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forms of these so-called playwrights, and rise to heaven where surely there will be better entertainment than Endre Horn's Brutus and Julius, now playing at the Castle Theater on Szinhdz utca, and better reading than Mihdly Antall's latest collection of doggerel and so-called love songs, Season of Lights, recently published to extensive foolish acclaim by the Horvath Press, and true celestial music rather than the awful experiments of Jdnos Bdlint, whose music leaves good people gagging while the so-called taste makers pronounce him a genius of the first order and a credit to Hungarian culture. I, for one, do not intend to read or listen to such works when I am sitting at the left hand of our Lord, after God tells me it is safe to come out from under my bed, where I will soon go in preparation for the gathering storm.

It demanded all of Karoly's patience to understand why his father found this tremendous, blistering (and artistically metaphorical) attack on his squalid, treacherous circle (and even our press, by God) to be funny rather than revelatory and alarming. In this writer, Pal Magyar, Karoly had finally found someone who put into words all the disgust he felt for his father's false friends, all the shame of tying the family's fortunes to this un-Magyar filth, and now his father was laughing, and congratulating Karoly for having nearly fooled him. The explanation came agonizingly slowly.

The vitriolic column condemning the KB as "Jews and scribblers" that had so captured Karoly's attention and distilled his own feelings that morning was written by none other than Endre Horn, the same leading light of the KB who had lampooned the senior Horvath in Under Cold Stars. Writing under an assumed name, Horn was at this time contributing (with great and comically unnecessary subterfuge) columns to the small, struggling, nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper Awakening Nation (Karoly's favorite, introduced to him by a press employee since fired for drunkenness). In these pieces, under the name Pal Magyar, Horn espoused extreme nationalist views, but in staggeringly bad prose. The essays had to be credible enough to slide past the well-blinkered but purity-mad editors of Awakening Nation but still bizarre enough not to be taken seriously by the average reader, and, most important, serve as self-promotion for Horn himself, hidden though he was behind his nom de mockery.

Karoly remained quiet, was forced by circumstance to be Horn's admirer, found himself at his own breakfast table gagged and bound at a distance by the Jew scribbler. He could say nothing. And so Karoly laughed. The betrayal of the press by his own father (Karoly later told a colleague) brought hot tears of shame to his eyes, the ruination of a once great man. "A man can be destroyed, of course, but a national institution cannot."

IM)
 
i
  
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But he went himself that day to the offices of Awakening Nation and assured himself the editors would not repeat their error. There were still some men of principle in this world, though his father could no longer be counted among them.

"Oh, here's a pity. Horn's game's been discovered by the clowns at Awakening Nation," his father reported one hungover morning.

"Has it really? What a remarkable turn of events."

THE
  
SECOND
  
IMRE
  
HORVATH
  
DIED
  
IN
  
1913, TEN
 
YEARS
  
AFTER
  
BLEATING
  
A

widely parodied eulogy at Endre Horn's very elaborate, very Catholic state funeral.

At Imre's passing, Karoly Horvath was thirty-five, married with three sons and still saddened by the memory of his infant daughter's death twelve years earlier. The girl had been named Klara, for his unlucky twin, and had succumbed in her turn to typhus. But now he shook off the dust and webs of rage and sorrow and climbed at last to the position he had deserved for two thirds of his life.

The day after his father's funeral, he made a list of everything the press should immediately cease printing. This long document began with Endre Horn's plays and proceeded through the works of nearly every member of the long since evaporated KB. Then he made a list of papers and writers he wanted the press to acquire, beginning with Awakening Nation, which had steadily grown in popularity in its fifteen years of circulation. The new chief examined his two lists, and re-examined—with the assistance of new and trusted associates—the financial status of the press. Over several weeks, he estimated the cost of acquiring everything he desired and the loss his firm would suffer if he excised all of its disgraceful properties. And then he revised. Some things, unfortunately, would have to stay, even though they were hardly admirable exemplars of the memory of the Hungarian people. Horn, for example, still sold ridiculously well. Antall inexplicably brought in money. But the composer Balint? No one listened to that garbage, and certainly no one bought the sheet music for the screeching noise. His father had been ridiculously sentimental to publish the work of that ungrateful sodomite. It was with a pleasure almost unmatched in Karoly's life that the tip of his pen very, very slowly scratched its way through the letters B-A-L-I-N-T j-A-N-o-s, even tore the paper slightly, and

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Karoly recalled his own precocious words that had stopped the composer panting in his perversely libidinous tracks so many years earlier at the Gerbeaud. "Take your hands off me, you disgusting man. Conduct yourself like a gentleman or a real gentleman will teach you how." Even at that young age he had known right from wrong and had courageously spoken. Balint had fallen back a step, grown pale to be so eloquently chastened in front of all his filthy friends, and by a young boy of all people. "And by a boy, by a young boy," Karoly whispered aloud. On the list of forty-five authors, newspapers, and magazines he hoped to sell off or discontinue, six writers and the magazine Culture were insufficiently profitable to justify amnesty: seven slow lines, each a joy. The other thirty-five writers and four publications would have to be tolerated and slowly replaced, but surely someone else at the press could be responsible for them. He was guardian of his nation's memory and conscience. If filth temporarily and necessarily brought in money to support this mission, so be it, but he would not dirty his hands with it.

The next year, having purged his company of unprofitable filth, Karoly completed the negotiations for his acquisition of Awakening Nation, which, as of July 8, 1914, bore the familiar Horvath logo in the upper-right-hand corner of every copy. Karoly took particular pleasure composing his monthly "Letter from the Publisher," which he inaugurated on the bottom left of page one, on August 10, 1914, on the topic of the Austro-Hungarian empire's eternal and immutable strength. In this debut he used as a symbol his own great-uncle Viktor, a Hungarian who had given his life for the empire at Kapolna. He called on Hungarians to stand firm in the face of current international tensions, as strength would certainly prevent war, this crisis would pass, leaving Austria-Hungary more dominant than ever. And though Awakening Nation never achieved the circulation of Corpus Sanus—with its bicycling results and horse-racing stories—Karoly always referred to it as the jewel in the Horvath crown.

MASTER'S
 
IN
  
BUSINESS
 
ADMINISTRATION,
 
FINAL
 
EXAM,
 
CASE-STUDY
 
ESSAY

Question, as administered to Karoly Horvath between August 11, 1914, and July 16,1947:

You are the head of a small but highly successful family-owned publishing business. Please outline your corporate decisions after each of the following

IS2 I ARTHUR PHILLIPS

seventeen events takes place in the country of your operations. Include explanations of how you access materials and labor, gauge the market, determine product range, carry out marketing, and manage an integrated strategic long-term planning function within your senior executive staff.

i. Your country fights and loses a world war; labor is scarce; inflation is alarmingly high. You lose your second oldest son to disease, which sinks you into an uncommunicative depression for several weeks. You decide to stop publishing several of your most profitable titles, as their authors are responsible for the flu that claimed your son's life. Revenue earned during the war from publishing government casualty lists, draft notices, maps, and propaganda is almost entirely depleted by the end of your despondency.

ii. Your country secedes from the stable political system it has belonged to for centuries; politics are dangerous and the government is weak.

iii. A violent Communist dictatorship emerges and nationalizes your press. You lose everything and are arrested. The Communist regime is nearly 70 percent Jewish, a statistic that strikes you as highly significant. Your execution is tentatively included on the Communists' very busy schedule.

iv. Your country loses another war (more of an epilogue to the last one) and is invaded by Romanians, who find themselves briefly in control of Budapest before giving it back and going home. You remain in prison throughout, and your execution date is first advanced then indefinitely postponed.

v. After only four months of Communism, a right-wing counterrevolution is successfully launched. You are freed from prison, your firm is restored to you (you fire your three staunchly anti-Communist Jewish employees on allegations of crypto-Communist sympathies), and you are personally congratulated for your courage by the new head of state, a regent/vice admiral. (He is a regent, although there is no monarch on whose behalf he administers. He is a vice admiral, although your country no longer has a coastline, having lost it—as well as 70 percent of its land and 60 percent of its population—under the predictably unpopular and embittering Trianon treaty ending the world war.) The regent cites your press as the memory of a people and the conscience of a nation. You receive a medal, which you hang in your office, in a glass case with a small electric light suspended over it. Executions of real and suspected Communists sweep the country. The demand for "national-Christian" newspapers and writers seems a very tempting foundation on which to rebuild your firm's fortunes.

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vi. Civil war is narrowly averted when a pretender to the throne of Hungary briefly appears.

vii. Peace and prosperity return at last to your country. Demand rises for your back catalog of Hungarian authors and scholars, though you privately associate them with imprisonment, tyranny, murder, and disease. The prosperity they can bring you, though a necessity, seems to you a sulfurous compromise with evil.

viii.
   
The Depression.

ix. Elections subsequent to the Depression unsurprisingly favor the fascists. The regent's new government flirts with Mussolini and Hitler and pushes through laws setting quotas on Jews admitted to universities and the professions, then declaring them an alien race. Please detail your firm's extensive opportunities for profit and acquisition.

x. Another world war. Your country tries very hard to stay out of it, wedged as it is between two very large opposing combatants who don't think yours really counts as an independent nation. Detail your new government and military printing contracts.

xi. Forced to pick sides, your country wades delicately into the war as a member of the Axis and shyly helps invade the Soviet Union. The government forbids marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Please estimate how many government-edict posters you can produce and paste in Jewish neighborhoods on short notice.

xii. At the Germans' repeated insistence, the Hungarian government grudgingly, quietly declares war on the United States and Great Britain. New laws force Jews to wear yellow stars and live in a Pest ghetto. After initial efforts to ship Jews to death camps, the government halts deportation when the Budapest police responsible for the roundups threaten to rebel. Please recalculate poster revenues, including both the deportation orders and their revocation.

xiii. The government implies to its German ally that it would like to pull out of the war now, that it had only gotten involved in order to reclaim a little of the Hungarian land lost in the last world war, that it has no serious grievance against the British and Americans anyhow. The regent secretly negotiates with the West, then publicly announces, over national radio, Hungary's separate peace with them. Hungary is instantly overrun by its spurned German ally. The regent's intricate diplomatic ploy was useless: Germany and its Hungarian Arrow Cross quasi-SS allies establish headquarters in the palace on Buda's Cas-

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tie Hill and bundle the regent off to Berlin. Back in Budapest, some of your countrymen eagerly offer to help load Jews onto trains en route to Auschwitz. Jewish possessions and apartments are free for the taking. The Arrow Cross, some of whose members work or have worked for your press, rival the SS in their spirited brutality. Meanwhile, other members of the government continue to enact the terms of their separate peace with the Allies and declare war on the (occupying) Germans. Your country is at war with everyone. Please be specific as to your business and commercial opportunities.