The review “Clés” having ceased its activity and closed its website, we reproduce here its article “Gitta Mallasz, the baroudeuse des anges” written by Patrice Van Eersel.

Was she a simple "scribe", as she called herself, or a spiritual master? Today, her former "students" are divided on the subject - some feeling attached first and foremost to the book, others to the person. One thing is certain: the former Austro-Hungarian swimmer, rough, funny and bursting with energy, was the catalyst for an extraordinary experience, which led - on the brink of the Shoah - to a staggering lesson in joy. A lesson that answers exactly the questions of today.

Without Gitta, the Dialogs would certainly not have happened. "She who shines", as the "voice of her angel" described her, was one of the two poles of an extraordinarily powerful arc. The other pole, "the one who measures", also a woman, from whose mouth came the famous Dialogues, was her friend Hanna Dallos. She was the complete opposite: gentle and patient, with a fine intelligence and a great culture. Gitta provided the animal energy. Hanna gave it shape. There was no opposition, just a formidable love match. In the teaching that eventually emerged from their mutual questioning, energy and form, matter and light, body and spirit were constantly described as "in love with each other", with the human being constituting the key to their encounter, the key to the entire cosmos!

But for those unfamiliar with this sublime and tragic story, we need to set the scene. It's a story that many of our friends and family will have the chance to learn about, retrospectively, after Gitta Mallasz fled Communist Hungary and took refuge in France in 1960, where she remained until her death in 1992.

Explosion of meaning in full modernity

The story begins in imperial Austria-Hungary. The daughter of a Magyar general and his Austrian wife, Gitta Mallasz was a three-headed devil from Slovenia who soon became the talk of the country. Hungarians love swimming and the young girl is a champion - in the pool and in the Danube. She's also a clown - she'll always have a taste for jokes that'll make you laugh out loud (her hosts of the last few years, Bernard and Patricia Montaud, know something about that). Finally, she was a formidable lover, whose fiancés fell one after the other, without her caring much. When she meets Hanna Dallos, on the benches of the Beaux Arts, everything opposes them. The daughter of refined, gentle Jewish schoolteachers, Hanna is rather fragile. But she also has a great sense of humour, and Gitta amuses her enormously. Against all odds, they become friends - after Hanna's marriage to the cabinetmaker Joseph Kreutzer.

At the time, Budapest was a very prominent modern city. Our young people work in a design, graphic art and advertising studio run by Joseph and Hanna. Over the years, their fascination is reversed. Gitta is madly in admiration of Hanna, who is more mature than she is and acts as an artistic, intellectual and spiritual guide to her colleagues and apprentices. With her eclectic culture, Hanna engages them in passionate discussions. A small group is formed, including Lili Strauß, a young woman known for her gentleness and her ability to teach an avant-garde method of body re-education derived from yoga in Hungary...
But times are getting darker. Anti-Semitic ideology invaded everything. Hanna, Joseph and several of their colleagues could no longer work. As the daughter of an anti-Bolshevik general (who had crushed Bela Kun's revolution in 1919), Gitta was able to "cover" for them and place orders for them. The little group continues their conversations in secret. Although Hanna, Joseph and Lili were born Jewish and Gitta Catholic, none of them identified with any particular religion. Ahead of their time, however, they are interested in all spiritual traditions, both Western and Eastern. Much of the conversation revolves around lies, "far more serious than violence". On many points, Hanna was influenced by the Eastern explorers of "non-duality", who told her that "body and spirit are one" and that "evil is only immature good". But the religions of the Book are also very present. Question: if the Word creates the world (an omnipresent Judeo-Christian theme, from Genesis to the Apocalypse of Saint John), isn't the real sin to betray him, in other words to lie? But what else do the world's leaders do, and not just the totalitarians? At this stage, Gitta is just another pupil, listening to Hanna; if she surpasses her classmates, it's mainly in the giddy, zealous, mad-dog genre.

War broke out and the atmosphere became leaden. Like all the Hungarian nobility, the dictator Horthy had no love for the Nazi Germans. If he collaborated with them, it was from a distance, in the manner of Spain's Franco or Portugal's Salazar. Although anti-Semitic, he refused to hand over "his" Jews, who made up the bulk of Budapest's bourgeoisie and its economy. Almost to the end, the Nazis, too busy elsewhere, tolerated this independence... As a result, for 750,000 Jews, Hungary became a balcony to hell. A pressure cooker. All the surrounding countries were being deported in droves... and not here? Fifty years later, having lived through the war in the Pest ghetto, Maria Torok, a Hungarian Jew who became a psychoanalyst in France, said that, in this highly charged atmosphere, a number of phenomena similar to the ones that occurred in the Pest ghetto were taking place. Dialogues with the angel have literally "exploded". So what is it all about?

The mystery of creative inspiration

The small group eventually took refuge in Budaliget, a suburb on the heights of Buda. It was there, on Friday 25 June 1943, at 3pm, while Hanna and Gitta were talking alone, that an event occurred that catapulted them to a new level of consciousness. Unbeknownst to them, Hanna suddenly changes her tone and tells Gitta: "Careful, it's not me talking any more", before launching into an extremely beautiful - and severe - speech to her friend. Gitta was instantly crushed. Her "guide" tells her: "We're going to get you out of the habit of asking pointless questions! The tone was set. From then on, for seventeen months, this phenomenon would be repeated a hundred times, every Friday at 3 p.m. - eighty-eight of these "Dialogues" would be written down in notebooks with black moleskin covers that would become famous... thirty-three years later.
From the very first interview, it's a very high level of teaching that comes through, in a sumptuous, lapidary and sharp Hungarian (that translators will have great difficulty in rendering, as with all strong poetry).

Lili soon joined her two friends - and her guide's voice was infinitely gentle. Joseph, sceptical by nature, took several weeks before following suit - his guide proving to be almost as mute as he was. In the end, the four of them - using the square structure as an 'antenna'? - that they received the very striking messages from their "guides" (the word "angel" didn't come until much later). Each time, it's Hanna who speaks, while Gitta and Lili take it in turns to record the voice's response to the other's questions. Beware: no automatic speech, no trance - "You absolutely must understand that it was all perfectly na-tu-rel!" Gitta would keep telling us, once exiled in France, in the strong Austro-Hungarian accent she would never lose. No channeling, no mediumship! Although...

What's the difference between the inspiration of a Mozart, who confessed to receiving his music "under the dictation of angels", and that of a medium uttering, asleep, words from who knows what unconscious mind? When asked about this, the theologian, philosopher and psychotherapist Jean-Yves Leloup has no hesitation in saying that, with the exception of cheats, 'inspirations' do not differ in kind, but in degree of consciousness, the sleeping channel representing, as it were, level zero, and the great prophet - say Moses - the other end of the same transpersonal scale (the artist differing greatly from the prophet in that he retains a generally enormous ego). Hanna, when she speaks, is 'transparent' and yet more awake than ever, so 'in form' that she utters words that surprise even herself! Which ones, for example?

A radical aesthetic manifesto

The Dialogues with the Angel bring together a very rich content, of which we can only give a brief overview here. The "guides" of the four friends (He who measures, He who radiates, He who helps and He who builds) present themselves as their "creative halves", forever linked to them - they whose consciences, still prisoners of the dream, believe reduced to their “created halves”, both “animal” and “mental”, two states subject to time and therefore destined to disappear with the death of the body. Never, however, is the body despised, quite the contrary. Crazy love, say the invisible messengers, draws light and matter together. It is a pressing call to incarnation: "Weight is the way", says the interview of October 1, 1943. But participation in gravity can only be done in joy: to fulfill one's destiny, the human must weigh happily! We are far from astral travel. Also far from pain. Suffering is useful only to the animal, to whom it serves as a compass. No deadly abstinence: sexuality, for example, is seen as a higher gateway to create “man”, and not to make “many men”. The divine (designated in Hungarian by the untranslatable pronoun "Ö", neither masculine, nor feminine, nor neutral) realizes Himself in a gush in permanent innovation, of which each human can become an actor on condition of daring to hoist his life and its questions at the height of this "radical aesthetic manifesto", as Michel Cressole will write inRelease, July 5, 1990. The “guides” insist particularly on this “eternally new” aspect of the divine force, of which they say themselves the humble messengers, taken inside an angelic hierarchy which is reminiscent of the Jewish Kabbalah.

Dancing for joy in the Holocaust!?!

Feeling their inevitable defeat, the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944. In just a few weeks, they deported 95 {124e548c0c036308b7597490134b369ee48a128e5dff1c887b141ac081cfaf96} of the Jewish community, hitherto spared and now thrown straight into the ovens! It was then that, ceasing to be a simple assistant or flabbergasted catalyst, Gitta Mallasz became an actor in the "experiment" that the angels said they were "attempting" on the four friends.

Pushed by an exceptional Catholic intelligentsia, the general's daughter first agrees to take the lead of a "war factory" manufacturing uniforms and serving, as in Schindler's List, to hide Jewish women hastily transformed in seamstresses. But if a hundred of them will be saved (with their children), Hanna and Lili, they will choose to die deported (Joseph precedes them there). Until the last drop of energy, bending but not breaking, they will continue to give substance to the most incredible and insolent of messages. The war ? An old reflex, a habit, a routine, a mortal boredom… – all the signs of the “Liar”. The true Peace, the men do not know it yet: it is the dance of the marriage of the Earth and the Sky, and this one passes by the Human, conscious of its creative part and thus immortal! Until the end, in the "commander's hut" of the war factory, and even then in Ravensbrück, supported by Lili and two other women (including Eva Dànos who will survive and testify), Hanna and Lili, despite being transfixed of sadness, will welcome the invitation to "dance the outline of the new world" and to pass it on to the deportees, transformed into walking corpses, but smiling one last time and not believing their ears.

Carry the message to the whole world

It is alone that Gitta Mallasz will live the other half of the epic. Having succeeded in becoming the decorator of the National Ballets of Communist Hungary (despite her father, an anti-Bolshevik general!), she will travel all over the world, waiting for her parents to die to seek political asylum in France. A long ascent will then begin, busy surviving (by designing album covers), then translating the contents of the notebooks that she has miraculously managed to preserve. With the help of Laci Walder, a Hungarian refugee, married in a sham marriage, but who became her real (and only) husband, and a few friends (including Françoise Maupin and Marguerite Kardos), Gitta Mallasz took fifteen years to come up with a text publishable French. It is Dominique Raoul Duval, editor at Aubier, who will find the title Talking with Angels (Gitta had titled: The 4 Messengers ). As for the promotion, it will be ensured by three radio men, captivated by the ardor of this unclassifiable Hungarian: Claude Mettra, of France Culture, and Jacques Chancel, of France Inter – the latter, will begin his “Radioscopy” of Gitta very skeptical and will turn around in amazement, during the broadcast, after Gitta, inspired, has made him read the passage on the smile on the air...

In a few years, the Dialogs will be translated all over the world, under the ultra-careful supervision of Gitta Mallasz who, with the help of Robert Hinshaw, publisher of the Jung Foundation, will succeed in having several translations sponsored by great minds, often musicians, for example Narciso Yepes and Yehudi Menuhin . Categorically refusing to become a guru and very explicitly forbidding anyone to set themselves up as an interpreter or an exegete of the Dialogues, Gitta, who had become a widow, was about to end her days in a village in the Dordogne. But fate will decide otherwise...

She was 81 when, driving in the middle of a storm, she crashed her 2CV into another car and broke both arms. Compelled to stop driving, she is happy to accept, on the advice of Marguerite Kardos, the invitation of a warm man who, for several years, has been organizing the conferences that she happens to give: Bernard Montaud. With his wife Patricia, he offers the old adventurer to come and live with them, in the middle of the Côtes du Rhône vineyards.

There will take place a last and astonishing phase of an already busy course. Pressed by her hosts - and by hundreds of readers - to explain, as concretely as possible, how each can contact their "creative half", Gitta Mallasz, finally agrees to teach the simplest way, for each one, to hear the voice of her inner guide (and not that of her delirium!), in an intimate dialogue which she will end up saying is a “natural function” of the human condition.

To read

The White Source, the astonishing story of the dialogues with the angel, Patrice van Eersel, Grasset and Livre de Poche editions.