Carl Lutz in Budapest

Fortepan presents a special edition of its collection. After several months of consultation, thanks to the Archives of Contemporary History in Zurich and Agnes Hirschi, a collection of 230 photograph made by Carl Lutz in Budapest will be available on the website within days. The Swiss diplomat, who saved the lives of more than 60,000 (!) Jews in Budapest, arrived in Hungary in 1942 as an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

His photos document both the bourgeois Budapest of the last years of peace and the life of a capital city gone mad. The main subjects of Carl Lutz’s photographs are his immediate surroundings, the Buda Castle, the Tabán, the Liberty Square and the banks of the Danube. They include the staff of the Swiss consulate, the persecuted, as well as Lutz himself, who for decades was hardly known not only in Hungary but also in Switzerland. An elegant, somewhat dry-looking bureaucrat who, as we now know, retained his clarity of vision, moral fiber, and incredible courage.
We present this extraordinary legacy with a talk by historian Krisztián Ungváry.

The projected image presentation is free of charge, entry is on a first-come, first-served basis.
The program is in Hungarian.