Miksa Falk (or sometimes Maximilian Falk, 7 October 1828 – 10 September 1908) was a Hungarian

politician A politician is a person active in party politics, or a person holding or seeking an elected office in government. Politicians propose, support, reject and create laws that govern the land and by an extension of its people. Broadly speaking ...

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the editor-in-chief of the German-language newspaper '' Pester Lloyd''.

Early life

Falk was born to an impoverished Hungarian-Jewish merchant family in Pest, which was a separate town (on the east bank of the river

Danube The Danube ( ; ) is a river that was once a long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire and today connects 10 European countries, running through their territories or being a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , p ...

) that was later united with the towns of Buda and

Óbuda Óbuda was a town in Hungary that was merged with Buda and Pest on 17 November 1873; it now forms part of District III-Óbuda-Békásmegyer of Budapest. The name means ''Old Buda'' in Hungarian (in German, ''Alt-Ofen''). The name in Bosnian ...

(on the west bank of the river Danube) in 1873 to form

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

, the capital of

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

. At the age of 15, he already wrote articles for German-speaking newspapers in Pest. He studied at the Faculty of Arts in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. He returned to Pest in 1848, but soon he went back to Vienna. From 1867 he lived in Hungary. Once he was misunderstood to be the great-grandfather of Peter Falk, after the American actor mentioned that he had some Hungarian ancestors. People believed it as much as the statue of the actor's most famous role, Lt. Columbo had been set on Miksa Falk street in Budapest.

Works

Initially, Falk worked for the magazine ''Ungar'' (''Hungarian''), then he moved to Vienna. He started to write articles at the newspaper ''Oesterreichische Zeitung'', but when the newspaper was banned, he went to work for the newspaper ''Wanderer''. In Hungary, he had articles in '' Pesti Napló'', where he criticized absolutism. At the same time, he wrote supporter conservative articles anonymously for the ''

Budapesti Hírlap The ''Budapesti Hírlap'' was a Hungarian daily newspaper published in Budapest from 16 June 1881 to 1938. Between 25 March and 28 September 1919 it was temporarily closed down. The paper had a conservative Conservatism is a cultural, s ...

''. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, he returned to Hungary for good and became the editor-in-chief of the German-language newspaper '' Pester Lloyd'', and also worked for the ''Politikai Hetilap'' (''Political Weekly Newspaper''). He taught the Hungarian language to Austrian-Hungarian Empress

Elisabeth of Bavaria Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria (24 December 1837 – 10 September 1898) was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I on 24 April 1854 until her assassination in 1898. Elisabeth was ...

.Gábor Ujváry: Auf den Spuren ungarischer Geschichte in Wien
in Collegium Hungaricum. Accessed 27 January 2010

Political life

Between 1850 and 1860, he joined the circle of

István Széchenyi Count István Széchenyi de Sárvár-Felsővidék ( hu, sárvár-felsővidéki gróf Széchenyi István, ; archaically English: Stephen Széchenyi; 21 September 1791 – 8 April 1860) was a Hungarian politician, political theorist, and wri ...

, who at that time lived in

Döbling Döbling () is the 19th District in the city of Vienna, Austria (german: 19. Bezirk, Döbling, Doebling). It is located on the north end from the central districts, north of the districts Alsergrund and Währing. Döbling has some heavily populate ...

, Austria. He supported the Compromise of 1867 with his articles. From 1875, he became the representative of the Liberal Party founded by Ferenc Deák. He was representative of cities

Kőszeg Kőszeg (german: Güns, ; Slovak: ''Kysak'', sl, Kiseg, hr, Kiseg) is a town in Vas County, Hungary. The town is famous for its historical character. History The origins of the only free royal town in the historical garrison county of Vas ...

, Arad and

Keszthely Keszthely (; also known by other alternative names) is a Hungarian city of 20,895 inhabitants located on the western shore of Lake Balaton. It is the second largest city by the lake and one of the more important cultural, educational and economi ...

in several periods. The party collapsed in 1905 and Miksa Falk retired.

References

External links

Miksa Falk in the Hungarian Biograpyical Lexicon

from the Pester Lloyd
Miksa Falk: The last days and death of István Széchenyi
(from MEK)
Miksa Falk on Jewish.hu's list of famous Hungarian Jews
{{DEFAULTSORT:Falk, Miksa Hungarian politicians Hungarian journalists Jewish Hungarian politicians Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Writers from Budapest People from Pest, Hungary 1828 births 1908 deaths