Are Hungarians from Mars?

Dr. Theodore von Karman

By Madeleine Kando

There are moments in an immigrant’s life, when one wonders where one belongs. Where one’s identity lies. Are you the person that left or are you the person that arrived? An emigrant or an immigrant? You cannot be one without the other, obviously. It’s like asking an airplane not to depart before arriving at its destination.

Most immigrants are much too busy trying to survive to ask themselves these existential questions. It’s a luxury that only a retired self-absorbed immigrant like myself, can afford. Besides, you would think that being a veteran immigrant of almost 50 years, I would have solved that riddle a long time ago.

I left my native Hungary at a very early age, not having any say in the matter. Then I left France to move to Holland where I basically grew up. I performed some test flights in my early twenties to England and Spain, but my final destination was America, where I spent the rest of my life.

The question I ask myself: am I Hungarian? French? Dutch? American?

I don’t kid myself by thinking that I am unique as an immigrant. The whole world is either emigrating or immigrating. We are a curious species and contrary to the proverbial cat, it hasn’t killed us yet. It just makes us want to travel and discover even more.

But Hungarians are a special case. There are more Hungarians that live outside of Hungary than in the country itself. The first ‘diaspora’ was not because Hungarians left their country; their country left them. The post-World War I Treaty of Trianon reduced the fatherland to a fraction of what if was before. As a consequence, two million Hungarians found themselves living outside their own country.

Other ‘diasporas’ (including the persecution of Jews in the Second World War and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) caused another 3 million Hungarians to leave their country, including little old me.

So what happened to all these millions of Hungarians? Did they become part of the ‘melting pot’? Just another patch in the crazy quilts that make up nations?

That assumption is not borne out by facts. Rather than politely blending into their new surroundings, like normal immigrants do, Hungarians always make their presence loudly known by being smarter or weirder, or more creative than others.

The Martians

This was especially the case with a group of prominent Hungarian physicists an mathematicians who emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. They were Jewish and were fleeing the Nazi occupation. After some time ‘observing’ them, as scientist like to do, their colleagues at the Los Alamos Lab, started to suspect that these men with their superhuman intellect, who had arrived from an obscure country and spoke an incomprehensible foreign language, were not ordinary humans, but were really from Mars.*

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi once casually asked fellow scientists the following question: “The universe is so vast that intelligent life must be out there in large numbers. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. They should have arrived here by now, so where are they? " It was Leo Szilard, fellow immigrant and Hungarian compatriot, who supplied the perfect answer: "They ARE among us," he said, "but they call themselves Hungarians."

According to György Marx, the extraterrestrial origin of the Hungarian scientists is proved by the fact that the names of Leó Szilárd, John von Neumann, and Theodore von Kármán cannot be found on any earthly map, but craters can be found on the Moon bearing their names: Szilard (crater), Von Neumann (crater), Von Kármán (lunar crater). There is also a crater on Mars named after Von Kármán.

To dispel any doubt about the veracity of the Martian claim, famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov told his readers that “There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: Humans and Hungarians”.

Here are some other reasons why Hungarians might have extraterrestrial origins: They like to wander about (like many celestial bodies). Hungarians themselves don’t really know where they come from, so why not Mars? They speak an exceptionally alien language with no connection to any other language group. They know how to say: ‘öt török öt görögöt dögönyöz örökös örömök között’ (“Five Turks are massaging five Greeks amid everlasting delights”) and some of them are so much smarter than mere terrestrials that extraterrestrial genes can not be discounted.

Hollywood

As mentioned before, Hungarians like to make a splash as immigrants. Which also counts for the film industry. Hungarians might as well be called ‘the Founding Fathers of Hollywood’. 20th Century Fox was founded by William Fox and Adolph Zukor founded Paramount Pictures. Another Hungarian, Michael Curtiz directed 102 films, amongst them ‘Casablanca. Without him no one would have heard of James Cagney, Doris Day, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland or Bette Davis.

Sometimes though, my compatriots didn’t get the recognition they deserved. Walt Disney was really good at reaping the benefits of others’ talents without giving them credit for it. The original creator of Bambi was a Hungarian writer by the name of Felix Salten. (See: Bambi: A Life in the Woods.)

Contrary to Disney, Salten was a terrible businessman. He sold the movie rights to his story for a mere $1000 to MGM producer Sidney Franklin, who in turn, sold it to Disney. The rest is history.

Another important contributor to the Disney Empire was Horvath Huszti. Without his exceptional artistic talent, there would be no Mickey Mouse or Snow White’s seven dwarfs. After decades of toiling in the drawing room without recognition of his name, he left the studio in disgust.

But all in all, the list of Hungarians that contributed to the world we know today is almost endless. There are Nobel Prize winners among them, business tycoons, actors, scientists, inventors, you name it. They are EVERYWHERE!

I am not super smart, I forgot my native language because I was too young when I left the mother ship, (does it count that I speak English with an accent?). There are no mounts on Mars named after me, but I do like to wander and I definitely have a hard time fitting in. Could the reason be that I have Martian genes? leave comment here

* The Martians included: John von Neumann (a.k.a. the father of the Atom Bomb), Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, George Pólya and Leó Szilárd.