At the age of twenty-four József Lukács was branch manager of the English-Austrian Bank in Budapest; he then became director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank, one of the largest banks in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An immensely affluent business magnate, he received noble rank from Emperor Francis Joseph I. József was a generous supporter of the arts and counted among his friends the composer Béla Bartók and the writer Thomas Mann.
Lukács had two brothers and a sister. His elder brother, John, who obtained the degree of doctor of law and later became a director at Machine Factory Láng, died in the Nazi German concentration camp at Mauthausen during World War II. His younger sister, Maria, became a cellist and died in England in 1980. The last-born child, Paul, died at age five.
Lukács was privately tutored until he was nine and then attended the Evangelic Grammar School, from which he graduated in 1902. As a high-school student he was enthusiastic about the modern writers Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, A. C. Swinburne, Leo Tolstoy, and Henrik Ibsen. Lukács tried his skill at belles-lettres, but after his finals he burned the philosophical plays he had written in the style of Ibsen.
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