Absent Friends

(Chris here)

Last week I opened up my email to find that one of my friends had died, This is the second time this has happened in about as many months, but the first time that the news had come completely out of the blue. Mark Pittaway, one of my colleagues in my department, was only 39, and I'd had a message from him two days before. I didn't reply because I didn't think that I needed to, at the time.

Mark was a bit like me in that he was a historian who'd worked for the Open University for ten years. Like me, he had a compulsive desire to tell people things. But Mark was quite a lot unlike me in that he'd published an immense amount of stuff. Lots of it was about his 'core topic' – work and life (but especially work) in postwar Hungary. But he could write, and write well, about Eastern Europe (and there's a lot of it) in the whole twentieth century. When he died, he was working on a big project on Burgenland and the Austro-Hungarian border from the 1920s to the 1990s. His work on the impact of the border, (which was, after all, the one that went down first in 1989) how it was controlled on both sides, and how the adjacent provinces each related to the other, was a brilliant exercise in re-examining Cold War certainties.

A few years ago we were talking in his office about our research plans. The practicalities of my plans involved continuing to schlep down the BL and the PRO (where I'm sat now, as it happens). His were rather more contingent – he pointed to his cupboard, about thirty cubic feet of densely-packed files. "I've photocopied everything that I'm going to need for the next five years. When the right wing gets back in after the next election, they'll ban me from the archives." In terms of the great big zero-sum game of Hungarian politics and civil society, he never identified himself as being on the left side, but he did acknowledge, with his trademark glee, that most of the other players saw him as such. I remember him laughing as he showed me a pair of peer reviews he'd received for an article: one called it an incisive and nuanced view of labour relations and regime legitimacy in postwar Hungary; the other said that Dr Pittaway was an evil charlatan and an apologist for Stalinist genocide, and thus the article must under no circumstances be published. The editor, safe in the (nearly always) less politicized atmosphere of British historiography, plumped for the former.

Like most economic and social historians, he could do small case studies. Unlike most of us, he could also study the bigger picture. He understood both halves of the political economy question: this is a pretty rare attribute for anyone anywhere, but to do it in Magyar is a special trick. As you might imagine, his knowledge of the ramifications of the collapse of Credit Anstalt in the 1920s and Hungary's debt crisis of the 1980s had become increasingly pertinent in the last two years. He was an active participant in the blog run by his friend Edward Hugh, and Edward was quoting his writing on the contemporary world on Fistful of Euros. He was chuffed (in fact, he defined chuffed) when a few months ago, along with Edward, he got a slapdown which proved that he'd arrived. In the corridor: "How're you doing?" "It's marvelous! I have just been denounced by the Hungarian Minister of Finance." He had, too.

I don't know how big he really loomed in FIDESZ's list of opponents. Perhaps this particular brand of know-nothings didn't rate him highly enough to be actively celebrating his death. Nevertheless, we can be sure that Mark made the right enemies for some damn fine reasons, and that's not a bad measure of a man.

Comments

[Richard J]

Praising my fellow guest-blogger might be a bit gauche, but this is a wonderful memorial.

[Matt L]

A great post about a great historian and a good person. I've heard it said that a really great historian doesn't write his or her master work until their late fifties or early sixties. Mark's early death deprived the rest of us the chance to see an outstanding historian rise to the peak of his powers.

Mark was not only smart and talented, he also freely shared his ideas and insights with others. I will miss seeing him at the conferences and in the archives. I will wonder what books and articles he would have written.