Leaving Habsburgia Behind: Central Europeans in China and America

Mátyás Mervay, Faculty Fellow, New York University

From the Danube to the Yellow Sea and onward across the Pacific, this lecture traces the lives of three individuals who emerged from a vanished Habsburg world and rebuilt their futures in the charged landscape of wartime China, before some went on to the United States. Linked by the steady, understated work of Shanghai’s Jewish refugee organizer, Paul Komor, the unexpected intersections of László Hudec, a Slovak-Hungarian architect once held as a prisoner of war in Siberia; Mathias Komor, a Budapest-born, New York-based dealer of Asian art; and László Frank, a sharp-tongued Viennese journalist, reveal a distinct Central European imprint on China’s cosmopolitan modernity and America’s postwar cultural landscape.

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