Béla Grünwald


Béla Ferenc József Grünwald de Bártfa was a Hungarian nationalist politician and historian who was active in Upper Hungary.

Life and career

Born in Szentantal to a Zipser German father, Augustin Grünwald and a noblewoman with Polish ancestry, Johanna Majovszky, Grünwald trained as a lawyer, receiving a degree from the Royal University of Pest. He attended universities in Paris, Berlin, Heidelberg, received a law degree and attended philosophy lectures. After a few months in Belgium and France, he returned to his parents' house in Besztercebánya. Serving first as administrator of Zólyom County, in the 1878 elections he was elected a member of the Hungarian House of Representatives for Szliács in that county as a member of the Liberal Party; he subsequently left the Liberals in 1880, serving as an independent before joining the Moderate Opposition party.
Grünwald was an activist for the assimilationist policies of Magyarisation in the predominantly Slovak region of Upper Hungary, founding and supporting the Upper Hungary Magyar Educational Society. He viewed the construction of a centralised state as a political priority. He explained his views on the policy in his 1876 book Közigazgatásunk és a szabadság, in which he urged Hungarian politicians to act as effectively and inexorably as the French in France and the English in the United Kingdom.
As a historian, Grünwald became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences after the publication of his 1888 work, The Old Hungary. In his historical works, he pursued a "democratic" method of historiography. He stated in The New Hungary, the sequel to his 1888 book, "The genius, too, is born. He is born in a particular age, as a member of a particular nation, a class and a family, and the stamp these circles press onto his personality in his youth stays on him even if he later comes come into conflict with them." He charged the Hungarian nobility with a lack of national sentiment, and feeling greater solidarity with nobles from other nations than with the Hungarian nation; the nobles, he argued, had neglected the development of Hungary as a nation-state. Nevertheless, on 22 April 1889, he accepted ennoblement from Emperor Franz Joseph I, becoming "de Bártfa".
Grünwald committed suicide by gunshot wound to the head in unclear circumstances while visiting Paris on 4 May 1891. Shortly before his suicide, he sent a telegram to Albert Apponyi, the leader of the Moderate Opposition, briefly notifying him of his death: "Béla Grünwald has died after a long period of suffering". In his famous dramatic 1929 account, The Paris Story, Dezső Szomory describes Grünwald's death and burial:
Grünwald's epitaph reads, "Here lies Béla Grünwald, unbreakable apostle of the Hungarian theory of the state."

Works