ETHNIC AND CLASS IDENTITY FORMATION WITHIN THE GERMANS OF HUNGARY (original) (raw)
Ethnographica et Folkloristica Carpathica, 2020
In my study, I focus on the events that took place in the short period after the Great War ended (1918) and before the consolidation of Romanian power in the Hungarian-Romanian Border Commission (1922) from the point of view of the artificially created ethnic category: the Satu Mare Swabians or Sathmar Swabians. The historiography related to the "ethnographic" aspects of these events has appeared multiple times and in several contexts and forms in the years since. However, the question of ethnicity has not arisen in relation to the population of German descent, but rather in relation to the Hungarian-speaking Greek Catholic communities of Romanian and Rusyn/Ruthenian origin who were treated by the Romanian side as Magyarized Romanians. Following this example, the Romanians later began to collect data on the Magyarized Germans, which they then presented to the Border Commission. Germans living in the territory witnessed a strong competition between identity politics and discourse supported by rival Hungarian and Romanian states. One of the key features of this rivalry was the intensive propaganda activity promoted by both the Romanian and the Hungarian authorities to gain territories to the detriment of the other.
Ethnographica et Folkloristica Carpathica
In my study, I focus on the events that took place in the short period after the Great War ended (1918) and before the consolidation of Romanian power in the Hungarian-Romanian Border Commission (1922) from the point of view of the artificially created ethnic category: the Satu Mare Swabians or Sathmar Swabians. The historiography related to the “ethnographic” aspects of these events have appeared multiple times and in several contexts and forms in the years since. However, the question of ethnicity has not arisen in relation to the population of German descent, but rather in relation to the Hungarian-speaking Greek Catholic communities of Romanian and Rusyn/Ruthenian origin who were treated by the Romanian side as Magyarized Romanians. Following this example, the Romanians later began to collect data on the Magyarized Germans, which they then presented to the Border Commission. Germans living in the territory witnessed a strong competition between identity politics and discourse su...
Transformations of the ethnic structure in Hungary after the turn of the millennium
The paper studies the changes concerning the ethnic structure of post-socialist Hungary. Based on the data of the 2011 census, the number of the non-Hungarian population has signicantly increased between 2001 and 2011 and so has had the number of those who refused to answer. Behind this phenomenon several reasons can be identied, like the methodical changes in the data collection of the census, migration and subjective factors. Regarding the methodology, double identication in three ethnic categories was allowed in the last census, which resulted in the growing number of respondents who claimed both Hungarian and minority identity. Meanwhile, migration (including cross-border residential mobility) from Romania, Ukraine, Serbia and Slovakia has changed the ethnic landscape. Beyond the above factors, subjective factors have also contributed in the changes. The present paper argues that the self-identication of some minority groups is related to the symbolic ethnicity and the double and hybrid identities, thus the results of the census cannot be interpreted merely by the assimilationist approach.
2021
Research Questions and Methodological Approaches in the Literature on the History of the German Minority in Hungary between 1945 and 1955 In my study, I summarise the content issues, methodological approaches and the most important results from historical literature dealing with the history of the German minority in Hungary during the decade after World War II. It can be said that the historical research on the expulsion of Germans from Hungary up to 1990 was characterised by a positivist, descriptive and event-centric approach. The research questions were organised and based on the terms of the Potsdam Agreement in relation to Hungary. In connection with both the content and methodological issues, I touch upon missing aspects and more complex possible research approaches.
Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2021
In the Carpathian Basin, German-speaking peoples have lived alongside Hungarians for hundreds of years, resulting in many, shared points of cultural intermingling. (Although commonly referred to as svábok ['Swabians'], this is not the correct term for Hungary's German minorities since their origins differ from those of Swabians living in Germany today). After World War II, thousands of Hungarian Germans were deported to Germany. Those who remained could not use their native language and dialect in public. Today, young generations reconnect with their German roots in statefunded, national minority schools where, through the medium of Hochdeutsch, students are familiarized with their Hungarian German dialect, history and traditions in a subject called népismeret ['folk education']. Since families cannot always provide a sense of Hungarian German identity, teachers have to enrich their students' connection while deepening their awareness of the many ways in which ethnic Germans have contributed to Hungarian history and culture. This paper provides a brief overview of the current legal documents and rulings that determine the curriculum in Hungary's national minority schools before detailing the topics studied in a Hungarian German folk education class. We contend that the overwhelming losses in cultural heritage that resulted from assimilation must be reversed in a process that simultaneously respects their unique, dual identity. To this end, we recommend adapting the curriculum of folk education to include an alternative, more inclusive perspective of famous, "Hungarian" individuals.
Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–45
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to "purify" their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as R. Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests. Davis's highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Moldavian Csangos, a Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking community of Roman Catholics in eastern Romania. During World War II, some in the Romanian government wanted to expel them. The Hungarian government saw them as Hungarians and wanted to settle them on lands confiscated from other groups. Resisting deportation, the clergy of the Csangos enlisted Romania's leading racial anthropologist, collected blood samples, and rewrote a millennium of history to claim Romanian origins and national belonging—thus escaping the discrimination and violence that devastated so many of Europe's Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. In telling their story, Davis offers fresh insight to debates about ethnic allegiances, the roles of science and religion in shaping identity, and minority politics past and present. Praise “An authoritative examination of nation building and minority politics during some of Europe's most difficult years. Davis brings together so many significant historical themes that the story of these few villages makes us rethink modern European history.” —Roland Clark, author of Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania “This transnational case study makes larger, comprehensive arguments about Central and Eastern European nation building. It powerfully employs theory from history, anthropology, political science, and sociology to disentangle the conundrum of identity.” —Calin Cotoi, University of Bucharest “A remarkable combination of microhistorical richness and interpretive acumen, this is a beautifully written study of one of the 'little peoples lost to history,' caught between more powerful states' self-interested attempts to dictate their identity. It prises open the deceptively simple question 'who do you think you are?' to reveal startling contests over the meaning of identity in politics, language, and lived reality.” —Jane Caplan, University of Oxford “Introduces fundamental questions of identity and belonging, asking us to consider the importance of language, religion, territory—and, no less, tradition and bias—as both building blocks and obstacles to ethnic community. An indispensable contribution to the investigation of modern nationhood.” —Keith Hitchins, University of Illinois “A major contribution to debate on the meaning of collective identity and its deployment for political ends. Eloquent, original, sophisticated, and persuasive.” —Dennis Deletant, Georgetown University
John C. Swanson. Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary
Hungarian studies review, 2021
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
Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in Eighteenth-Century Hungary
Austrian History Yearbook, 2003
ARADOX AND CONTRADICTION often characterized the formation and evolution of national identity in the Hungarian Kingdom. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, an explosion occurred in efforts to recover supposedly ancient "ethnic" memory as historians, linguists, and archeologists produced one great breakthrough after another, revolutionizing their conceptions of the past. At the same time, an equally strong forgetting of the complex multicultural and multiethnic reality of the region also transpired. 1 The parallel processes of recovering and forgetting intensified after the end of World War I. By the 1930s and 1940s, Slovak historians had reconstructed their history on the foundations of the Great Moravian Empire, Romanian textbooks became dominated by the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, and Hungarian historical narratives were almost exclusively concerned with the history of the Magyars. While historians did occasionally write books that were not biased in favor of their respective ethnic-national groups, they remained marginalized and, most importantly, the mass of students learning history at the middle, high school, and university levels were only superficially introduced to the role other ethnic groups played in their history.