Double Exile

Contents: Fin-de-Siècle Budapest - The Hungarian Trauma: 1918-1920 - Berlin Junction - Second Expulsion, Double Trauma: 1933 - New York Asylum: Acceptance and Animosity - Problem Solving and the U.S. War Effort.

The Author: Tibor Frank, M.A., Dr.Univ., Ph.D., D.Litt. is Professor of History and Director of the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. He has taught frequently at universities in the USA (UCSB, UCLA, Nevada-Reno, Columbia). In 2002 he won the prestigious German Humboldt Research Award and spent the academic year 2003-04 in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Professor Frank is a corresponding fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London.

«Tibor Frank is the world's foremost expert on Hungarian scholars, scientists, and artists who chose exile or were forced into exile during the first half of the twentieth century. (...) Frank's description of the adventures of these extraordinary expatriates is as fascinating as is, for instance, his analysis of how some among them helped to develop the atomic and nuclear bombs as well as computers, thereby literally changing the way we live and think today.» (István Deák, Columbia University)
«This fascinating book goes far beyond Fermi's and Bailyn/Fleming's accounts and presents the whole story in all its transatlantic richness. (...) Finally, the individual profiles, most especially of Leo Szilard, but also of Michael Polanyi, George Pólya, Theodore von Kármán, and John von Neumann, give the collective story of so many names in so many fields of the sciences and social sciences its subjective and personal touches. At the end I was forced to contemplate the historical contingency that without the Hungarian 'gimnázium' there might not have been an American atomic bomb...» (Werner Sollors, Harvard University)
«The book to be read (...) is Frank's masterly account of a greatly gifted generation, most of the members of which had twice to begin their lives anew in foreign lands.» (Lee Congdon, Hungarian Studies Review)
«Frank covers an impressive range of issues and people, examining with great care the Hungarian, Central European, German and American layers of the émigré question, returning time and again to the notion of the 'Hungarian genius' and the idea that emigration studies should further differentiate national origins, so as to become aware of the more intricate effects of specific cultural traditions and educations. In doing so, Frank creates a surprisingly pleasant, considering the subject, and at times page-turning, narrative that provides access to a staggering amount of data and source material about Hungarian-Jewish professionals from 1919 up to