Leaving Habsburgia Behind: Central Europeans in China and America
Tracing the lives of three individuals who emerged from a vanished Habsburg world and rebuilt their futures in China and America.
Mátyás Mervay, Faculty Fellow, New York University
From the Danube to the Yellow Sea and onward across the Pacific, this lecture traces the lives of three individuals who emerged from a vanished Habsburg world and rebuilt their futures in the charged landscape of wartime China, before some went on to the United States. Linked by the steady, understated work of Shanghai’s Jewish refugee organizer, Paul Komor, the unexpected intersections of László Hudec, a Slovak-Hungarian architect once held as a prisoner of war in Siberia; Mathias Komor, a Budapest-born, New York-based dealer of Asian art; and László Frank, a sharp-tongued Viennese journalist, reveal a distinct Central European imprint on China’s cosmopolitan modernity and on America’s postwar cultural landscape.
This talk is presented as part of the Winter/Spring 2026 Lecture Series, which features a range of scholars with expertise on the art and design of Austria and Germany.
About the Speaker
Mátyás Mervay is a Hungarian historian specializing in China and Central Europe, and is currently a Faculty Fellow at New York University. After graduating in Budapest, he spent five formative years in China learning Mandarin and earning an M.A. in modern Chinese history. In 2017, he moved to the U.S. to pursue doctoral studies at NYU, teaching East Asian history at Princeton and Yeshiva Universities along the way. He earned his Ph.D. in 2024 with a dissertation on China’s Central European refugee and migrant communities. Mervay is the author of two forthcoming books: Postimperial Lives: Habsburg Expatriates and the Making of Sino-East-Central European Relations, 1918-1949 and Paul Komor: A Righteous Hungarian in Wartime Shanghai. A Selection of Diaries and Correspondence.