The other day I came across a reference to The War against the West – a book on Nazi ideology published in 1938 by a Hungarian philosopher. The discovery was, like all real discoveries, unexpected. Having noted a volume on Weimar intellectuals on my bookshelf by Wolfgang Bialas I had searched the internet to find out what my old acquaintance had been up to. It turned out that among other things he had edited a volume of essays on The War against the West – a book he called the most penetrating analysis of Nazi ideology.
That certainly sparked my interest, since I had long obsessed about that weird amalgam of beliefs. But what really caught my attention was that the author of the volume turned out to be Aurel Kolnai, who had been one of my colleagues at the University of London at the beginning of my teaching career. A lecturer at Bedford College, he was an elderly, odd looking man whom I saw here and there at various official occasions. He was, I found out, a Hungarian exile, a refugee from both Nazism and Communism. He was also a devout Catholic and he had written a book on sex and disgust in which dicey passages were composed in Latin. I had heard all this from my friend Bernard Williams who considered Kolnai to be an interesting and original philosopher. But I never made any attempt to learn more about him at that time.
Bialas’ words, however, made me curious. Our library catalogue showed that we had a number of Kolnai’s books in Berkeley. One of the was called A Political Memoir. I have a long-standing interest in philosophical autobiographies and memoirs – asking myself how philosophers sought to interpret their own lives in philosophical terms. A Political Memoir seemed ta good place to get some quick insight into Kolnai’s thinking. After that I could turn to the 700 pages of the War against the West.
The Political Memoir has turned out to be a fascinating opening into an unusual mind. I find myself glued to its pages. Kolnai was born in 1900 into a Jewish Hungarian family. The story he tells of the first fifty-five years of his life is at the same time the story of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. He reveals himself as a keen and discerning observer of the terrible things that were transforming the world. Essential to his story is his conversion to Catholicism from an indifferent attachment to the Jewish religion when he is in his late twenties. But his course on that road is far from usual. He acquires early on a devotion to the work of G. K. Chesterton, the English Catholic writer, and it is this influence that determines his conversion. Kolnai is, in fact, in his own words an “Anglomaniac.” He admires, in particular, the conservatism of the English. When he finally gets to London he feels, at last, at home though financial worries will eventually take him to teach in America. A Political Memoir depicts an unusual person writing about his own times and himself in an intelligent and highly individual fashion. Now I feel that I need to read more of Kolnai’s works.
