suffering from depression when he met the irrepressible Duczynska. On the issue of Communism, the couple also had major differences in that despite his revolutionary sympathies Karl had never agreed with the totalitarian aspects of the Hungarian Soviet regime and had in fact emigrated from Budapest to Vienna in June 1919, several months before the collapse of the ill-fated experiment in radical Socialism. Ilona, on the other hand, had until this point been an uncritical supporter of Lenin's Soviet republic, and its attempts to export revolutions into the rest of Europe. Many hours of heated discussions between the two enriched both intellectually and only strengthened their affection for one another. Polányi's depression vanished, and he became more aware of the links between political theory and practice, while Duczynska's uncritical admiration of the actual policies of Hungarian and Russian Communist leaders underwent a transformation; she became increasingly critical.

In the spring of 1922, after Duczynska's divorce from Tivadar Sugár had become final, she and Karl Polányi married. They moved into a modest apartment in one of Vienna's workers' districts. In 1923, Duczynska gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Kári. By this time, Duczynska's views had become highly critical of both Communist strategy and tactics, and given the vocal nature of her opposition, she was expelled from the small and faction-ridden Hungarian Communist group in Vienna. Duczynska joined the powerful Austrian Social Democratic Party, quickly gravitating to its left wing.

Faced with the need to earn a living for her family, she became editor of the prestigious economic journal, Der österreichische Volkswirt. Given the fact that this journal was essentially non-political and indeed served the "bourgeois interests" of investors and speculators, Duczynska's immense energies still needed a more sharply focused ideological outlet. This she found by also serving as editor of the journal of the leftist opposition within the Austrian Social Democratic movement, Der linke Sozialdemokrat. By 1929, Duczynska had become as critical of the Social Democratic leadership as she had been earlier toward the Communists, and as a consequence of her relentlessly oppositionist attitude within the party, she was expelled.

Seeking a respite from politics, Duczynska now returned to her earlier intellectual love, namely science, and worked to earn a doctorate at Vienna's College of Technology (Technische Hochschule). Within a few years, however, as the political situation in Central Europe deteriorated and Fascism loomed, her political passions were rekindled, and she became a leading member of the small but influential Gruppe Funke ("Spark Group"), a splinter organization led by Leopold and Ilse Kulcsar that hoped to inject a more militant spirit into a seemingly paralyzed Social Democratic movement. The seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany in 1933, and the collapse of democracy in Austria soon after, alarmed Duczynska and after the bloody suppression of the Social Democrats in February 1934, she decided that the only group capable of meeting the challenge of Hitlerism were the Communists. She joined the minuscule but conspiratorially well-organized Austrian Communist Party, quickly becoming one of its leaders. Besides being a member of the Autonomer Schutzbund (Autonomous Protective League), she also organized an illegal radio cell and became editor of the underground journal Der Sprecher. In May 1935, she became a member of the group of five that ran the Viennese underground organization. Duczynska's conspiratorial cover name during this perilous period was "Anna Novotny." Thanks to her own skills and cool-headedness and those of her comrades, many illegal activities took place on a regular basis without her ever being arrested.

Kulcsar, Ilse (1902–1973)

Austrian anti-Nazi activist and author. Born Ilse Pollak in Vienna, Austria, in 1902; died in 1973; married Leopold Kulcsar; married Arturo Barea.

suggested reading:

Barea, Ilse. Vienna: Legend and Reality. NY: 1966.

Österreicher im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg: Interbrigadisten berichten über ihre Erlebnisse 1936 bis 1945. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1986.

Pütter, Conrad. Rundfunk gegen das "Dritte Reich": Deutschsprachige Rundfunkaktivitäten im Exil 1933–1945. Ein Handbuch. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1986.

In February 1936, having completed her doctoral work in physics, Duczynska immigrated to England, where her husband and daughter had already been living for some time. Here she was active in organizing support for political prisoners in Austria. At the same time, she looked for work that would enable her to use her scientific expertise. Politically, Duczynska's fierce integrity again brought her into conflict with those in power. In this case, she was expelled from the Austrian Communist movement because of her critical views on the Moscow purge trials. During World War II, Duczynska found work in the British defense industry, working on the design, construction, and testing of new aircraft (she would be honored for this by being named an Associate Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society). At the same time, she kept her political involvement alive by becoming a leader of the leftist but non-Communist Hungarian exile movement of Count Michael Karolyi.

In 1947, after she and her husband were denied admission into the United States by immigration officials bending to emerging Cold War phobias, presumably because of their radical past, Karl and Ilona moved to Canada instead. Her husband's reputation increased over the years, particularly after the publication of his book The Great Transformation at the end of World War II. Ilona Duczynska, on the other hand, began to fade into history. Not until the final years of her life was she able to once again gain readers and admirers for a series of historical works that served to argue for the democratic possibilities within the Socialist view of history and society. Even before her husband's death in 1964, Duczynska regained much of her youthful optimism about the positive potentialities of Socialism. The tragic Hungarian uprising of 1956 gave her hope that the cruel despotism of the Soviet model might yet be overcome, as did the "Prague Spring" of 1968.

Starting in the 1960s, Duczynska was able once again to visit Hungary, which she continued to regard as her home as much as she did Vienna or Canada. In her last books, Der demokratische Bolschewik (1975) and Workers in Arms (1978), she wrote with youthful enthusiasm about her belief that democracy and Socialism could and indeed must inspire one another in order to survive. Her hatred of ideological dogmatism and political dictatorship made her a lifelong foe of Stalinism and party bureaucracy. Ilona Duczynska died, one of the very last survivors of Europe's classic age of revolutionary fervor, on April 24, 1978, in Pickering, Ontario, Canada. In the year of her death, the noted British historian E.J. Hobsbawm wrote "to salute her eight decades of devotion to the cause of the liberation of mankind, and her unbroken, but never uncritical, enthusiasm for socialism."

sources:

Arbeitsgemeinschaft "Biografisches Lexikon der österreichischen Frau," file in Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Vienna.

Buttinger, Joseph. In the Twilight of Socialism: A History of the Revolutionary Socialists of Austria. Translated by E.B. Ashton. NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953.

Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Drucker, Peter F. Adventures of a Bystander: Memoirs. New ed. NY: HarperCollins, 1991.

Duczynska, Ilona. Der demokratische Bolschewik: Zur Theorie und Praxis der Gewalt. Munich: List Verlag, 1975.

——. "Körber im Vorfebruar: Eine späte Begegnung," in Ludwig Jedlicka and Rudolf Neck, eds., Vom Justizpalast zum Heldenplatz: Studien und Dokumentationen 1927 bis 1938. Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1975, pp. 208–211.

——. Workers in Arms: The Austrian Schutzbund and the Civil War of 1934. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1978.

Lewis, Jill. Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1934: The Failure of Labour in the First Republic. New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991.

Pasteur, Paul. "Femmes dans le Mouvement ouvrier Autrichien 1918–1934" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rouen, 1986).

Szecsi, Maria. "Ilona Duczynska gestorben," in Arbeiter-Zeiting [Vienna], May 3, 1978.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia