István Deák

Who is István Deák?

István Deák is a Hungarian-born American historian, author and academic.

Deak was born at Székesfehérvár, Hungary. He was educated at a Catholic gymnasium in Budapest and began his university studies in 1945 at the University of Budapest. His studies were disrupted by the war and postwar chaos, and he left Hungary in 1948, following the communist takeover. He then studied history at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked as a journalist in France and for Radio Free Europe in West Germany. In 1956, unable to gain residence in France, he settled in New York City where he studied modern European history at Columbia University under Fritz Stern. He obtained his doctorate in 1964 and spent the next 33 years teaching at Columbia. He was the Director of Columbia's Institute on East Central Europe between 1968 and 1979.

Deak has written extensively on eastern and central European history and politics. His publications include Weimar Germany's Left-wing Intellectuals; The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849; Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918; and Essays on Hitler's Europe. He edited and partly wrote, together with Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath. He has also written extensively for the New York Review of Books and other periodicals.