Borisz de Balla

Borisz de Balla (August 19, 1903 – February 16, 1992), also known as Borisz Balla de Iregh, was a Hungarian journalist, historian, diplomat, author, and educator who taught in the United States after World War II.

Born on August 19, 1903, in Petervarad, Hungary, de Balla attended the University of Pécs, where he received the B.A. (1924) and Ph.D. (1938), as well as Eötvös Loránd University, where he received an M.A. (1932).^[1] His father was a diplomat, serving as the Hungarian ambassador in Zagreb.

De Balla was active in Hungarian Catholic circles, and served as an editor, co-editor, or contributor for several Hungarian Catholic periodicals, including Korunk Szava (Voice of Our Age, editor from 1931-1935), Új Kor (New Era), Jelenkor (Our Age), Nemzeti Újság (National News), and Vigilia (Vigil, editor-in-chief from 1935-1938).^[2] He entered the Hungarian Foreign Service in the Summer of 1939, and served as cultural and press attaché in Brussels and Madrid; as Secretary of Legation in Berne; and then as Hungarian Consul in Paris. He left the diplomatic service in 1946 and remained in Paris for a year, before emigrating to the United States with his wife, the Baroness Melanie de Schwaben-Durneiss.^[3]

In America, de Balla taught History at Loyola College in Maryland from 1947-1948, and then at Le Moyne College, a Jesuit college in Syracuse, New York, from 1948-1958. He then joined the graduate History faculty at St. John's University in 1958, where he specialized in teaching intellectural history and the philosophy of history.^[4] At St. John's, he supervised Thomas Laszlo Szendrey's 1972 doctoral dissertation ("The Ideological and Methodological Foundations of Hungarian Historiography, 1750-1970").^[5]

He was the author of A lélek útjai Nyugaton (1934); A megsebzett (1938); Niczky növendék (1939); Brüsszeli napló: 1939-1940 (1940); Der Verwundete (1947); Niké naplója (1959); and Traditionalist Warnings and the Limits of Progress in History (1967). De Balla contributed essays to Commonweal, Catholic World, Thought Patterns, University Bookman, and to a collected work by St. John's history faculty (Studies in Modern History).

References

1. Directory of American Scholars, 6th ed. (Bowker, 1974), Vol. I, p. 149.
2. Éva Petrás, "A Splendid Return": The Intellectual Reception of the Catholic Social Doctrine in Hungary (1931–1944) (Wesley János Lelkészképző Főiskola, 2011).
3. Borisz de Balla, "History and Beyond: Pages from a Diplomatic Diary, 1939-1946," In Gaetano L. Vincitorio (ed.), Studies in Modern History (St. John's University Press, 1968), 1-90.
4. Directory of American Scholars, 6th ed. (Bowker, 1974), Vol. I, p. 149.
5. Steven Béla Várdy, "The Life and Untimely Death of Professor Thomas Szendrey," American Hungarian Educator, Vol. 26, no. 1-2 (Summer 2003): 1-3; Steven Béla Várdy, "Remembering Professor Thomas Szendrey (1941-2003)," Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. 30, no. 1-2 (2003): 137-140.