The Hungarian author Aladár Kuncz (1885-1931) spent five years as a prisoner in an internment camp in France during the First World War. Kuncz wrote about his experiences in his memoir A Fekete Kolostor (1931), first published in Hungarian shortly before his death. It was translated into English, by Ralph Murray, as Black Monastery (Chatto & Windus, 1934).  Highlighting its popularity, Murray states in his prefatory Translator’s Note that ‘Of this book, in little, impoverished, postwar Hungary twenty thousand copies have been sold’ (n.p.). There were translations into several other languages, including French, German, Italian, Turkish and Romanian.

Black Monastery is one of the few narratives written from the perspective of someone kept in a French internment camp. As Matthew Stibbe points out, ‘the First World War marks the major turning point in the rise of the internment camp as a twentieth-century global phenomenon, [… but it was not] entirely a novelty of the post-1914 period’ (2019, p. 7).  Stibbe charts the extent of French internment (2019, pp. 81-9), noting that it was ‘the first belligerent to enact internment measures against enemy aliens during the First World War’ (2019, p. 81).

Kuncz’s memoir begins with him on holiday in Brittany at the outbreak of war, ‘one of the consequences of my Francophile loves’ (p. 1), becoming almost instantly ‘despised and outcast, rubbish thrown out into the street’ (p. 10). He makes a mercy dash to Paris only for the Hungarian consul to be unable to aid its citizens; he is kept under surveillance in Paris, then sent to Périgueux, in the Dordogne, before returning further north to the island of Noirmoutier (1914-16), just south-west of Nantes, from which the memoir takes its title (Noir/black – moutier/monastery). He was then moved south and further offshore to the Île d’Yeu (1916-19); both islands are in the Vendée département, off France’s Atlantic coast.

Throughout Black Monastery, Kuncz adds additional reflections based on hindsight, often forcefully and poignantly. Amid narrating fears of violence against internees at Périgueux at the time, he looks back:

Perigueux, though we did not know it, was only the beginning of the beginning. If we had had the slightest idea that we were to stay under those conditions for five years we should have gone mad or committed suicide. For the moment all our thoughts were bent on sending news home, with obtaining help somehow, from somewhere, from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy of some neutral state, on killing the time from morning till evening. (p. 28)

The gap between quotidian human tolerance and the scale of the injustices wrought is salutary here: wartimes are insistently contemporary, as scholars such as Mary Favret (2010) have argued.  A shared experience is of waiting: Kuncz and other internees wait for release; civilians wait for news; soldiers wait between bouts of participation in different ways; all fear in different ways that violence may, or know that it will, interrupt their waiting.

The book’s nearly 400 pages give an extended sense of the torment of a man like Kuncz, a victim of circumstance.  He finds out belatedly about his father’s death (pp. 209-10), and inevitably the nature of interned existence brings about literal nightmares, as he struggles to cling to sanity, with an unlikely solution: ‘I had become practised in drugging my consciousness in sleepless nights. So I plunged into a long meditation on Kant and Bergson’ (p. 335). However, there are moments of relief. Kuncz also enjoys the escape from reality offered by a cross-dressing theatre production.  Dr. Herz, the German internee who takes on the female parts, is described remarkably:

He lived among us like a feted prima donna. The halo of his womanhood went with him even when he had on his usual shabby, rusty-brown overcoat, patched, baggy trousers, blue workman’s sweater and his ordinary, flabby man’s face with its eye-glasses and its thatching of scanty hair. Now he dared give more expression to his femininity. He was soft, attentive; for all the repugnance of his masculine countenance there was a sort of mysterious, tempting coquettishness in his smile, in the play of his eyes and in the rich modulations of his voice. (pp. 295-6)

The impact of the homosocial environment is registered strongly, Herz’s aura enduring even as he is dressed as some sort of cross between Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character and a labouring man.

The November 1918 Armistice does not lead to their immediate release, but further waiting: ‘The white, emaciated faces of the other Hungarians looked at me like unanswerable question-marks—What is going to happen to us? What is going to happen to Hungary?’ (p. 370). The memoir concludes with Kuncz’s release, in April 1919, and his return to a Budapest in which:

There were very few people in the streets, the shops were shut, the houses neglected and dirty, as though a storm had swept through the town. Everything had aged and grown gloomy and turned its head away wearily, and the red flags hanging everywhere were like big red patches of blood against a smoky haze. (p. 409)

The conditions to which he has returned via a journey of approaching 2,000 km seem little better than those on the Île d’Yeu, but it is the sympathetic offer of a cigarette which provokes the conclusion – also the conclusion of the memoir – that ‘We had returned. From pain to greater pain’ (p. 409).

On his return to Hungary, Kuncz taught in Budapest and as writer and editor participated in Hungarian periodical culture. He returned to his native Transylvania, settling in 1923 in what was then Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), establishing a reputation in letters in the region.

The text is in the War Books Boom database for the Scottish portion only, appearing substantially after the UK-wide peak. The translator, Ralph Murray, had Scottish ancestry, descended from the Dukes of Atholl.  Murray would go on to be an internationally significant diplomat (the comedian Al Murray is his grandson).

First version by Ray Thomson

Developed by Andrew Frayn

Works Cited

Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Aladár Kuncz, Black Monastery, trans. by Ralph Murray (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934)

Matthew Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War: A European and Global History, 1914–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

 

Biographical information is from the Hungarian Wikipedia entry for Kuncz, translated via Google Translate.