“The Martians” in America

In the mid-1930s, faced with the strengthening of totalitarian regimes on the old continent, a whole constellation of top European intellectuals moved to America and sought work at the universities there. Among them, a group of mathematicians and physicists with extremely unusual intellectual abilities caused a particularly great interest. They memorized entire books as a joke, and performed complicated mathematical operations in their heads. They dealt with mathematical problems that others couldn’t even formulate, and along the way, they also solved many previously unsolved old problems. They seemed to know all the world’s languages, as well as Latin and ancient Greek, but they spoke to each other in some strange language of their own, of which no one else understood a word. However, when they spoke English, it was always with a characteristic “Draculian” accent. It looked like they were out of this world. When someone jokingly called them Martians, there was a grain of seriousness in it, and they themselves accepted that unexpected honor with pleasure.

But, actually, they were Hungarians. They were born in Budapest, close to each other, all at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. The Hungarian language, which they used to confuse their new colleagues, has a Siberian origin and very tenuous connections with other languages, but it is characterized by a dominant accent that is difficult to get rid of and which was popularized in America by Bela Lugosi playing Count Dracula.

Ok, as for the language, that was easy to explain, but what about their alien intellectual abilities? To clarify this, we must take a look at the school where they originated.

Lutheran high school in Budapest

There is no doubt that Varosligheti Fasor Avenue is one of the most fashionable streets in Budapest. The wide street with elegant tree-lined streets is surprisingly not burdened with heavy traffic, and since the last third of the 19th century, luxurious family villas of the city’s elite have sprung up in it, as well as elegant public buildings. The street has retained its prestigious character to this day, so that the elegant villas of the former rich are now used by foreign embassies or cultural institutions.

The most noticeable building in the street, however, is the neo-Gothic complex consisting of the Lutheran church and the school building attached to it, into which, immediately after the completion of the construction, in 1904, the already quite famous gymnasium moved, which had been housed in a cramped building until then. Although founded by the Evangelical Church, the Gymnasium had a distinctly humanistic character and was open to students from all religious communities, and was especially popular among members of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Thanks to such an approach, the Gymnasium received a significant financial donation from private benefactors and the Hungarian government, which enabled the construction of a magnificent building in Varosligheti Fasor Avenue. From that moment on, the school’s working conditions were really excellent, and children of the city’s intellectual elite and the richest Budapest families enrolled in it.

However, all this would mean little if the school did not have excellent professors, many of whom had doctorates, and some were academics. The professor of mathematics and also the director of the school, Laszlo Ratz, gained a particularly high reputation. The move to a new, magnificent building coincided with the most creative period of Professor Ratz’s life, and his High School, as well as Hungarian education in general, entered its most successful period. Not only did Professor Ratz develop a special method of working with the most talented students of his school, but he used his authority and decisively influenced the reform of the Hungarian school system in the direction of discovering talented students for whom special pedagogical treatment was provided. His students were educated in the best traditions of Western civilization, and the two most important ingredients were: moral character and independence of thought. Not only mathematics and physics were important, but Professor Ratz took care of the physical form of his favorite students, as well as their knowledge of foreign and classical languages. Ancient Greek with a Hungarian accent? Who knows if we’ll ever hear anything like that again?

He recruited mathematical talents, which were still the most important to him, as the editor of the Mathematical-Physical List, which published non-standard problems and the solution of which required a deeper understanding and more creative thinking. Solving those problems became a matter of prestige among Hungarian high school students, and the most successful were invited to the Lutheran High School to be taught mathematics by Professor Ratz personally.

For a talented, intellectually curious student, the time spent in high school can be quite a hassle. In order not to be declared a weirdo, you sometimes have to take part in stupid student jokes, pretend to support a certain club, even remember the names of two or three football players, and, well, occasionally join in the conversation.

But does everyone have to go through that torture?

Maybe not. In the first two decades of the 20th century, the Lutheran High School in Budapest became a zone of intellectual elitism that made student life not only tolerable, but also interesting even for the greatest prodigies. At the height of such an atmosphere, at a time when the Great War was raging around them, the students of this school, in their ivory tower, coolly searched for elegant solutions to complex mathematical problems. None of them knew it at the time, but it was the best high school in the world at the time.

The next war was met by the best students of the school, now “Martians”, in America, in significantly different circumstances, and the tasks they solved there changed the world. Among them were physicist Edward Teller (original Hungarian name Teller Ede), physicist Eugen Wigner (Wigner Jenő ) and mathematician John von Neumann (Neumann János). They were joined there by their friends from other high schools in Pest, the mathematician Paul Erdos (Erdős Pál) and the physicist Leo Szilard, who spent his childhood in Varosligheti Fasor Avenue. They played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project, in the development of the first computers, and in the Cold War that soon followed. The last Martian to arrive in America was John Harsányi (Harsányi János), also a student of the Lutheran High School, who barely escaped first from Hitler’s and then from Stalin’s followers. All of them came from the families of Budapest Jews, the world’s intellectual elite of that time.

Architect Samu Pecz – designer of the complex

At the time when the Lutheran church and gymnasium complex was to be built, the Hungarian Secession was in full swing. However, the financiers of the project did not want any innovations, so they hired Sama Pecz, an architect with more conservative views, to develop the project.

Samu Pecz, was born into a well-known family of prominent architects, and after thorough education in Austria and Germany, and practice in the best offices in Pest, at the age of 34 he became the dean of the Faculty of Architecture and remained in that position until his death. As a designer, he distinguished himself with classically designed buildings in the neo-Gothic style, and his great reputation enabled him to receive orders for some of the most impressive buildings in Budapest, including significant city symbols such as the Great Market Hall and the National Archives of Hungary. He especially distinguished himself as a designer of Protestant churches to which he gave his personal stamp. The most interesting among them is the Reformed Church on Szilágyi Dezső Square on Buda’s bank of the Danube.

When Art Nouveau, under the name Secession, appeared in Hungary and was enthusiastically accepted by both the profession and the citizens, Samu Pecz ignored the innovations and continued to work on projects in historical architectural styles, Romanesque and Gothic, with which he got along and which he creatively supplemented with its architectural solutions. I would especially recommend visitors to Budapest to look at the refined masonry details executed according to his designs, for example at the building of the National Archives of Hungary or at the Library of the Technical University, and also at the Lutheran Gymnasium.

As a designer, Mr. Pecz insisted on the use of the highest quality durable materials, and for the roof covering he would most often suggest Zsolnay ceramics, so at least in that respect he did not differ from the leading secessionists. That was exactly what the financiers of the Lutheran Church and Gymnasium in Varosligheti Fasor Avenue wanted to emphasize: classics, tradition, stability and reliability.

And Mr. Pecz offered exactly that. He did everything possible to emphasize the high standards of this school with architectural means. For the facade of the Gymnasium, he chose a combination of facade bricks and smooth plaster, in several shades of ocher, which is the traditional choice for buildings of great social importance in Central Europe. The interior of the Gymnasium, with its high Gothic vaults in the corridors, gave teachers and students a sense of dignity and further motivated them. The library was especially large, and the specialized cabinets had to leave room for several thousand samples of different minerals and rocks, as well as for a collection of several thousand butterflies and other insects.

Later history of the school

After the Great War, the Hungarian school system, by inertia, continued to function for some time, but the political difficulties that the country fell into eventually affected the intellectual climate. The math and physics paper was still published, but the competition was less and less, and the standards were lower. Laszlo Ratz died in 1930, and by the end of the decade all his favorite students had already left the country and gone to America.

The most difficult days for the Gymnasium came after World War II. As soon as the communist government in Hungary was sufficiently consolidated, the Gymnasium was forbidden to operate. Her most famous students, now American citizens, were ideological opponents and pioneers of the Cold War, so they were not to be openly admired. The Hungarian authorities hoped that the passage of time would make the legend of the best school in the world somehow fade into oblivion.

However, that did not happen. On the contrary, as soon as the political system was changed again in Hungary, the famous Gymnasium was quickly restored as one of the first symbols of the newly awakened hope.

A little later, the school authorities decided to emphasize its rich history and a modest memorial plaque with the names of the four most respected professors and only three students was placed on the facade. Wigner, who received the Nobel Prize for physics, Harsanyi, who received it for economics, and the greatest pride of the school, its best student, John von Neumann, who would have received both, had he not died too soon, were chosen.

In the great competition, there was no place on the memorial board for the rest of the constellation of famous students, among whom were: Theodor Herzl, Petőfi Sándor, György Lukács, Edward Teller and, why not, the architect Samu Petz, also a former student of this school.

Darko Veselinović
November 2023