Between the two world wars, the dominant trend in Hungarian
history writing was Geistesgeschichte, as represented by the
works of Gyula Szekfû, Bálint Hóman, Gyula Kornis, Tibor Joó,
József Deér, and Péter Váczy. Fully versed in the works of
Ranke, Meinecke, Dilthey and Lamprecht, Gyula Szekfû, the most
outstanding of these historians, was also the one to conclude
that Hungarian history would lend itself admirably to a
consistent synthesis. In his A magyar állam életrajza (1918),
and in his Bethlen Gábor (1929), Szekfû expressly models his
approach on Meinecke's, and tells the entire story from the
vantage point of raison d'état and the national point of view.
This meant that for him, the central issue of Hungarian history
was the territorial integrity of historic Hungary, the Hungary
of St. Stephen. This particular outlook is even more evident in
Szekfû's Három nemzedék (1920), the veritable Bible of the
period. Here, he depicts the nineteenth-century Hungarian
liberals responsible for the disintegration eff