The United States entered the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, Japanese Americans faced persecution and even imprisonment due to their national heritage. The primary objective of this paper is to highlight that it was not only U.S. citizens of Japanese or German descent, but also Hungarian Americans, who could become targets of American authorities, albeit not to the same severe extent. The wartime atmosphere was so tense that the FBI responded to even the slightest rumors, launching investigations against law-abiding citizens who had no intention of undermining the American war effort. This paper examines the case of one Hungarian immigrant family—the Gondos family—as an illustrative example of how U.S. wartime intelligence targeted American citizens of “enemy alien” descent based solely on unsubstantiated rumors. Analyzing this case offers valuable insight into the experiences of wartime minorities in the United States. Therefore, the findings contribute to the historiography of twentieth-century American history, Hungarian migration history, and the academic field of American Studies.
This article seeks to uncover and understand children's experiences in the confining spaces of the refugee camp in Austria–Hungary during the First World War. This narrative builds primarily on recollections of adults about their younger selves as I draw on a number of available autobiographies, memories, and interviews produced by Italian-speaking refugees who fled Trentino and the Austrian Littoral. I bring these sources together as I seek to explore ways encampment inherently pervaded refugees’ childhood. The article departs from top-down analyses of displacement in Austria–Hungary as it reflects on how refugee children understood their uprootedness and the rapport they developed with the camp as a proposed tool of state-driven care.
The study of literature should not be based only on a one-sided analysis of the text, it should also take account of the perspective of the reader. Considering the connection between literature and recipient, there are structures that influence cognitive perception during reading. Thus the spatial order of the story, dedicated to cognitive poetics, is very important. The article focuses on the literary mechanisms of spatial perception and spatial concepts in narration, especially in the early work of the Austrian poet and novelist Ilse Aichinger.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Before the political shift that occurred in1989, the biographies of early communists who had participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 could not be the subjects of critical histories. Later, such historical actors were either vilified or simply neglected. This article contributes to the reversal of this neglect by examining the youth of the novelist Ervin Sinkó (1898-1967), who both participated in the rule of the Soviet Republic and authored Optimisták, Történelmi regény 1918-1919-ből [‘The Optimists, a Historical Novel About 1918-1919’]. This article describes how the experience of anti-Semitism and traumas caused by the First World War led Sinkó through a number of fluid, intermediary stages that culminated in his support of communism; eventually, however, Sinkó’s experiences within the Soviet Republic’s regime prompted him to abandon communism in favor of an idiosyncratic form of Christianity. From another perspective, this work also traces the concurrent development of Sinkó's personality, from that of an aggressive adolescent to a compassionate adult.
This article provides an introduction to the scholarly career of Sándor Radó (1899-1981), one of the leading Hungarian geographers and cartographers of the 1960s and 1970s. Belonging to a generation of newcomers who took control of every aspect of Hungarian scholarly life in the 1950s after the ousting of the old elite, Radó’s scholarly path was not unique. The complete transformation of Hungarian geography was deeply embedded within this broader process, as its nature, approaches, conduct, and institutional organization was rearranged along Marxist-Leninist ideological lines. A critical examination of Radó’s career and his scientific work, therefore, helps us to understand how Hungarian science functioned during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and provides insight into the practice of career and institution building, and thus reveals the atmosphere within which scientific results were achieved.
As the above title indicates, because of the publication schedule of Hungarian Cultural Studies this bibliography straddles 2015-2016, covering the period since the publication in Fall of 2015 of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each year’s bibliography may also be supplemented by earlier items, which were retrieved only recently. Although this bibliography series can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages may be included. For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2010, for which this is a continuing update, see Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Carlo Salzani. “Bibliography for Work in Hungarian Studies as Comparative Central European Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/hungarianstudiesbibliography.
As the above title indicates, because of the publication schedule of Hungarian Cultural Studies this bibliography straddles 2013-2014, covering the period since the publication in Fall of 2013 of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each year’s bibliography is supplemented by earlier items that were only retrieved recently. Although this bibliography series can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages may be included.
For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2010, for which this is a continuing update, see Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Carlo Salzani. “Bibliography for Work in Hungarian Studies as Comparative Central European Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/hungarianstudiesbibliography.
In this paper, in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary year of 1944 in Hungary, I explore selected women’s Holocaust diaries, memoirs, letters, and other less studied documents, such as recipe books, all written during the war, which can provide invaluable resources for understanding the experiences of the victims of war, by personalizing the events and helping to write the obscure into history. At the same time, such documents allow historical voices of the period to provide testimony in the context of the divided social memory of the Holocaust in Hungary today. I will first discuss several Hungarian diaries and “immediate memoirs” written right after liberation, among others, that of Éva Heyman who began writing her diary in 1944 on her thirteenth birthday and wrote until two days before her deportation to Auschwitz, where she perished. I will then discuss two recently published volumes, the Szakácskönyv a túlélélésért (2013), which contains the collected recipes that five Hungarian women wrote in a concentration camp in Austria, along with an oral history of the life of Hedwig Weiss, who redacted the collection. Finally, I will refer to the postmemory anthology, Lányok és anyák. Elmeséletlen történetek [‘Mothers and Daughters: Untold Stories’] (2013), where thirty five Hungarian women, some themselves child survivors, others daughters of survivors, write Holocaust narratives in which their mothers’ lives become the intersubject in their own autobiographies, underscoring the risks of intergenerational transmission, where traumatic memory can be transmitted (or silenced) to be repeated and reenacted, rather than worked through.
This paper tries to map out the political poetics of Peter Handke’s Die Lehre der Saint-Victoire (1980). Handke’s text is shown to emulate Cézanne’s painting technique of associating coloured patches with the harmonious whole of an image, a procedure that accords with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics after Auschwitz. The stab this paper takes at fleshing out Handke’s political aesthetics leads to the critical question as to whether this is simply aestheticism revamped.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
In their texts Ilse Aichinger and Konstantinos Kavafis adopt a perspective from which the conceptions of identity and otherness can be questioned and their interrelationship reconsidered. The binary opposition between “Us” and the “Other” is thus undermined and its dimension as a discursive construction becomes apparent. Both Aichinger and Kavafis do not focus on the “Other” when writing about “Barbarians”; they rather question the conception of “Us”. The subversive value of these texts lies in this very questioning of a homogeneous and clearly drawn conception of identity.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
By now diverse movements of the 1960s such as the «Viennese Actionism» and predecessors (in the broadest sense) like the «literarische cabarets» of the so called «Wiener Gruppe» in 1958/59 are well documented and established in Austria’s cultural history. Other groups, art performances and happenings seem to be of marginal historical significance, probably because no chronicler has defined their sphere of influence. This essay investigates action theatre groups, happenings and similar movements initiated by the Austrian poets Wolfgang Bauer and Joe Berger in the 1960s and 1970s and points out their historical relevance.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Beauvoir’s work was translated in 1969, a period of change in state socialism: the introduction of some elements of market economy in 1968 (called New Economic Mechanism), the publication of Western bourgeois philosophers as Sartre and Beauvoir, and Marxist philosophers’ efforts to revise orthodox Marxism. ’The woman question’ was declared to be already solved by socialism. The emblematic female identity is of the working mother: free and equal with men by virtue of law, taking part in producing new value as worker and according to her natural role as mother and wife, representing the center of the socialist family. Under these circumstances the reception of The Second Sex is highly interesting: a success (two editions in a high number of copies), but only two contemporary reviews (one friendly, one sharply critical). In this paper, I give a reconstruction of socialist women’s reading of Beauvoir, given their officially propagated homogeneous identity and their unrecognized double burden. They could have identified themselves with Beauvoir’s new, independent woman and at the same time with the traditional woman. Beauvoir’s legacy for us post-socialist women can be derived from this past: to face ambiguities in identity and to vindicate individual freedom.