La confesión burguesa de Sándor Márai. Lengua, cultura y formación en la vieja Europa

Abstract

This article aims to highlight a key paradox in the life of a Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, who, as a European intellectual, defender of the humanistic continental tradition, was forced to emigrate to the United States. After the Allied victory in 1945, the Americans, as predicted by John Dewey in his autobiography, thought that Europe was to become a simple province of their nation, emerged with the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, which proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as a human right. Since the old Europe, based on culture, civilization, and education disappeared, its foundations had to be restored on an economic basis by the European Coal and Steel Community. The new Europe was made possible by the treaty signed by Adenauer and de Gaulle, who, like Márai, were suspicious of the Soviet Union, and its modern and materialistic worldview, which collapsed in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, nine months after Márai's death.