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Papers by Richard Esbenshade
Hungarian studies review, Nov 1, 2021
It is easy in today's Hungary to live blissfully unaware of the long history of German Hungarian ... more It is easy in today's Hungary to live blissfully unaware of the long history of German Hungarian presence and culture in the country. The relative invisibility of German Hungarians and their past is replicated in their almost complete absence in English-language literature, except for some treatment in the context of postwar expulsions. John Swanson's award-winning study 1 not only redresses this lacuna but also constitutes a major intervention into debates on minority issues, nationalism, and identity both in theory and across other geographical contexts. In his opening lines, Swanson states that his purpose is "to question the notion that Germans are Germans. " Such easy categorizations, he argues, "ignore the temporality of historical knowledge" (ix). His subsequent use of the term in quotation marks, at least in introducing his position, parallels the rendering of the term "the Jew" by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and, subsequently, many others. This allows Swanson to escape "the nationalist assumption that 'Germans' and similar groups are homogenous, bounded, and clearly distinguishable from other such groups" (5). He sees them instead not as "an actual group" but rather as "a representation of arenas teeming with competing interests" (8). Groups, he notes, "are variables, not constants" (9). Swanson develops his theoretical orientation with reference to many of the leading lights of nationalism studies, relying especially on Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" and Rogers Brubaker's "triadic nexus, " and building on Tara Zahra's notion of "national indifference, " though going beyond the dichotomy the latter implies. While this resistance to definition remains in tension throughout his study, it opens up a new and productive orientation that allows his unique method to flower. That method is as much as possible ethnographic and is based to a great extent on extended in-depth interviews with subjects in Hungary and Germany who recount their family histories and details of everyday life in their youth and in family lore. Supplemented by published and unpublished local (village) histories, interwar ethnographies, church logbooks, and other local archival documents, these ethnographic sources make possible what Brubaker would call a "cognitive approach. " At the same time, Swanson
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2019
THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in... more THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in Hungary in particular, extending from the end of the Second World War until the Eichmann trial, has recently been challenged.1 The return or emergence from hiding of survivors quickly led to an explosion of Holocaust literature. Before the communist takeover, in the midst of difficult material and turbulent political conditions, Jenő Lévai and others published collections of documents;...
Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 31
THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in... more THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in Hungary in particular, extending from the end of the Second World War until the Eichmann trial, has recently been challenged.1 The return or emergence from hiding of survivors quickly led to an explosion of Holocaust literature. Before the communist takeover, in the midst of difficult material and turbulent political conditions, Jenő Lévai and others published collections of documents;...
Representations, 1995
... The connections between national identity, national narrative, and individual memory have bee... more ... The connections between national identity, national narrative, and individual memory have been much explored of late, for a wide range of national settings and historical periods.'0 In the totalitarian experience of postwar East-Central Europe, the imperative of presenting ...
Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2015
This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II... more This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II Hungary to uncover their connection to underlying “symbolic geographies” and “mental maps.” Focusing on the way in which Hungarian identity and history have been informed by, and indeed inserted into, virtual spatial rubrics that rely on the historically developed cultural concepts of “Europe” and “Asia,” and “West” and “East,” the paper looks in particular at the “populist-urbanist debate” that raged between two groups of writers, both opposed to the ruling neo-feudal order. The populists were composed mostly of provincial-born intellectuals who saw the recognition and uplift of the peasant as the key to Hungary’s salvation. The urbanists were cosmopolitan intellectuals, mostly of assimilated Jewish origin, who saw the wholesale adoption of progressive Western rights and norms as the only way forward.
Hungarian studies review, Nov 1, 2021
It is easy in today's Hungary to live blissfully unaware of the long history of German Hungarian ... more It is easy in today's Hungary to live blissfully unaware of the long history of German Hungarian presence and culture in the country. The relative invisibility of German Hungarians and their past is replicated in their almost complete absence in English-language literature, except for some treatment in the context of postwar expulsions. John Swanson's award-winning study 1 not only redresses this lacuna but also constitutes a major intervention into debates on minority issues, nationalism, and identity both in theory and across other geographical contexts. In his opening lines, Swanson states that his purpose is "to question the notion that Germans are Germans. " Such easy categorizations, he argues, "ignore the temporality of historical knowledge" (ix). His subsequent use of the term in quotation marks, at least in introducing his position, parallels the rendering of the term "the Jew" by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and, subsequently, many others. This allows Swanson to escape "the nationalist assumption that 'Germans' and similar groups are homogenous, bounded, and clearly distinguishable from other such groups" (5). He sees them instead not as "an actual group" but rather as "a representation of arenas teeming with competing interests" (8). Groups, he notes, "are variables, not constants" (9). Swanson develops his theoretical orientation with reference to many of the leading lights of nationalism studies, relying especially on Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" and Rogers Brubaker's "triadic nexus, " and building on Tara Zahra's notion of "national indifference, " though going beyond the dichotomy the latter implies. While this resistance to definition remains in tension throughout his study, it opens up a new and productive orientation that allows his unique method to flower. That method is as much as possible ethnographic and is based to a great extent on extended in-depth interviews with subjects in Hungary and Germany who recount their family histories and details of everyday life in their youth and in family lore. Supplemented by published and unpublished local (village) histories, interwar ethnographies, church logbooks, and other local archival documents, these ethnographic sources make possible what Brubaker would call a "cognitive approach. " At the same time, Swanson
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2019
THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in... more THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in Hungary in particular, extending from the end of the Second World War until the Eichmann trial, has recently been challenged.1 The return or emergence from hiding of survivors quickly led to an explosion of Holocaust literature. Before the communist takeover, in the midst of difficult material and turbulent political conditions, Jenő Lévai and others published collections of documents;...
Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 31
THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in... more THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in Hungary in particular, extending from the end of the Second World War until the Eichmann trial, has recently been challenged.1 The return or emergence from hiding of survivors quickly led to an explosion of Holocaust literature. Before the communist takeover, in the midst of difficult material and turbulent political conditions, Jenő Lévai and others published collections of documents;...
Representations, 1995
... The connections between national identity, national narrative, and individual memory have bee... more ... The connections between national identity, national narrative, and individual memory have been much explored of late, for a wide range of national settings and historical periods.'0 In the totalitarian experience of postwar East-Central Europe, the imperative of presenting ...
Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2015
This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II... more This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II Hungary to uncover their connection to underlying “symbolic geographies” and “mental maps.” Focusing on the way in which Hungarian identity and history have been informed by, and indeed inserted into, virtual spatial rubrics that rely on the historically developed cultural concepts of “Europe” and “Asia,” and “West” and “East,” the paper looks in particular at the “populist-urbanist debate” that raged between two groups of writers, both opposed to the ruling neo-feudal order. The populists were composed mostly of provincial-born intellectuals who saw the recognition and uplift of the peasant as the key to Hungary’s salvation. The urbanists were cosmopolitan intellectuals, mostly of assimilated Jewish origin, who saw the wholesale adoption of progressive Western rights and norms as the only way forward.