By conservative estimate, this university has by now trained and retrained well over 3,000 teachers of English, with most of them still active in the Hungarian school system, the diplomatic service, publishing companies, libraries, in the civil service, for NGOs, in the private sector, and with multinational firms - and quite a few of them abroad. In view of its decisive and steadily growing national impact it might surprise some that Hungary’s second university English department was launched relatively late (about five decades after the English Institute in Budapest was established), just a couple of years before the country, and later the university itself, was thrown into the turmoil of World War Two.
During the first two decades of its existence, the activities of the English Department in Debrecen were repeatedly frustrated by war events, ill-conceived political decisions, existential threats, and an inadequate infrastructure. Indeed, during this period, not only did the Department come into existence with very meagre resources at the outset but, through the repeated intrusions of history and politics into the academic sphere, it was soon to rise from its ashes on two subsequent occasions.
It was in the fall semester of the 1938-1939 academic year that the English teacher training program was launched at the University of Debrecen with eight first-year students and a very small teaching staff: Sándor Fest, head of the new department had only one, later two instructors, to help him in his work. Within less than 66 months, academic life ground to a halt in the Department when in the spring of 1944 the German occupying forces set up one of their military headquarters in the main building of the University (with the premises of the English Department on the ground floor turned into stables to accommodate dozens of artillery horses of the invading German army). Another blow during the same year was the tragic death of Professor Fest caused by an exploding bomb during a German air raid of the Hungarian capital on December 30.