Gyula Horn
Gyula Horn · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain in 1989 and let the East Germans through, later prime minister — grandson of Salamon Horn and Róza Blau
5 juillet 1932, Budapest, Hongrie — 19 juin 2013, Budapest, Hongrie
Budapest
Gyula Horn is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain in 1989 and let the East Germans through, later prime minister — grandson of Salamon Horn and Róza Blau
Origins and early life
Gyula Horn was born in Budapest on 5 July 1932 into a working-class family of Jewish origin that had converted to Protestantism: his paternal grandparents, Salamon Károly Horn, a locomotive driver, and Róza Blau, were Jews, as the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities records, and his father, a communist worker, was arrested and killed by the Gestapo in 1944 — the Jewish grandparents on whom this fiche rests, and a family history of the Holocaust that Horn himself bore.
Work and career
He studied economics in Rostov-on-Don, and this fiche states plainly the darkest fact of his career: after the crushing of the 1956 uprising, in which his brother was killed, he joined the militia that helped restore the communist order, a choice he defended and his opponents never forgave. A diplomat and foreign-ministry official from 1969, he became foreign minister of the reform government in May 1989, and on 27 June of that year, with his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock, he cut through the barbed wire of the border at Sopron with a pair of shears before the cameras of the world; in September he opened the border to the East German refugees crowding the Hungarian camps, tens of thousands of whom crossed to the West — the breach in the Iron Curtain that led, two months later, to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Recognition
He received the Charlemagne Prize for it in 1990, rebuilt the successor of the communist party into the Hungarian Socialist Party, and led it to victory in 1994; as prime minister until 1998 he imposed the austerity that stabilized the economy and took Hungary toward NATO and the European Union. He died in Budapest on 19 June 2013.
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Source: https://mazsihisz.hu/mai-szuletesnapos-horn-gyula-egy-zsido-munkasfiu-es-miniszterelnok-es-meg-egy-meglepetes/
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Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain in 1989 and let the East Germans through, later prime minister — grandson of Salamon Horn and Róza Blau
Source: https://mazsihisz.hu/mai-szuletesnapos-horn-gyula-egy-zsido-munkasfiu-es-miniszterelnok-es-meg-egy-meglepetes/
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