The Vocation of the Historian Interpreted by Henrik Marczali

Abstract

Cambridge historian George Peabody Gooch assessed the achievement of Henrik Marczali (b. 1856, d. 1940) as it follows: ”It was not however, till the appearance of Marczali that Hungarian historiography broke the shackles of
a narrow patriotism. His popular sketch of the development of the Hungarian people and his works on Hungary under Maria Theresa and her sons represent the highest achievement of Magyar scholarship. The need of today is not a new national history but a rich crop of monographs.”

Henrik Marczali educated in Berlin, Paris and Oxford, had participated in Theodor Mommsen’s, Wilhelm Wattenbach’s, Karl Wilhelm Nitzsch’s and Georg Waitz’s seminars in Berlin, attended to Jules Quicherat’s and Gabriel Monod’s lectures in Paris and William Stubbs’ tutorials in Oxford. He became the first professional historian in Hungary, had written monographs, syntheses, taught primary-source critics, methodology and theory besides the narrative history of Hungary and its thematical interpretations.

This study focuses on his interpretation of vocation of historians in the nation-making process through his underlying assumptions of writing history, his concept and interpretation of nation vis-à-vis perennialist and modernist versions of the discourse, the concept and function of education, civilization, and morality in connection with barbarism versus civilization, and, the legacy of the prophets, following his father’s (Mihály Morgenstern/ Marczali) and his mentor’s (Mór Kármán) Jewish moral heritage.