Márai the Journalist 1921–1936 - A Selection
Márai the Journalist 1921–1936 - A Selection

Summary/Abstract: "There was a period of thirty years in my life when, every day, between two cigarettes in the coffeehouse, I would dash off one or two of these little sketches for the daily papers,” recalled Márai, whose huge journalistic oeuvre, a significant part of it in German, has only recently become accessible as library archives are explored. The 1920s and 1930s were the great years of his journalism. From 1919 to 1923, Márai, who was bilingual in German and Hungarian, lived in Germany; he then moved on to Paris, where he remained until 1928. He was a correspondent of the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung, but also wrote for other German and Austrian papers and for the daily Újság in Budapest, which sent him to Berlin in 1933. There he closely followed Hitler’s accession to power. Márai regarded the feuilleton as a form of literature, its “antechamber”. As he put it: “And what bravura there was in the Hungarian press at that time, the sheer virtuosity displayed by the very best writers of the age, describing the everyday and the transient with the very lightest of touches, so that the reader would suddenly glimpse something enchanting, weighty and eternal in the most fleeting of subjects.”

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