This paper provides an account of the author’s family history in the context of her microhistorical research into the lives of her mostly peasant ancestors living in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Szentes, a small agricultural town in the middle of the Great Hungarian Plain. After becoming a recognized branch of historical research, in the past decade microhistory has made its way into genealogical research, offering an approach and methodology that allows for the piecing together of information about ancestors even when detailed accounts or documents are missing – either because they were lost or because they never existed in the first place. Such microhistories then offer insight into and provide important details for local social history, results that take family history work well beyond the personal scope.
The deportation memoir of Biri mama (Irén Reményi) is the third publication byTamás Kieselbach, of a book series he created, Sorsfordulók: a 20. századi Magyarország drámai pillantai [‘Turns of Fate: The Dramatic Moments of Twentieth-Century Hungary’], in which his aim was to illustrate the four historical turning points of the twentieth century: 1919-1920, the Holocaust, 1956, and 1989. My interest in studying Reményi's work is, first, and most briefly, to locate its role in the Kieselbach series. Second, I want to to provide the memoir with richer context, specifically with the aid of later documentation discussing Bergen-Belsen, the Ungarnlager, and the Celle DP camp. Third, I have aimed to create a kind of narrative reconstruction from fragments that I have been able to unearth of her family history to offer a deeper understanding of her family's complex private history as a microhistory that becomes part of macro or public history in the first half of the tortured twentieth century history of Hungary.
This article is the second part of a study investigating how Hungarians have influenced early childhood music education in the United States. In Part One, Chong documented the lesser-known histories of four Hungarian and American female scholar-educators who promoted the early childhood concepts at the heart of Zoltán Kodály's approach to music education. In this study, she traces Kodály’s footprints to private, stand-alone baby-toddler music classes in the US. In the 2000’s, baby-toddler music enrichment exploded in popularity as the children’s activity industry became one of the fastest growing sectors of the US market. Only a handful of local programs are explicitly Kodály-based, such as Sing, Play, Move!, at Holy Names University’s Kodály Center. Chong’s search in the Los Angeles area for quality Kodály instruction for her toddlers led to highly lucrative major US providers of baby-toddler music such as Music Together and Kindermusik. These programs share Kodály pedagogical practices, such as that of singing folk music in the children’s mother tongue, but map histories without reference to Hungary and attribute their approaches to American men not known as Kodály protégés. This paper explores whether the impressive profits and musical excellence of these programs can rightly be attributed to Kodály.
Embedded in culture historical research on color, the present study contributes to the hypothesis that a given color only obtains its cultural or symbolical meanings in association with another color. By analyzing Hungarian examples of the color yellow, I will demonstrate that a color may have associations of a different character in relation to another color: this association may rely on symbolism alone, as seen in the relationship between yellow and black in connection with the concept of impurity tied to bile, excrement and dirty soil. Connections between colors may also be based on sensory-psychological/cognitive similarities, such as those drawn between yellow and green in earlier times across Europe, an association that can be traced in some archaic elements of Hungarian culture, such as in the ideas connected to jaundice. In addition to this argument, I also propose that, out of excreta, compared to feces light yellow urine is closer to the category of white associated with purity (through the analogy of white wine) than to yellow which (also) symbolizes impurity.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Khazar ancestry of European Jewry was a popular idea that particularly resonated throughout the discourse surrounding Hungary’s national origin and belonging. One of this discourse’s critical questions concerned whether Magyars and Jews were divided or united by ethnicity or religion: this paper demonstrates how Samuel Kohn (1841-1920), an important rabbi-scholar of the time, participated in this discussion by arguing for a common origin of the two groups. Kohn asserted that the Khazar ancestry of Hungarian Jews comprises both an ethnic and a religious connection. He considered two complementary questions: whether Hungarians and Jews possessed common ethnic origins and thereby belonged to the same race, and whether Magyars converted to Judaism during the Khazar era, i.e., the belief that Hungarians and Jews shared a common religion in the past. The contemporary political atmosphere magnified the significance of Kohn’s contribution.
The article contextualizes the oral life stories of three Hungarian-speaking women and their connections to the national histories of East-Central Europe. Through these three life narratives, I argue that in reconstructing their own life stories, the women articulate historical change. The women – born in the 1920s in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and coming of age in a socialist Eastern bloc as citizens of different nation-states – make up a generation as well as a mnemonic community with divergent versions of their community’s past. They talk about childhood in the interwar era, their maturation during the Second World War, their married life and work during the early years of socialism and their retirement years after 1989. In so doing, they give shape to starkly different family histories and personal experiences which inform not only their political sensibilities, but also their sense of womanhood, ethnicity, social standing and assessments of the past. While placing themselves into a sequence of events, they maintain their sense of integrity and construct political subjectivities. Their stories are imprints of a deeply divided collective memory of a generation bearing all the complexities that make women’s history different from the mainstream historiographical canon.
Although only a decade in age separates each one from the next, the women whose life stories are discussed here represent three distinct Holocaust generations of Hungarian-speaking women. I aim to examine the recently published memories/memoirs of these three women whose narratives are all centered in the Holocaust when the deportations began in Hungary in 1944. Their personal stories are placed within a larger socio-historical context, but treat matters which come within the personal knowledge of the writer and therefore offer precisely the kind of alternative micro-history often provided by women’s narratives. All three authors also have in common that they left their homeland as young adults and hence their stories arguably belong more broadly to the most important subgenre of life writing today. While such writing is produced by both genders, writing by females predominates. My aim is, in part, to examine in the texts under discussion the three autobiographers as self-historians in their retrospective and crafted stories told (and retold) in different contexts, so that their life stories are not merely a recapitulation of past events but rather their creation of personal narrative identities.
The population of Austria-Hungary was counted five times between 1869 and 1910. This process of counting established a new relationship between the state and its citizens. The state procured vast knowledge about its citizens, and the latter became accustomed to contact on a regular basis with state authorities and administrative practices. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the state and its citizens knew more of each other than ever before. This article scrutinizes the administrative translation of reality into discourse and the effects this had on the two parties involved.
In Central Europe nowadays universities, research institutes or museums are attempting to reconfigure the region's complex history from the perspectives of formerly forgotten or marginal/ized individuals and groups. Besides initiatives such as the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, or of the Center for Queer Memory in Prague, new studies and literary works presently (re-)create narratives that challenge the generally accepted past. Two recently published Hungarian books, a novel and a study that partly deals with the novel, exemplify this revisionist tendency. Ildikó Lovas’ novel, Spanyol Menyasszony ['The Spanish Bride'] (2007), which questions the cult of Géza Csáth (1887-1919), the writer and psychoanalyst who was also a drug addict that murdered his wife, renders the fictional diary of Csáth's wife and victim, Olga Jonás (1884-1919); Anna Borgos’ study, Nemek között: Nőtörténet, szexualitástörténet ['Between the Sexes: Women’s History, Sexuality History'] (2013), examines the Csáth affair within an inclusive analysis of women’s positions, roles and sexuality in the Hungarian culture of the last century. In this article Chmurski traces the ways in which both authors reread the lives and tragic marriage of Csáth and Jonás.
The attempt of the Hungarian political elite to form an alliance with the Ottomans after the disastrous Vasvár Treaty (1664) remains one of the least researched topics of Hungarian and Habsburg history. This paper examines the little known attempt of Prince Mihály Apafi, the Ottoman appointed ruler of Transylvania, to intercede on behalf of the Hungarian nobility with Grand Vezir Ahmed Köprülü (1661-1676), the de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire. The carefully crafted instructions issued to Apafi’s secret emissary, the Turkish-speaking Dávid Rozsnyai, and Rozsnyai’s detailed report about his encounters with Köprülü and top ranking Ottoman powerbrokers, provide unprecedented insights into the nature of Hungarian contacts with the Porta and reveal the deeply engrained conviction of many Hungarian nobles—both Catholics and Protestants—that becoming the sultan’s vassals was the only way to guarantee the survival of an independent Hungarian Kingdom.
This paper presents trends in today’s Shakespeare translation in Hungary based on interviews with Hungarian translators and scholars. Instead of a collection of names and dates of translators and translations, it focuses on the organic development of Hungarian Shakespeare translation, which has been going on for more than two hundred years, and tries to fit new developments into the tradition of translating Shakespeare in a theoretical framework. “Hungarian Shakespeare,” now seen as a broad collection of Hungarian translations and adaptations, lives on, is kept alive in theaters, but it is undergoing a process of simplification. It was very hard work to do away with the forced prudishness and mannerism of the nineteenth century Shakespeare translations. After World War II, during the dominance of Communist culture, it was not allowed for several translations of Shakespeare to co-exist, so a politically appointed committee was set up to decide which one fit into the official canon. Only the selected texts could be printed and used in performances. After the political changes in Hungary in 1989, there was an upsurge of interest in Shakespeare, and since the 1990s there has been an unprecedented plurality of Shakespeare translations. I aim to examine the processes that led to the development of today’s easy-to-understand and naturalistic translations, and to the abandonment of century-old classical ones.
Berglund, Bruce R. and Brian Porter-Szűcs, eds. 2013. Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. 386 pp.
Reviewed by Dorottya Nagy, University of South Africa, Helsinki, Finland.
The sixteenth-century migrations of Anabaptist communities within Europe, particularly Tyrol, becomes an important literary theme for the Austrian novelist Maria Veronika Rubatscher who draws parallels between the relocated fellowship and the German-speaking minority in Italy after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Discussing the portrait of Tyrolean Anabaptism in her novel Das Lutherische Joggele, this paper shows how the author utilizes the movement’s history as a means of expressing her nationalistic identity.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia