Page - 371 - in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg - Netzwerker der Kunstwelt

Across the Leitha 371 Henszlmann, Pulszky and Böhm had more in common, however, than merely a shared enthusiasm for art. Henszlmann maintained close personal links to the sculp- tor after he returned to Budapest and, whilst in exile in Britain, was also friends with his son Wolfgang Boehm (1823–1890) who pursued a successful career as a painter in London. Indeed, the Böhm circle was based, in part, on other prior personal connections. Pulszky’s family already knew Böhm before the circle was convened in Vienna ; in the mid-1830s Gábor Fejérváry had moved into the Pulszky family home, decorating it with a set of copies of the Parthenon marbles executed by Böhm himself.21 In his remi- niscences Pulszky referred to Henszlmann as one of his closest childhood friends, while the extensive correspondence between the two shows that they remained in close con- tact throughout the 1850s and 1860s.22 Like Henszlmann, Pulszky also threw himself into the 1848 revolution and supported Hungarian independence ; he served as a mem- ber of the National Defence Committee (Országos Honvédelmi Bizottmány), for which he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Habsburg authorities, resulting in a period of exile in London. Indeed, his political commitments were even more marked than those of Henszlmann or Eitelberger, for he continued to work closely with the revolution- ary leader Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) after the defeat of 1849, accompanying him on international tours and playing a prominent role in the promotion of the Hungarian nationalist cause abroad.23 The Böhm circle meetings thus functioned as a kind of social, intellectual and ide- ological nexus that brought together intellectuals from both halves of the Empire (as they would be after 1867). The implications of this have hardly been considered, and the lack of critical attention to this nexus is all the more striking, given that Böhm himself had grown up in Upper Hungary (now : eastern Slovakia). Specifically, he grew up in the German speech island of Wallendorf (in Hungarian : Szepesolaszi/in Slovak : Spišské Vlachy), only 60 or so kilometres northwest of Košice. The appeal of Böhm to the circle of Hungarian intellectuals and art lovers can thus be ascribed to prior personal acquaintance as well as to their shared common background, for they all came from the same part of Upper Hungary. Pulszky grew up in Eperjes (now Prešov) which is only 36  kilometres north of Košice, and the triangle encompassing Prešov, Spišské Vlachy 21 E. Szintesi, Joseph Daniel Böhm Parthenon-fríze, in : Ferenc Pulszky (1814–1897) Emlékére [In memory of Ferenc Pulszky (1814–1897)] (ed. E. Marosi/I. Laczkó/J. Szábo/L. Tohtné Mészáros), Budapest 1997, pp.  56–69. There is an English summary on pp.  163 f. of the same volume. 22 F. Pulszky, Meine Zeit, mein Leben I :  Vor der Revolution, Pressburg and Leipzig 1880, p.  38. 23 T. Kabdebó, Diplomat in Exile : Francis Pulszky’s Political Activities in England, 1848–1860, New York 1979.