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Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2018_1_Book Review

pdfVolume 7 Issue 1 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

“A Pearl of Powerful Learning:” The University of Cracow in the Fifteenth Century. By Paul W. Knoll. (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 52.) Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. 789 pp.

Publications on the history of the University of Kraków, including the medieval period, would fill a library. The topic has been attracting historians’ interest for a long time now. The very first summaries were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in Polish and in French. Since then, several works have examined and presented the history of the university, but most of them were written in Polish. Paul W. Knoll, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Southern California, is an expert in Eastern European and, in particular, Polish history, and he has been dealing with the history of the University of Kraków in the Middle Ages for half a century. The present monograph can be regarded as the essence of his oeuvre.

Knoll examines the history of the Jagiellonian University until the fifteenth century. His work is divided into eleven chapters, framed by an Introduction and a Conclusion, two maps at the beginning, and eighteen illustrations (mainly of the university buildings) scattered throughout the text. The Appendix A–D contains the list of the rectors of the university and deans of the faculty of arts between 1400 and 1508 and the number of the matriculated students year by year at the University of Kraków between 1400 and 1509, classifying them into ten geographical groups. The latter are presented in charts, too. The Appendix includes a short summary of the life and work of Copernicus. The Index of people and place names will be very useful for researchers who are in search of precise data.

The Bibliography is impressive and grandiose, and it merits some emphasis. The 129 published sources in Latin with Polish, English, French, and German comments and the 1,151 (!) bibliographical entries in Polish, English, German, French, Italian, Czech, and Slovak were issued between 1665 and 2015 all over Europe, in the United States of America, and in Canada. Naturally, the bibliography primarily contains works on university history and the history of the University of Kraków, but it also includes publications on the history of Poland and Kraków and its buildings, the history of other universities and the academic curricula, and writings on several sciences (the liberal arts, philosophy, literature, theology, astronomy, astrology, humanism, etc.).

The first, second, and third chapters (Instauracio Studii: The Foundation of a Pearl of Powerful Learning, Cracow and Its University, Institutional History and Development) give a portrait of the origins of the University of Kraków and the history of the university in the fifteenth century. The book provides a summary of the history of the university, which includes descriptions of the academic dignitaries, academic everyday life, and the city of Kraków itself. The fourth chapter (The Personnel of the University: A Statistical, Social, and Academic Profile) discusses the students of the university, focusing in particular on their geographical and social origins and the main tendencies in matriculation and graduation. The fifth chapter (The University in the National Life of Poland) examines the uses of the courses of study for the Krakowian clergy and the role of the university in the spread of the vernacular Polish language and the formation of Polish national consciousness.

The subsequent chapters are dedicated to the curriculum at the Jagiellonian University, including the ideas which shaped it, the works which were used during the lessons, and the professors who interpreted these works. Furthermore, it examines the works by Polish thinkers which became part of the curriculum by the end of the fifteenth century. The sixth and seventh chapters (The Arts Faculty I–II) discuss the curriculum of the most important faculty, the seven liberal arts, and the eighth chapter is dedicated to the other two faculties (Medicine and Law). However, the faculty of medicine was relatively weak in Kraków in the fifteenth century, but the faculty of law had existed since the foundation of the university, and it was very important as a tool with which Casimir the Great consolidated his power and regulated the system of public administration. Although both cannon and Roman law were supposed to be taught in Kraków, the teaching of the latter started only in the sixteenth century. The ninth chapter (Theology) emphasizes the significance of theology. As the “queen of sciences,” it was especially important in medieval education. In Kraków, the second founder, King Władysław Jagiełło, managed to get papal permission for this faculty.

The tenth chapter (Humanism) describes the spread of Humanism from the middle of the 15th century. However, Humanism did not dominate the era, and in the early period the neighbouring countries inspired its spread. It became a significant phenomenon only at the end of the fifteenth century. The eleventh chapter (Libraries and the Library) emphasizes the importance of books and libraries in academic education. It describes the establishment of the first libraries of the University of Kraków, namely the present-day Biblioteka Jagiellońska and the libraries of the students and professors. This chapter is especially worthy of attention since it interprets in detail the works which were used by the masters of Kraków, and it follows shifts in both public and scientific interests and seeks to restore the personal libraries of more than forty scholars of Kraków, completing them with their biographical data.

Knoll’s publication is an essential work, since no other modern English monographs have been published on the medieval Jagiellonian University (except some publications on the whole history of the university). The English translations of the cited Latin sources add to the value of the monograph, as do the shorter and longer biographies of the relevant representatives of the university in the various chapters.

If one takes the above mentioned aspects into consideration, the monograph is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in university history, the history of the University of Kraków, the city of medieval Kraków, the ideas and works which flourished here, or the Polish scholars who exerted important influences on education in the fifteenth century.

 

Borbála Kelényi

Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Eötvös Loránd University,
History of Universities Research Group

Writing History in Medieval Poland: Bishop Vincentius of Cracow and the Chronica Polonorum. Edited by Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński. (Cursor Mundi 28.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 250 pp.

The Chronica Polonorum, written around 1220 but before 1223, is the second historical composition by a single author to be written after the Gesta Principum Polonorum of Gallus Anonymus (written around 1113) about the history of Poland and the Piast dynasty. It is, furthermore, one of the most researched and discussed medieval texts concerning the history of Poland. The narrative’s author, Master Wincent or Vincentius, is the first identified history writer of the Piast dynasty whose career and deeds scholars have studied, and so, since the editio princeps of the text, both the question of the identity of the author and the text itself have been subjects of intensive research.

Master Vincentius, called Kadłubek, studied either in Italy or in France, and he had a wide and deep philosophical, theological, and legal erudition. He was one of the most important and influential ducal officers of Kraków during the second half of the twelfth century, before he was elected Bishop of Kraków in 1207. In 1218, he asked for this dispensation, and he withdrew to the Cistercian monastery of Jędziejów.

His chronicle consists of three general parts. In the first, which is based mostly on legends and classic patterns, he composed the mythical beginnings of Poland. The second is devoted to the deeds of the Piasts in the eleventh century. In this part of his narrative, Vincentius draws strongly on the gesta of Gallus Anonymus, which means that he must have been familiar with at least with one of its manuscripts. Since Vincentius was practically an eyewitness to many of the events which took place during his career, the third part, which contains stories about twelfth-century Poland, is based on his own experiences.

The book which is the subject of this review, which was edited by Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński (one of the Australian Polonica researchers), contains papers contributed by recognized Polish medievalists on Master Vincentius’ chronicle. This collection of studies is the most recent one on this subject, after the basic Latin text edition, published by Marian Plezia, the modern Polish and German translations of the text, and several studies devoted to the author and his work edited by Andrzej Dąbrówka and Witold Wojtowicz some years ago. Due to lack of space, I will refrain from discussing all the contributions in detail. Rather, I offer basic impressions about each individual paper, which I have arranged in thematic groups.

One of the focuses of the volume is the author himself. In addition to Darius von Güttner-Spozynski’s preface, two papers are devoted to this topic, one by Jacek Maciejewski (Bydgoszcz) on Vincentius’ background and family origins and one by Marian Zwiercan (Kraków) on the author’s influence on history writing in Poland. A further contribution by Józef Dobosz of Poznań discusses two general points: the when and the why, presenting all relevant scholarly theories about the time of the writing of the Chronica Polonorum and analyzing the chronicle writer’s causa scribendi.

Since the Chronica Polonorum was composed in a very sophisticated, academic, classical Latin language, using all possible Antique and medieval literary patterns, one of the most significant scholarly questions has always been the issue of the text itself as a literary and grammatical phenomenon and accurate or plausible interpretations of the narrative. Four papers discuss this issue in the book. Two of them were written by Edward Skibiński (Poznań), one of the outstanding experts on medieval Latin philology in Poland. Skibiński presents the problems of the language of the text, and he attempts to interpret the narrative of the chronicle on the basis of philological observations. The third paper of this kind is by Katerzyna Chmielewska of Częstochowa. Chmielewska presents the antique and biblical topoi of the text. The fourth and last contribution in this group is by Zénon Kałuża (Paris). He puts the chronicle and its author into the context of the erudition of the twelfth century, the so called Renaissance of the twelfth century.

Four papers are devoted to questions of social history. In contrast with Gallus Anonymus, who tried to depict the gesta militaria of the Piasts, Master Vincentius, presumably prompted by his erudition, was more interested in social history, and he used terms of Roman law in his work in his attempts to construct and interpret particular social bonds. As one of his terms of social bonds, he refers to Poland as res publica in his work. One finds one paper devoted to this phenomenon by Paweł Zmudzki (Warsaw) on the construction of the nation in the chronicle.

No doubt, the Chronica Polonorum is one of the most ancient sources on the origins and kind of political order in Poland, since Master Vincentius provides us with a tradition about the legitimation of ducal power and the rules of dynastic succession, describing the famous testimony given by Boleslas III the Wrymouth on his deathbed. These particular questions are discussed and presented in Przemysław Wiszewski’s (Wrocław) paper. Marcin R. Pauk (Warsaw) analyzes another aspect of social/political order depicted in the chronicle. Wiszewski’s paper focuses on the transition in society and economy in Poland represented by Master Vincentius, which, we may add, corresponds to the general skills of the European economic and social changes of the late twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth. The last paper in this section, and also the last one in the book, was written by Robert Bubczyk (Lublin). It provides an overview of church life and courtly culture seen though the text of the chronicle.

The book also contains two appendices, both of which are intended to help readers better orient themselves. One is an abbreviated genealogy of the Piasts, representing the main descending line of the dynasty from Mieszko I to Konrad I of Masovia. It is a little jarring that the list of representatives of the Piast dynasty is ordered rather like a catalog and not a proper genealogical chart. The second appendix provides a chronology of Polish history, presenting the most important events from the very beginning of the history of the country up to 1230.

It is not easy to summarize one’s impressions of a book the goal of which is to provide one of the most complicated narrative texts on Medieval Poland. The questions discussed in the book were and still are the subjects of scholarly debates. It suffices to think for example of the question of the time, place, and the intention of the writing of the text. But not only classical issues of research are of significance here. Subjects like the social order and the question of the seniority throne succession system, on which there is a great deal of secondary literature, are issues which remain to be solved by new generations of historians. The publication of this book, which offers a sample in English of all of the relevant scholarly approaches to this important text, is thus an event to be hailed. It will prove of tremendous importance and usefulness for Polish researchers on the text and for Anglophone readers. I hope that this volume will be the point of departure for more research on Master Vincentius’ life and text.

Dániel Bagi
University of Pécs

Kaiser Karl IV. 1316–2016. Ausstellungskatalog Erste Bayerisch-Tschechische Landesausstellung. Edited by Jiří Fajt and Markus Hörsch. Prague–Nuremberg: Nationalgalerie / Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2016. 703 pp.

The historiography of Emperor Charles IV of Luxemburg (1346–78) is closely tied to his anniversaries. In the nineteenth century, some important works on him were published around the 500th anniversary of his death by Emil Werunsky (Geschichte Kaiser Karls IV. und seiner Zeit. I–III. [1880–92]). Another anniversary in 1978 brought the still indispensable biography by Ferdinand Seibt (Karl IV.: Ein Kaiser in Europa, 1346–1378 [Munich, 1978]) and a number of other volumes. In 1978, commemoration of the emperor was linked to exhibitions, like the one in the Nuremberg imperial castle and the memorable exhibit on the artistic and architectural influence of the fourteenth-century Parler family (Die Parler und der Schöne Stil) in the Schnütgen-Museum in Cologne.

The 700th anniversary of the birth of Charles in 2016 has been celebrated both in Germany and in the Czech Republic with several special events, conferences, public festivities, and exhibitions to mark the jubilee. One of the most spectacular events of the festivities was the exhibition organized by the Czech National Gallery and the House of Bavarian History, which was on display both in Prague and later in the German National Museum in Nuremberg in 2016 and 2017. In the case of this exhibition, entitled Emperor Charles IV, 1316–2016 IV, Jiři Fajt acted as the curator of the exhibition, and he and Markus Hörsch served as the editors of the catalogue volume. Fajt, currently the director general of the National Gallery in Prague, has impressive experience as the organizer of major international art historical exhibitions, like the one on Magister Theodoricus in 1998, Prague; The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1437 in 2006; and Europa Jagellonica 1386–1572 in 2012. Fajt and Hörsch are both well-known experts on the late medieval art of Central Europe, and based on the outcome, there is little reason to doubt that the tasks were in the right hands.

The catalogue is an impressive publication from the perspective of its size and its quality. It constitutes an endeavor to meet the interests of both the general public and the scholarly audience. The volume includes many high quality illustrations, maps, ground plans, and chronological tables. The thirty-one scholarly essays and the approximately 350 page-long catalogue section present a multifaceted image of Charles’s personality and the period of his reign. To make a sound judgment on this new overview one could turn to a similar antecedent volume for comparison. In the anniversary year of 1978, Ferdinand Seibt, at that time the leading expert on medieval Bohemian history, published a volume of collected essays on Charles IV as statesman and art patron (Kaiser Karl IV.: Staatsmann und Mäzen [1978]). The differences between the two books shed some light on the findings of the last almost four decades in the study of Charles IV.

It is clear from the comparison that the traditional approach of political history partly has lost its prestige in the recent catalogue. Some chapters, like the one on the coronations of Charles IV by Olaf B. Rader, the one on the Charles IV’s accession to the imperial throne and the Golden Bull by Eva Schlotheuber, and the one on the analysis of marriage policy by Václav Žůrek, represent the field of political history. The 1978 volume offers more studies in this area, e.g. on the church policy of the emperor, the political contacts with other European countries, and individual chapters on the position of various territories under his rule in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Brandenburg, etc.

There are some attributes which have traditionally been connected to Charles IV not only in the historical literature, but also by his contemporaries. The Luxemburg ruler is often characterized as a wise and learned sovereign, and also as pater patriae in medieval Bohemian literature. These aspects are presented both in the 1978 volume of essays by Fidel Rädle and František Kavka and in the current volume. Here, Eva Schlotheuber discusses the impact of Charles as a medieval author who wrote an autobiography, in which he reflects on the first thirty years of his life. Many contemporary chroniclers referred to Solomon as the Biblical model of the wise ruler, and one can find this concept connected to Charles IV. He was well-educated in theology, as some sermon-like chapters of his autobiography demonstrate, and in practical matters as well. Both the autobiography and the Golden Bull emphasize the importance of having command of several languages, and Charles himself spoke Czech, French, Italian, German, and Latin. The foundation of the Prague university in 1348 also constituted an institutional emphasis on the importance of this concept.

Charles has often been referred to as a pious ruler. This was discussed in the 1978 volume in the contribution of Franz Machilek. His formative paper about interactions of private and state religiosity is still a basic work of reference. In the recent catalogue, Martin Bauch’s essay gives many examples of Charles’ personal and public shows of religiosity. There are a number of sources on the emperor’s interest in relics. He was one of the most devoted collectors of relics among his contemporaries, and he used them very efficiently as a tool to strengthen his legitimacy. Pilgrimages, for instance to Aachen, or royal journeys might also have served as occasions to acquire the sought-after relics, which could be put in the service of his political aims. Similarly, architectural projects, such as the construction of the St. Wenceslaus Chapel in the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague or the concept and decoration of the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlštejn castle, also exemplify his determination to use the cult of saints and their relics in the service of his own idea of state religiosity.

Studies on Charles’ support for the arts have an important place in both volumes, but the 2016 catalogue brought several new insights to this discussion. If offered a multifaceted discussion of the field itself, reflecting on the courtly art of the Luxemburgs, goldsmith objects, textile works, and the music of the period. Art patronage under the reign of Charles is obviously connected to two other characteristics of his influence. On the one hand, he exerted a decisive influence on the two centers of his realms, Nuremberg and Prague, discussed in the chapter by Benno Baumbauer and Jiří Fajt on Nuremberg and the chapter by Jana Gajdošová on Prague. The latter essay refers to Prague as Grossbaustelle and Versuchslabor (a large construction site and experimental laboratory), i.e. as sites for a new kind of Gothic architecture. On the other hand, Charles’ art and architectural projects were closely interconnected with his sophisticated sensibility towards royal representation. Royal representation, including the presentation of his own portraits in various formats, was a unique characteristic of Charles’s personality. The essay by Markus Hörsch examines the representation of Charles in the German imperial towns, and Martin Bauch discusses the entry of the emperor into Rome in 1368/69. František Šmahel, the doyen of Czech medieval studies, returns in his contribution to the theme of his earlier book about the last visit of Charles to Paris in 1377/78 (The Parisian Summit, 1377–1378: Emperor Charles IV and King Charles V of France [2014]), combining it with a reconstruction of the funeral ceremony (Pompa funebris) of the emperor.

The economic aspects of the reign of Charles IV were presented in detail in the 1978 memorial volume in the study by Wolfgang von Stromer entitled “Der kaiserliche Kaufmann” (The imperial businessman). The writings of Stromer and his concept on the economic policy of Charles still belong to the basic reference works on the period. The 2016 catalogue includes three essays on special aspects of economic life, e.g. mining and long distance trade, monetary history, and the role of the royal forests. Environmental and climate history represents a new and fresh field in the 2016 catalogue. Gerrit Jasper Schenk discusses the concept of a “fourteenth-century crisis,” reflecting on various phenomena connected to this crisis, such as the Great Plague, famine, and the flagellant movement.

Both catalogues include essays on the memory of the Luxemburg ruler. In the new volume, Wilfried Franzen follows the effect of Charles’s rule in the period of his two sons, Wenceslaus IV and Sigismund. Jan Royt surveys his position in the early modern and modern period, and René Küpper discusses his image in the historiography and public view.

The catalogue Kaiser Karl IV. 1316–2016 certainly does not displace or replace the earlier publications on Charles IV, but it does add several inspiring new contributions to the reading list of eventual further works on the emperor. It will be used as an indispensable new overview of the various aspects of his rule. A quick glance at the list of the authors of the individual essays will convince the reader that there are numerous younger or already established scholars who have contributed to our understanding of the personality and period of Charles IV by writing significant new inquiries. The volume will serve its editorial concept well, which was to give a well-structured, up-to-date overview of the present state of research on Charles IV and a nicely illustrated catalogue of his period, which will also meet with interest among the general public.

Balázs Nagy
Eötvös Loránd University

The Art of Memory in Late Medieval Central Europe (Czech Lands, Hungary, Poland). By Lucie Doležalová, Farkas Gábor Kiss, and Rafał Wójcik. Budapest–Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016. 352 pp.

With this volume, the authors have begun to fill a gap in the scholarship on Central European medieval cultural history. One could list numerous reasons for this omission, among which perhaps the most important ones are the unfavorable judgement of the art of memory and the difficulty of uncovering new sources. Adopting approaches to the study of the art of memory which have emerged in the German and Italian speaking world (such as that of Johann Christoph Frh. von Aretin, Paolo Rossi, Frances Yates, and Sabine Heimann-Selbach), the authors have tried to collect and present the late medieval Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish provenience or origin sources connected to the artes memorativae. As they emphasize several times, this research has remained a largely unexplored field in Central Europe, and they have taken only preliminary steps toward subsequent monographs and, above all, text editions.

In the introduction, editor-in-chief Gábor Farkas Kiss outlines the history of the scholarship on this topic. After a short definition of the ars memorativa, he enumerates antecedents from Antiquity (such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium) and then offers possible explanations as to why an unprecedented growth occurred in the popularity of treatises on the art of memory in the late Middle Ages. According to Kiss, the most important factors included the requirements of new and resurgent universities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the rising significance of preaching (against either the Ottomans or other confessions), and last but not least, monastic devotion. These factors are continually revisited in the succeeding chapters.

The first chapter, “Artes Memoriae and the Memory Culture in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia and Moravia,” is the work of Lucie Doležalová. Taking into account the manuscripts containing treatises on the art of memory, Doležalová presents the most interesting texts in their context. Of course, many of these treatises pertain to the Hussite environment. The texts of Czech origin are mostly translations or compilations (such as Mattheus Beran’s memory treatise); these frequently survived as fragments or parts of larger works.

In the next chapter, Rafał Wojcik, whose dissertation discusses the printed treatise of Jan Szklarek, presents the late medieval mnemonic treatises in Poland. As in the Czech lands, artes memorativae in Poland first appeared in the university environment, particularlyin Kraków, and in the friaries of the Polish Observants. In disseminating the studies on the art of memory at the University of Kraków, foreign professors, the so-called “itinerant humanists” (such as Jacobus Publicius, Conrad Celtis, etc.) played leading roles. It is worth adding, like the Mendicant communities, these figures connected the entire Central European environment to the written culture in Italian and German speaking world. Furthermore, the Polish Observants created and modernized the art of memory, an apparently successful innovation, since traces of it can be identified later, for instance in nineteenth-century pedagogical treatises.

In the third chapter, Farkas Gábor Kiss introduces the reader to “The Art of Memory in Hungary at the Turn of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Kiss notes that, compared to Bohemia and Poland, fewer sources from the Middle Ages in Hungary survived the Ottoman attacks. Still, thanks to the political connections between Hungary and Poland (and principally the Jagiellonian contacts), several treatises or authors mentioned in the Polish environment can be considered Hungarian as well. Of course, the use of the art of memory as a learning method stands out in comparison to its other uses. Students used it to help them memorize grammatical rules, and preachers were able to learn sermons by heart more easily.

The chapters discussed above figure as prefaces to the text editions, which comprise more than half of the volume. Most of these are first editions are of these texts edited on the basis of a single extant source. Every text edition is headed by a short exordium about the source itself and its context. Unfortunately, there are only a few references in these three chapters to the texts in the Appendix, and the exordia sometimes contain references to the more detailed analyses in the chapters. More problematically, the chapters are to be read as articles in a series: for example, the volume overall is inconsistent in the citation and translation of Latin paragraphs and in summaries of the main theses. But aside from these formal inconsistencies, it might have been more useful had the original authors and their works been presented not simply in their regional contexts, but also chronologically and with some discussion of their methods. For example, the treatise of Magister Hainricus is discussed in every chapter because of its considerable influence in East Central Europe, but there are problems concerning the text itself, which is included in the Appendix. If there is only one manuscript and several printings containing inserted notes sometimes in Hungarian and sometimes in Slovak, why did the editor choose a printed version with only Hungarian notes? Conversely, why did the authors of this volume dedicate several subchapters to the itinerant humanist Jacobus Publicius, but not include a text edition of his art of memory in the appendix? These choices seem accidental and unconsidered and, unfortunately, this affects the value of the entire volume.

This editorial unevenness notwithstanding, this publication will certainly attract great interest because of its intent and sources. The well-chosen examples and expressive illustrations at the end of the volume will acquaint the curious reader with the different methodologies of the art of memory. In delineating the East Central European sources on the ars memorativa, the authors have opened the door wider to research on this ancilla of late medieval rhetorical studies.

Emőke Rita Szilágyi
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918. By Jakub S. Beneš. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xv + 268 pp.

While the subtitle of this book sums up the object of Jakub S. Beneš’s inspiring study, its main title simplifies what turns out to be a sophisticated argument about a complex relationship. “This book is … about how the workers that made up one of Europe’s largest Social Democratic movements came to embrace nationalism,” Beneš initially declares (p.2), while in his conclusion he highlights how “Social Democracy played a leading role in the democratization process in Austria … Socialism empowered the growing ranks of industrial workers to lay claim to political rights as well as national culture” (p.239). The Introduction’s triad of “Socialism, Nationalism, and Democracy” would thus have made for a more accurate title, as Beneš agrees with the politician and Austro-Marxist thinker Otto Bauer that genuine commitment to the three can at times be inseparable (p.17).

While the former story has been told by Hans Mommsen and other scholars, the more complex narrative is more original and enriching, in particular because Beneš highlights the autonomy of ordinary workers to form their own views on nationhood, class relations, and political means and aspirations. He does so by analyzing a rich collection of sources, ranging from proletarian prose and poetry to speeches, essays, diaries, and memoirs of rank and file workers and party activists. Within Austrian Social Democracy, Beneš has chosen to focus on the party’s interconnected but increasingly separate Czech and German spheres. The inclusion of other national branches would have enriched the argument, but there are good reasons to accept this particular framing. In the 1907 Reichsrat elections, Czechs and Germans accounted for 87 percent of the Social Democratic vote and won 74 of the party’s 87 seats in parliament. Czech-German relations largely defined the character of the party, and mostly Beneš is attentive to the ways in which Czech stood out from the culturally dominant and “universal” German as a marked ethnic category in Habsburg Austria, which could make Czech Social Democrats look more nationalist than their German counterparts.

The book consists of five chapters. The first, “Narrating Socialism in Habsburg Austria,” explains how, beginning in the late 1880s, the Austrian Social Democracy took shape and evolved as a loose, locally autonomous “poetic organization,” centered more around meetings, manifestations, and the dissemination of socialist periodicals than around tight, centralized structures with clearly regulated membership. Beneš shows how emotion and rationality coexisted quite comfortably within the movement. Epic stories of suffering and redemption proved highly successful, and while for example stories about the sexual exploitation of working-class girls by bourgeois men were common, (while the mention of these accounts is a rare example in the book of the issue of gender), national issues were rarely central to Social Democratic narratives. Beneš points to the many at times conscious parallels and references to religious imagery in these stories of martyrdom, baptism by suffering, and ultimate salvation, but he might have given more emphasis to how bourgeois nationalist narratives and rituals had already done the same.

With the rejection by workers of the nationalist chauvinism exploding in the wake of the Badeni language ordinances of 1897 as its starting point, Chapter 2, “Exclusion from the Nation,” examines how socialist workers reacted to accusations of being nationally indifferent or traitors. In reality, Beneš argues, most workers were not indifferent to the idea of national belonging, and they protested angrily about being excluded from the national communities to which they felt they belonged. This feeling was shared by German and Czech workers, albeit with somewhat different modalities due to the different composition of their national bourgeoisies. Czech Social Democratic workers in particular felt forced to address accusations of being anti-national after 1897, which influenced their views and vocabularies on nationhood.

Chapter 3, “Storms of November,” offers a detailed analysis of the campaign for universal suffrage in November 1905, an event that catapulted Social Democracy into the center of Austrian politics. Mass mobilization linked electoral reform and revolution and released an enormous, at times violent energy among ordinary workers that forced the government to give in. For Czech Social Democrats, the campaign became their entry ticket to the national community, and many activists felt that the party was now ready and entitled to lead the nation. The gap between the German Austrian Social Democrats and the bourgeois nationalist parties remained bigger, but German Social Democrats too now felt that they more than other parties represented the national will of the (German) people.

This growing self-confidence bolstered attempts to claim national symbols for the Czech and German working classes, as discussed in Chapter 4, “Socialist Hussites, Marxist Wagnerians.” Czech socialists stylized themselves as the natural heirs to the radical Hussites in ways that would resonate decades later in the speeches of Klement Gottwald, when the Communists seized power in February 1948, while their Austrian German fellows tried to claim Schiller and Wagner for their cause. Beneš points out how this was not a case of smooth integration into a bourgeois national culture, but a deeply combative battle for control of national cultural icons and political leadership. The socialist versions of nationalism abandoned neither the class struggle nor the idea of solidarity among the international working class.

Still, the years leading up to 1914 witnessed an organizational split between German and Czech Social Democrats, a process discussed in Chapter 5, “The Logics of Separatism.” Beneš initially suggests that rising Czech ethnic nationalism was “the chief driving force behind the demise of the internationalist workers’ movement” (p.175), but his account is more nuanced than this assertion might at first suggest. The national splitting of the Austrian party was institutionally overdetermined, we hear, and Beneš points out how Austrian German socialists’ paternalism or indifference to Czech needs accelerated national separatism. It was a political disagreement about tactics in November 1905 that led the more radical Czechs to favor autonomy from Vienna, not nationalism per se. Even within the trade unions, there were many structural factors and practical local concerns that worked against any all-Austrian trade union centralism.

A shorter final chapter, “War and Revolution,” covers the years of the Great War and the dissolution of Habsburg Austria. The account seems sketchier than the rest of the book, and I missed references to Zdeněk Kárník’s seminal 1968/1996 study Socialisté na rozcestí: Habsburk, Masaryk, či Šmeral (Socialists at a Crossroads: Habsburg, Masaryk, or Šmeral). Generally, however, Beneš covers the secondary literature well.

The short conclusion offers a spirited plea for the relevance of working class history. Class is, as Beneš initially argues, a cultural and ideological postulate that is powerful because it speaks to demonstrable social facts (p.8), and his cultural history of the lives and worlds of ordinary workers is innovative and enriching. My only major reservation is the absence of a proper discussion of the term “nationalism.” The author lets the term cover phenomena ranging from simple identification with a given nation to manifestations of radical chauvinism and denigration of other nations. This failure to explain his use of the terminology more precisely is problematic because Social Democrats (party leaders and rank and file) consistently claimed that their commitment to the nation was radically different from that of the bourgeoisie, and free of chauvinism. “[O]nly a genuine patriot can be a real internationalist” (p.200), the carpenter Vojtěch Berger wrote in his diary in 1912, and for all the occasional bickering and mistrust among Czech and German Social Democrats, this was, Beneš convincingly shows, the predominant socialist view. I therefore find that the true message of Beneš’s book lies not in narrating the failures of Austrian socialism as a conventional “workers-into-nationalists” story, but rather in his conclusion (p.244) that the “conviction that wage-earning people possessed the right to determine the character of national politics and culture was … a major achievement.”

Peter Bugge
Aarhus University

Die Habsburgermonarchie und die Slowenen im 1. Weltkrieg. By Walter Lukan. (Austriaca 11.) Vienna: New Academic Press, 2017. 260 pp.

Austro-Hungarian politics in World War I and its role in the eventual demise of the Habsburg Empire are topics which have interested historians and other scholars since 1918. Slovenian historians are no exception, and Slovenian politics during World War I has also been given a great deal of scholarly attention. Walter Lukan, a retired professor at the University of Ljubljana, has been researching Slovenian politics for decades and has published a number of articles in journals and edited volumes on the subject, as well as a book in Slovenian. His current book is a synthesis of his research and also the first book about Slovenian politics in Austria-Hungary during World War I in a language other than Slovenian. This makes it especially valuable.

The book begins with a short chapter on Slovenian politics in the pre-war years and then tracks its development from the outbreak of the war to the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (i.e. Yugoslavia) on December 1, 1918. In six chronologically arranged chapters, Lukan describes and analyzes the evolution of Slovenian high politics from its predominantly ultrapatriotic and loyalist beginnings in the autumn of 1914 to its break with the dynasty four years later. A supplement with seven crucial documents (some of which have been translated into German for the first time), a ten-page English summary, an extensive bibliography, and a name index complete the book.

Building on the existing secondary literature and his own research, Lukan shows how Slovenian politics recovered from the shock of Sarajevo, which shattered the dream of an autonomous Slovenian-Croatian administrative unit, to be established by Francis Ferdinand upon his accession to the throne, and how the political elite slowly started showing some initiative beginning in the summer of 1915. The attempt to use the entrance of Italy into the war as a means of pushing for some semblance of autonomy in the form of an anti-Italian “military border” (Lukan was the first historian to write about this plan, decades ago) was unsuccessful. While parts of the army, including chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, were not unsympathetic to the idea, several generals did their best to nip it in the bud. In the end, they prevailed, and the plan was shelved.

In the second half of 1916, however, the improved political atmosphere in the Empire and a reshuffle within the dominant Slovenian People’s Party resulted in a definitive change of course. The new Emperor slowly dismantled military absolutism, and in the People’s Party and the Croatian-Slovenian caucus in the Reichsrat Anton Korošec and Janez Evangelist Krek pushed the hyper-loyal Ivan Šusteršič to the side. Consequently, as Lukan shows, passivity was replaced with a much more ambitious approach to politics. The People’s Party managed to prevail on the liberals to collaborate with them in the pursuit of their vision, and the pre-war goal of a Slovenian-Croatian state within the Empire was revived. For a while, Korošec and Krek toyed with the so-called subdualist solution, which would have united the so-called Slovenian lands and Croatia within the Hungarian half of the Empire. However, beginning in early 1917, Slovenian politicians and most Croatians from Istria and Dalmatia started talking seriously about trialism, i.e. the establishment of a third, South Slav unit of the Habsburg Empire. While this could not have been achieved without the dismantling of the existing dualist structure, a large majority of Slovenian politicians remained loyal to the Habsburgs and could only envision the new South Slav state within the Habsburg framework.

When the Reichsrat finally reopened in May 1917 and the Slovenian and Croatian MPs presented their program for the reform of the Empire, the so-called Habsburg clause was an inseparable part of the May Declaration; only a few MPs were privately already thinking about alternatives, while most were deeply convinced that the Empire was going to survive and that it could be reformed. As it became clearer, however, that the emperor and his successive governments were unwilling to fulfil the demands put forward in the Declaration, this attitude began to change. For mainstream politicians, Lukan shows, the Habsburg clause increasingly became a tactical instrument which shielded them from accusations of disloyalty and allowed them comparatively unfettered freedom of action. Additionally, the clause was very important in popular propaganda as a large majority of the Slovenian speaking population would only support a South Slav state “under the scepter of the Habsburgs.”

During the last year of the war, Slovenian (and Croatian) politicians gathered in the newly established Yugoslav caucus were, as Lukan persuasively shows, deeply hypocritical in their politics. Publicly they still pursued the goal of a South Slav unit within the Habsburg Empire, but privately they were increasingly working for full independence and, at least in some cases, unification with Serbia and Montenegro. Beginning in early 1918, even public proclamations became more radical, and the Habsburg clause was often missing. As South Slav politicians from the Austrian and the Hungarian half of the Empire gathered in Zagreb in the first days of March 1918, the document they prepared, the so-called Zagreb Resolution, demanded a South Slav nation state without even mentioning the Habsburgs. Anton Korošec, by that time a leading figure in the “Yugoslav movement,” later claimed that they “threw the Habsburg scepter out of the window then and there” (p.147).

These developments were the result of the changed international situation (the survival of Austria-Hungary was by then far from certain) but also of disenchantment with the emperor and the government. As Lukan’s detailed analysis shows, neither Charles nor his ministers were willing or able to support a reform of the empire that would have satisfied Slovenian politicians, who were leading figures of the Yugoslav movement. Korošec and his allies were not really prepared to compromise anymore. While the leaders of the Slovene People’s Party were ready to accept partial autonomy within Cisleithania in the autumn of 1915 (possibly limited to Carniola and the Littoral) and would probably have agreed to the unification of Cisleithanian Croatians and Slovenians in an Illyrian Kingdom in the first half of 1917, they were not prepared to give any ground in 1918. Their greatest fear was an incomplete reform within the dualist framework (unification of Croatia-Slavonia with Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and, possibly, Serbia, was often talked about in government circles) which would have left the Slovenians isolated. They therefore pushed for a unification of all the Habsburg South Slavs, within or without the Habsburg Empire. Thus, the October 1918 manifesto of Emperor Charles, which was a last-minute attempt to save the Empire, was rejected outright, and on October 29 the new State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs was simultaneously proclaimed in Zagreb and Ljubljana.

Lukan’s well-written and comprehensive synthesis presents wartime events and developments clearly, and his interpretations are balanced. Yet the book has a few flaws. First, his analysis is focused almost exclusively on the politics and politicians of the People’s Party. This is understandable to a point (the party had dominated Slovenian politics for years), yet a more comprehensive examination of liberal and social democratic politics would offer the reader a more complete picture. Similarly, the book would also benefit from a wider focus when it comes to the visions of the future within Slovenian politics. Namely, Lukan writes primarily about the developments which led to the break with the Habsburg Empire, and he only mentions alternative ideas sporadically. Finally, Lukan rarely goes beyond high politics, yet when he does, he shows that this would be a worthwhile endeavor. For instance, when he compares the visions of the future held by large parts of the population with those advocated by politicians, a non-negligible divide emerges. It is therefore a pity that his inquiry is focused so narrowly on elites.

Yet on the whole, Walter Lukan’s book is an important contribution to the historiography on World War I Slovenian politics, and it is a must read for any historian dealing with the political history of the Habsburg Empire during the Great War. It provides a pithy summary of the existing secondary literature and presents many new insights based on original research. In short, it is the new standard work on the subject.

Rok Stergar
University of Ljubljana

Radikálisok, szabadgondolkodók, ateisták: A Galilei Kör története (1908–1919) [Radicals, freethinkers, atheists: The history of the Galileo Circle 1908–1919]. By Péter Csunderlik. Budapest: Napvilág, 2017. 400 pp.

An amazingly well documented first book was published by young historian Péter Csunderlik based on his PhD dissertation (defended in 2016) on a subject known for its extremely polarized and ideologized interpretations in Hungary. After having been monopolized by counterrevolutionary narratives during the Horthy regime in the 1920s, according to which the Galileo Circle was responsible for the rise of the postwar Soviet Republic in Hungary (1919), later the memory of the Galileo Circle became entirely dominated by Communists in power between 1948 and 1990, who sought to cast the members of this circle as forerunners. Nevertheless, the last historical volume on the subject was published in 1960, which might indicate that student radicalism was also seen as a challenge to the Hungarian communist regime, which in many regards was of a conservative mindset. Whatever the case, this diachronic aspect was much better known than the “story” itself, which has remained a something of a lacuna in the historiography until now. By putting aside these diametrically opposed and ideologically biased images, Csunderlik has opted to dig out what was hidden by these posterior interpretations: namely ideas and practices based on empirical documentation (press, publications, minutes, registers, memories, correspondences, etc.) linked to the Galileo Circle itself around the 1910s. To the Circle’s reception during the Horthy era, he dedicated only the last chapter of his book, which remains essentially separate from his comprehensive narrative of the Circle itself.

Originally, the Galileo Circle, launched in Budapest in 1908, was a student branch of the Szabadgondolkodás Magyarországi Egyesülete (Hungarian Freethinking Association), itself part of a larger, international network. According to Csunderlik, this student group, which was composed originally of students in the humanities and medical sciences and never numbered much more than 1,000 men and women, soon turned out to be a literal countercultural institution (including networks of media, associations, schools, aesthetic and scientific activities, happenings, etc.) opposed to liberal-conservative norms and institutions as they had been in force since 1867. If one considers conflicts with the establishment in the arena of higher education, for example, effectively a vivid antagonism can be drawn. By claiming anti-clericalism and articulating a harsh criticism of the conservativism, backed by political power, in the arts and sciences (the choice of Galileo as a name was a gesture to the well-known scientific figure, and it was considered a sort of “battle cry”), the Galileo Circle, thanks to its membership’s radically critical endeavors, effectively challenged in many ways hegemonic practices and institutions. (However, power felt even more challenged by “adult” radical bourgeois thinkers directed by Oszkár Jászi, who was also by the way a mentor of the Galileo Circle, because of their democratic views on the question of ethnic and national minorities in historical Hungary.) According to Csunderlik, this peculiar group was not only a student intellectual milieu but also a breeding ground for new revolutionary attitudes.

The book successfully mixes the history of ideas and social history in order to obtain an image as complex as possible of the peculiar backdrop to the young intellectuals’ revolt against patriarchal society, which began much earlier than 1968. At this point, Csunderlik misses a (not so much diachronic but) horizontal comparison: a transnational perspective both on youth movements and on secondary and higher education would have shed light on similar phenomena in the larger European context (for instance Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 [1979]; Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in conflict [1995]; Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., History of Young People in the West, vol. 2 [1997]; David Fowler: Youth culture in modern Britain, c.1920-c.1970 [2008]). Student precarity, about which the Galileo Circle collected statistics for Budapest in 1909 (statistics which were published in 1912), was a problem all over Europe in the pre-war years, and it was often connected to a growing dissatisfaction. In France, for example, the most representative and influential opinion poll, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, published by Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde in 1913 indicated a return to traditional ideals, a change of mood that was going to being exploited by war nationalism, which promoted patriotic redemption and salvation (Koenraad W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France [1964], p.196). In this regard, Csunderlik leaves the reader hungry to know more, because he fails to address the cultural context of conscription of a certain part of the Galileo Circle’s membership in World War I by switching too rapidly to their antimilitarism later in the conflict (so an eventual exacerbation of patriotism, as short as it could be among them, was not taken into consideration).

When the topic at hand is more a question of philosophical and ideological currents than practices, Csunderlik effectively turns to transnational comparison: he detects, for example, the European circulation of freethinking, anti-clericalism, atheism, and Marxist ideas, which were widely used by members of the Galileo Circle. The group was in fact marked by internal divisions in terms of these very ideas: one faction, led by the young Károly Polányi (the first president of the Circle and a subsequent polyhistor, economist, sociologist, and philosopher known for his work later written in London entitled The Great Transformation, a model for historical sociology) was stuck in a more apolitical freethinking (based on the theories of Ernst Mach), while many members progressively opted for Marxism and, in the second part of World War I, even for revolutionary Socialism.

Thus, Csunderlik discuses the role of the Galileo Circle not exclusively within the political field or the scientific one, but also within a broader cultural context; he examines many of its social and cultural factors and conditions: its recruitment practices, its locations, its events, its media, its scholarly activities, its receptions, and its audiences. In order to discuss all this, he needed to abandon the linear chronology within the greater, nevertheless chronologically limited parts, i.e. the so-called “great” (1908–14) and the “short” (1914–19) periods of the Galileo Circle, and opted instead for thematic organization. The Galileo Circle was linked to discussions of politics, ideologies, war, science, history, youth, gender, sports etc., in other words a wide array of important discourses of political and cultural currents of the epoch. Csunderlik describes how the Circle’s manifestations were perceived by contemporaries in political and intellectual arenas, but also in society at large. Csunderlik successfully traces the contributions of the Galileo Circle to the shaping of the ideas of cultural and political modernity in early twentieth-century Hungary, and he has assembled a balanced and well-founded historical work on this youth group.

Eszter Balázs
Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum/Kodolányi University of Applied Arts

Europe’s Balkan Muslims: A New History. By Nathalie Clayer and Xavier Bougarel. Translated by Andrew Kirby. London: Hurst, 2017. 285 pp.

When people refer to “European Muslims” or “Islam in Europe,” they tend to forget the eight million Muslims in Southeastern Europe. Sophisticated studies on Islam and Muslims between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean are rare, and there are almost no comparative studies on the subject, probably due to the obstacle posed by the linguistic diversity of these communities. In Europe’s Balkan Muslims: A New History (first published as Les musulmans de l’Europe du Sud-Est (XIXe-XX siècles) [2013]), Xavier Bougarel and Nathalie Clayer undertake the monumental task of synthesizing their knowledge of this heterogeneous Muslim group and presenting a historical overview of it from the early nineteenth century to 2001.

Clayer and Bougarel are professors at the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies in Paris, with complementary research profiles. Bougarel specializes in Slavic-speaking Muslims in Yugoslavia from the Second World War to the violent dissolution of the Yugoslav state, and Clayer’s emphasis is on the Albanian and Turkish side and the Ottoman and post-Ottoman period. They are thus able to compare the situations of diverse Muslim groups in several countries in different political periods, many of which were extremely turbulent.

The process of Islamization in Southeastern Europe during six hundred years of Ottoman rule was by no means uniform, and the authors also emphasize that religious diversity is one of the region’s main characteristics. Although the vast majority of the Muslims in the region are Sunnis of the Hanafi rite, there are significant regional, social, and ethnic differences among them, and there is also a great intra-Islamic variety in terms of religious interpretations, practices, and affiliations. This heterogeneity is made vividly clear throughout the book, as the authors explore the complex character of Muslim identity formation in changing contexts. At the same time, the authors also point out the Muslim population’s exposure to and interaction with a myriad of political and religious impulses from both East and West. Bougarel and Clayer’s approach is based on the premise that Southeastern European Muslims cannot be understood simply in relation to the dismantling of empires and the emergence of nation states, but must be situated in a broader political, social, and cultural perspective.

The chronological structure of the book functions as a framework for presenting the diversity of these communities and the ruptures and continuities of their histories in an orderly manner, and it gives a good understanding of their development from the early nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire really started to lose control over its European possessions. The first chapter discusses reforms, bureaucracies, and new elites before the Eastern Crisis in 1876, with emphasis on changing Muslim-Christian relations, intellectual enterprises, different Islamic networks, and national identity discourses. The second chapter covers the five decades between the Eastern Crisis and the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. In this period, Muslims in Europe found themselves in a precarious situation between a crumbling empire and Christian-dominated nation building projects (with the exception of Albania), projects which included population exchanges, migration, and the forced displacement of minorities. While identities were politicized, nationalism developed more slowly among Muslims, who were often influenced by Islamic reformist currents. Chapter three explores the interwar period and World War II, which was marked by important political changes, including new territorial divisions, agrarian reforms, ideological struggles, nationalization programs, and the rise of authoritarianism. Outside Albania, Muslims were in a minority in all the states of the region. Islamic institutions were reorganized and subjected to nationalization, and local forms of Islam became parts of new networks.

Chapter three covers the communist period from the end of World War II to 1989, i.e. the general context of the Cold War, nationalisms, and authoritarianism. At the end of World War II, Albanian-speaking Muslims were massacred and violently expelled from northern Greece, and the 1950s saw the migration of other Muslim groups in the Balkans to Turkey. Modernization and collectivization reduced the influence of Muslim elites, and “Islam” was often portrayed as a reactionary force. From the outset, the communist regimes introduced antireligious policies, and scientific socialism became the cultural norm. Muslim groups developed different national identities, depending on factors such as ethnic distribution. The reorganization of Islamic institutions reflected the states’ attitudes towards their Muslims groups and towards religion in general. Bosnia was the only place in the region where pan-Islamic and Islamist currents maintained a continuous presence after 1940.

The last chapter discusses the dramatic years between 1989 and 2001, when the communist regimes collapsed, Yugoslavia disintegrated, and the countries of the region generally reoriented themselves towards the European Union and NATO. In this period, religious freedom was restored and institutions were revived and reintegrated into global religious networks. At the same time, the 1990s was traumatic for many of the Muslims in the region. Bulgaria had forced 300,000 of its Muslims to flee to Turkey, and warfare in Bosnia and Kosovo included massacres and ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Religious symbols were destroyed. The Muslims in the Balkans emerged as victims, but also as a political actor. In Bosnia, Muslim identities have to a certain extent become re-Islamized after the war. In the other countries, political Islam has been marginal or nonexistent. While religious life in public was revitalized after communism, liberalization and globalization have led to the diversification of religious practice and the fragmentation of religious authority. Muslim identities in Central and Southeastern Europe are also related to questions of economic, social, and political status.

One important observation is nevertheless that the post-Ottoman history of this region is characterized by the violent expulsion of Muslims from new Balkan states with Christian majorities. The last “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnian Muslims and Albanians from Kosovo in the 1990s was part of a recurrent pattern which began in the early nineteenth century with the expulsion of “Turks” from Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. At the same time, the authors draw attention to the demographic changes which took place in Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in part as a consequence of Muslim emigration, particularly to the remaining parts of the Ottoman Empire and later to Turkey, but also to the West. Furthermore, large Muslim communities have remained in the region and grown, and today three Balkans states have Muslim majorities (Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania).

The authors admit that the end of communism inevitably led to a certain desecularization and in many cases a strengthening of the link between religion and nation, but they do not agree that this necessarily means that religious practice is on the rise or that there has been a general de-secularization of society. While a minority of Muslims have become very pious, most notably neo-Salafis (who insist that religious precepts must regulate every detail of daily life), the vast majority are non-practicing. Southeastern European Muslims’ religious development basically has followed same pattern as religious development in the rest of Europe, with the pluralization and individualization of religious life, and most of the Muslims in the region do not practice their religion.

Bougarel and Clayer emphasize the need to consider “the diversity of national and provincial historical trajectories, the complex interactions between local, national and supranational actors, and moments of rupture and uncertainty” (p.209). The nation state has not been the only actor in Southeastern Europe, and the Balkan states must be understood in a wider political context, including from the perspective of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers’ interest in the region, the logic of the Cold War, Yugoslavia’s copy of the Soviet model, international factors in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Nations, and Euro-Atlantic integration. Another observation is that one cannot really talk about one Balkan Islam or treat the Muslims in this region as an “Islamic curiosity,” cut off from the rest of the Muslim world. They are part of the wider Muslim world and connected to many of the same religious, cultural, and political developments. Their Muslim networks are not simply Ottoman or Middle Eastern, but have points of contact with global Salafism and with Sufi networks in Asian and African countries.

Against this backdrop, it is almost impossible to generalize about Southeastern European Muslims, and the overview provided by Clayer and Bougarel of this complex topic is impressive. The 13-page glossary, nine maps, and various demographic tables are useful. Europe’s Balkan Muslims fills a hole in the academic literature and is accessible and relevant to non-academics. It contains food for thought for anyone interested in processes of religious change, secularization, globalization, nationalism, religion and politics, the privatization of religion, religion and nationalism, Islam and pluralism, Islamic diversity, Islam in Europe, and Islam and Muslims in general. Moreover, it can be recommended to various policymakers, security analysts, and others with a practical interest in Muslims. Hopefully, Bougarel and Clayer are already preparing a book covering developments after 2001, which have been as complex as the processes and changes in the period covered in this book.

Cecilie Endresen
University of Oslo

A magyarországi németek története. [The history of the Germans of Hungary]. By Gerhard Seewann. Translated by Zsolt Vitári. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 2015.

There are few works of scholarship in Hungarian which examine the histories of the religious, linguistic, and national minorities in parallel with the other processes of the region, the country, or the majority society. Gerhard Seewann has undertaken to address this shortcoming (or at least to address one of the lacuna in the secondary literature) by presenting the history of the German community of Hungary as part of European and regional processes and the prevailing interethnic relations of these communities with the Hungarians, as well as in comparison with the circumstances of other minority groups. Published originally as Geschichte der Deutschen in Ungarn in 2012, in his synthesis, which spans historical eras, Seewann considers the German minority not simply as a kind of passive object of the events of history, but rather as a subject or agent in these events. Thus, his work can serve as a basis for modern textbooks on the history of this community. The monograph will be of interest and relevance to scholars of the subject, members of the community, and readers who take an interest in history.

In order for Seewann to be able to achieve his admittedly complex aim, he needed not simply to draw on and rethink the existing secondary literature, but also to break with the nation-centered mode of historical narrative which is so prevalent in the scholarship on (Central) Europe. Of course, at the same time, in connection with the individual eras in the history of the region, he had to present the relevant political, economic, and social processes in Hungary in order to be able to analyze the various events which took place on different levels (transnational, regional, and significant from the perspective of the German minority) in their complex interaction with one another. In his presentation of the connections and interconnections, for the most part he demonstrates a good sense of proportions.

The first volume of the two-volume work, which with the appendices is more than 1,000 pages long, concludes with the year 1860. The second begins with the negotiations between the Hungarians and the Habsburg court which preceded the Compromise of 1867 and presents the history of the German minority in Hungary until 2006. Seewann divides his narrative into periods on the basis not of individual events, but rather according to the points at which historical processes began and came to an end, an approach which is praiseworthy. However, while the chapters on the period beginning with the early Modern Era and concluding in 1860 are based exclusively on the events of Hungarian history, the structure of the second volume also seems to take into account pivotal points which influenced the fate of the German community, for instance their situation at the end of World War II and the expulsion of many members of this community from the country.

The structure of any major work of historical scholarship which covers several centuries of history is inevitably a bit uneven at times, since there are different quantities and qualities of source materials for each individual period, and in many cases the research methods also differ. Although the structural disproportionalities of Seewann’s work are due for the most part to this, some scholars on medieval Hungarian history and the period of Ottoman occupation, notably Márta Fata and Tobias Weger, have made a few concrete remarks concerning the chapters on these periods. Their fundamental objection is that Seewann does not offer an adequately deep comparison of the German-speaking communities in Hungary with other linguistic or national minorities, nor does he address the German aspects of the occupied territories in his discussion of these periods.

He also does not make adequate use of the most recent findings in the historical scholarship on Eastern and Central Europe, so the chapters in question must be regarded more as outlines or sketches. Reviewers of the monograph have also criticized the Seewann for having failed in some cases to clarify the precise meanings of the terms he uses. The section on the socialist era is similarly schematic, as indeed its relative brevity makes clear, and it is difficult to understand why Seewann did not devote a separate chapter to the period after 1989. Since there is almost no basic research in the secondary literature on the decades of socialism, Seewann might have done better simply to include this section at the end of the second volume as a kind of overview, thereby indicating that it is not yet possible to offer a thorough narrative summary of the period. In my view, he should have taken this into consideration when deciding when to bring his narrative to an end. He also should have included a chapter summarizing the main tendencies in the history of the German minority in Hungary.

The narrative is nicely complemented by the source materials which are included in the monograph (36 in the first volume and 23 in the second), and these materials strengthen the work as a kind of “handbook.” Almost all of these source materials have been published before, and it would perhaps have been preferable to have selected source materials which have not yet been published and include them with the appropriate annotations. The first volume includes four maps, two of which (one of the Habsburg Empire, 1699–1795, the other of Hungary, 1867–1914) have no information concerning the ways in which the lands in question were divided by nationality. The second of the two, furthermore, should have been included in the second volume, which in fact does not contain a single map. In general, given the tremendous breadth of the material and the span of history covered, Seewann would have done well to have included more maps, diagrams, tables, and illustrations, as these kinds of additions would have made the book more useful in an educational setting. Indices of names and places at the end of both volumes and the register of concordance are integral parts of the work and so is the list of primary and secondary sources containing several hundreds of items. Since Seewann completed the original German manuscript in 2011 and six years passed before the work was published in Hungarian, it would have been worthwhile to have added the most recent works of secondary literature to the list of sources on the subject.

Quite understandably, Seewann examines the main questions of his work, which as already noted covers a millennium of history, in chronological order. Accordingly, the titles of the main chapters refer in general to the defining trends of a given era and thus also the main reference points of the analysis. The main chapters, however, are divided into thematic subchapters. The only exception is the short introduction, in which Seewann compares the main tendencies of German settlement in Hungary in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.

Since in a brief review, one could not possible give a summary of such an ambitious work, I will limit myself to a few observations and explanations offered by Seewann which I consider important contributions to the existing scholarship, both in content and approach.

The most important part of the chapter on the period between 1526 and 1699 is the discussion of the demographic legacy of the Ottoman occupation and the political and economic general conditions of the settlement and resettlement of the country. Seewann persuasively refutes a cliché which has become a commonplace in Hungarian historiography, according to which the territories which were occupied by the Turks were almost completely deserted. Interpretations resting on this contention tend to ignore the fact that a large proportion of the population simply moved to larger settlements in the hopes of surviving. Seewann also offers a detailed analysis of the South-North migration of hundreds of thousands of people and refutes a “romantic” German interpretation which was vigorously instrumentalized in the 1930s according to which the settlers created the villages (which later blossomed) out of little more than blood and sweat (i.e. out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo). He convincingly shows that the period between 1688 and 1711 did indeed bear witness to a kind of dress rehearsal for the later large-scale importation of settlers, the primary purpose of which was to ensure a workforce for the owners of large estates and food for the soldiery and the cities. The arrival of settlers was also important for the development of agriculture, the improvement of the work ethic, and from the perspective of reliable taxation incomes.

The most extensive and also most thoroughly developed section of the first volume is the chapter dealing with the period between 1711 and 1790, which Seewann refers to as the century of new settlers. He approaches this very complex process from the perspective of the actors, taking into consideration the motives of the settlers, the landowners, and the state, as well as the various steps they took, the results they achieved, and the consequences of the influx of new inhabitants. Seewann presents the efforts that the landowners and the state had to make to lure members of the workforce in German-speaking territories to Hungary, efforts they were compelled to make in part because they were in competition with Prussia and Russia for this workforce. This competition ultimately determined the concessions and allowances that were offered to the settlers. Seewann also refutes the notion that the settlers were impoverished. Most of them came to Hungary as peasants, smallholders, artisans, or day-laborers with at least modest financial means. In Hungary at the time, however, this capital was not insignificant, and it was often complemented by bequests paid by family members who had remained in the settlers’ ancestral homelands. The German settlers were also motivated by the opportunity to achieve a better social status than before. Having acquired the right to move freely, they could accept the best or at least better offers of land and plots and the most advantageous conditions offered to incoming settlers, which included the freedom of religion for Protestants, which Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance guaranteed. In his presentation of the perceptions and perspectives of the people who were affected by this process, Seewann makes excellent use of various ego documents (memoirs, correspondence, last wills and testaments), thus offering his reader a wealth of knowledge relevant to the social history and the history of the mentality of these communities.

Of the chapters on the history of the Germans in Hungary in the Early Modern Era, “The Period of Political Mobilization, 1914–1945” merits particular mention as perhaps the best section of the monograph. In this chapter, which fundamentally addresses political history, Seewann puts emphasis on the questions of political mobilization, ethnic identity, and the construction of identity. He goes into considerable detail and offers a persuasive portrayal of the process which began with the efforts of the Ungarländischer Deutscher Volksbildungsverein (led by Jakob Bleyer, the Verein initially sought only to secure rights concerning cultural affairs and education) and ended with the rise of the Ungarisches Volksbund der Deutschen, which was led by Franz Basch and which served the great power interests of the Third Reich. Seewann shows the interconnections among the events in the coordinate system of the efforts and actual measures taken by the German minority and the German and Hungarian states. Fundamentally, he seeks an answer to the question of how, by the second half of the 1930s, for a significant segment of the German minority, which at the beginning of the era was for the most part apolitical, the notion of the indivisible Hungarian nation had been replaced as the principal orientation point by attachment to its own ethnic group, the community of the German folk, and the “mother country,” i.e. Germany.

My critical remarks notwithstanding, I consider Gerhard Seewann’s groundbreaking work an important contribution to the secondary literature. His monograph provides a summary of the scholarship on and knowledge of the history of the Germans of Hungary which is critical and in many respects innovative in its approach, and which also goes beyond simple descriptions and analyzes subtle interconnections. The unevennesses in his synthesis call attention first and foremost to the dearth of research on the subject, thus also suggesting new avenues of inquiry.

 Ágnes Tóth
Hungarian Academy of Sciences ­­– University of Pécs

Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945. By Stephan Gross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 398 pp.

Export Empire engages with an often neglected aspect of German relations with Southeastern Europe before World War II: German attraction and influence, projected through peaceful, voluntary commercial and cultural exchange. It discusses soft power as one of two alternative views on empire, which were advanced by different elite circles and administrative departments in a polyarchic Nazi state and by different non-state organizations. It studies the ideas of hard power, formal empire, and informal empire or sphere of influence based on soft power from their conception in the imagination of German elites in the late nineteenth century to their application in policy, and it makes a definitive assessment of their efficiency and effects.

Gross convincingly argues that it was precisely soft power, based on the export of goods and cultural products and advanced primarily by non-state institutions, that delivered to Germany valuable economic resources and political influence in the Balkans and helped sideline the traditionally leading power, France. Soft power is the answer to how Germany regained economic positions which had been lost after World War I and how it managed to shift its foreign trade away from its Western European creditors. Soft power also paved the way for Nazi economic exploitation during World War II. But this book demonstrates that economic exploitation was not the result of carefully designed, planned entrapment. Rather, it was the result of a power shift within the German state, whereby the proponents of soft power and informal empire lost influence over the region or switched sides and adopted the Nazi approach of hard power colonial imperialism. The hardline Nazi vision of Lebensraum took over the private institutions’ liberal view of Mitteleuropa and Grossraumwirtschaft or greater economic space. As Gross shows, 1941 was the turning point of the soft power decline, when, after the unsuccessful German operations in the Soviet Union, the war effort meant greater demands for food, labor, and raw materials. The “economic miracle” achieved through soft power in the 1920s and 1930s, which no doubt was in line with German interests, was destroyed completely by the brutal force of occupation and resource extraction, which left behind devastated economies and war ridden societies. However, the principles at work which won Germany its status as a desired and legitimate partner (and even a modernizing mentor and “natural” ally), may also be observed in other informal empires in the past and today.

Competing concepts of German power in Europe and competing imperial visions ran almost in parallel among German elites from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic. The traditional understanding of empire as colonial rule or hard Weltpolitik was shared by nationalist-minded elites after 1880 (Admiral Tirpitz and Chancellor Bismarck, for instance) and intellectuals including Max Weber, Gustav Freytag, Heinrich Class, and others who believed Germany “had a historical mission to either uplift or rule over the Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire” (p.15). These ideas informed the perception of Russia shared by the highest military officials, such as Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm: “after 1910 they believed any future war would be a ‘struggle for existence between Teutons and Slavs’” (p.16). The concept of Lebensraum, which motivated Nazi atrocities in Poland and Russia during World War II, derive genealogically, even if indirectly, from such a vision.

The liberal vision of an economic federation in Central Europe, the Mitteleuropa project, was advanced most notably by Gustav Stresemann, for whom the economy, rather than the nation, was to transcend state borders and win Germany its reputation and prestige. This view grounds German power on the quality of German exports, the reliability and adaptability of German traders, the precision of German technology, and the knowledge and prosperity that Germany spreads through its economic relations. Germany as a “developmental mentor” within an economic and cultural hierarchy was viewed here as a sustainable source of power and prosperity.

Trade and cultural diplomacy are the two pillars of soft power. Yugoslavia and Romania represent the region as a whole, because they were of the highest economic importance for Germany, Yugoslavia due to its minerals and Romania due to its oil. They are also compared to each other in the book to highlight nuances of soft and hard power. The central focus of the new contribution is on non-governmental organizations. The Leipzig Trade Fair, the Mitteleuropaeischer Wirtschaftstag, the German-Romanian Chamber of Commerce, and others such forums provided crucial points of contact for traders from different countries; they supplied information on the markets where Germany had lost its positions and investments after World War I; they served the small and medium-sized businesses looking to export and import under the confusing conditions of bilateral clearing; and they were the social platform where trade actually happened. The remarkable increase in trade between Germany and the Balkans is attributed to a great extent to the effective operation of these organizations.

Cultural diplomacy in the form of academic exchange programs made Germany the most desired destination for people interested in pursuing the study of economic, technical, and medical subjects, and graduates from these kinds of programs in Germany often took high government positions back home. Not only were they pro-German by conviction and loyalty, they also had access to certain material rewards, and they had a vested interest in fostering and perpetuating the subordinated relations with the Reich. Development work was also high on the agenda. Although less industrially and infrastructurally developed, the nations of the Balkans were seen as capable of advancement. Furthermore, they were seen as suitable for “Germanization,” meaning advancement under German mentoring. Aryanization (the ethnic cleansing of the territory and its repopulation with non-Jewish people) was not the main message of these programs. In contrast to Poland, southeastern Europe was not seen as a space to be populated with Germans as part of their Lebensraum, but rather as a place where the Reich should play its “civilizing mission.”

None of these policies of trade and cultural diplomacy in the Balkans were controlled by Nazis belonging to Hitler’s inner circle. It was other groups, consisting primarily of businessmen and academics, which shaped the vision of an economic space. And no doubt these groups worked to secure the empire Germany sought to create by providing reliable deliveries of food and raw materials and maintaining a hierarchical division of labor in which the agrarian states developed, but still remained agrarian. In response to some of the earlier debates on this issue, Gross argues that hindering the development of the Balkan states was not a German objective, but increasing their purchasing power was.

The end of World War II struck a final blow to the hard imperial ambitions of German foreign policy, along with the racism and unilateralism of National Socialism. The soft power of German exports and cultural diplomacy are palpable elements of German international influence today. As a study of the mechanisms of soft power, this book is relevant to our understanding of other imperial systems of the same period and also to a more nuanced grasp of the role of soft power in other spheres of influence.

The main contribution of the book is its disaggregation of the Nazi state into a battlefield of worldviews and its presentation of the ways in which private actors were able to achieve various results under certain conditions of autonomy: soft power was indeed effective. Furthermore, soft power wins a worthier victory than nationalism. More generally, the book addresses fundamental problems concerning economy and society and the formation and competition of elites. It raises questions about the role of society in bringing to power one worldview over another, and it warns indirectly of the brutal human costs paid for the rise and fall of some ideas. Export Empire offers a safe way of learning a valuable historical and theoretical lesson. Comprehensive, balanced, and well-argued, it is a must read.

Vera Asenova
Independent researcher

A terror hétköznapjai: A kádári megtorlás, 1956–1963 [The everyday weekdays of terror: The reprisals of the Kádár Regime, 1956–1963]. By Zsuzsanna Mikó. Budapest: Libri, 2016. 286 pp.

Around the time of the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a vast array of writings was published on the events of the momentous year, including scholarly essays, commemorative volumes, and memoirs. With this outpouring of publications came new opportunities for the presentation of the findings of profound scholarly research as well. The monograph by Zsuzsanna Mikó, which is the result of ten years of dedicated research, was one such work. It offers a complex analysis of the reprisals and repressive measures implemented by the Kádár regime and memories of these reprisals.

The study of the reprisals which were implemented between 1956 and 1963 alone would merit a thorough historiographic overview. The first analyses, which were essentially political in nature, had an important role in ensuring that the “Hungarian case” remain a prominent agenda item among Hungarians in the émigré communities and that the memory of 1956 remain vivid. The early historical essays, some of which were samizdat publications, shaped the historical and scholarly discourses on the period during the change of regime. After archives were opened, numerous research initiatives were launched to study the newly accessible files. In addition to the various monographs on the revolution, beginning in the 1990s CD-ROMs and online databases were also produced. Mikó’s book constitutes a continuation of this scholarly discourse. She presents and analyzes the findings of the various projects which strove to foster and spread historical knowledge of the events and their legacy, as well as the fragmentary nature of some of the projects and the various ways in which they might be continued. Her book, which she published as the head of the Hungarian National Archive, can also be read as a kind of platform of an institutional leader.

The essential focus of the book concerns justice and compensation (in addition to questions concerning history and, more narrowly, the history of law). The tension between the various approaches to the study of historical events shapes the entire text. The cases presented and analyzed by Mikó offer a vivid illustration of how juristic solutions are unsuitable as approaches to historical questions or attempts to understand the recent past, whether we are speaking of the 1989 rehabilitation proceedings launched by the last government in power before the change of regime or the 2011 “lex-Biszku” bill (which was intended to allow the prosecution of people suspected of having committed crimes in the suppression of the revolution). In the course of her analysis, Mikó emphatically notes that “the historian raises questions (…) and searches not for juridically sound answers, but rather for answers which are appropriate from historical, professional, and moral perspectives, and she does not judge” (p.29).

Unquestionably, in the best-case scenario, the study and narration of the past should remain the task of the professional historian. In this spirit, Mikó’s analysis seeks to restore the “logical order” to the process of the repressions and reprisals. She presents the various measures that were taken, from the decisions of the political actors to the composition of the laws and the procedures adopted by the prosecutors and the courts. The cases which she has examined earlier and the systematically structured series of data shed light on the functions and the dynamics of the retaliation in the wake of the revolution. Her presentation of the internal statistical data and the political debates which took place in 1957 concerning the process of launching the mechanisms of reprisal reveal the dilemmas and ambitions of the leaders of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and the reorganized party state. The statistics concerning the summary rulings are evidence of a raw desire to take revenge and deter any and all shows of opposition, while the later data shed light on the tactics of the practice of power. One of the most interesting parts of Mikó’s analysis—and an aspect of her findings to which she gives considerable emphasis—is her presentation of the way in which people in power were confronted with the falseness of the official ideology and propaganda: as the initial reports on the reprisals made clear, the active participants in the revolution had come from the working classes, and they could hardly have been considered class enemies or “reactionary” elements known from previous epochs. The statistical and linguistic conjuring in which the party machinery engaged after having received these reports gave rise to one of the most fundamental propaganda texts.

After having presented the “constituent elements” of the mechanism of repression and reprisal, Mikó examines some of the problems that arose in the functioning of this mechanism. She examines the question of the responsibility of the judges and prosecutors, shedding light on the reestablishment of the so-called People’s Tribunals, which had served as an instrument of the communist takeover between 1945 and 1949.

In recent years, the study of the roles of collaborators and people in power has become a subject of increasingly pressing interest in public life in Hungary. This may be due in part to a kind of craving for justice, which has also become increasingly palpable in recent years, and it may similarly be due to growing recognition of the interrelationships between the databases and the various datasets which are available, as well as the lacunae in these datasets. At various points in Mikó’s narrative, she discusses persons who were active participants and collaborators in the measures that were adopted and the policies that were implemented. In the accounts of the period of reprisals and any study addressing the issue of responsibility, an assessment of their part in the events is one of the most exciting questions. Within the framework of her narrative, Mikó addresses the resistance and hesitancy of the judges and the collision of legal procedure and political expediency. The directions that were given by the Board of the Supreme Court reveal perhaps better than any other source that the trials held after the 1956 Revolution were indeed political in nature.

One essential precondition of Mikó’s analysis – and in fact of any analysis of the legal and ideological language that was used – is a clarification of the terminology and a kind of linguistic deconstruction. One of the strengths of her work is her examination of the terms (and the contexts of the terms) used in the written documents produced by the organs of power and also used in the secondary literature. She sheds light on the meanings and usefulness of the terms used to designate someone’s background. Similar key terms include conceptual, constructed, and show trials; because Mikó offers precise definitions of these terms, they prove useful tools in her analysis. True, in her assessment some of the terms should simply be rejected, as they have no meaning. For instance, the term “socialist legality,” she claims, is beyond definition. A more nuanced approach would admit the adjective ‘socialist’ in this context may simply mean ‘the lack thereof’, but could also refer to a decisive emphasis on social origins or to a formal respect for procedure.

In the wake of the conferences that were held as part of the anniversary of the revolution and the publication of almost innumerable documents on the events, both within academic circles and in public life, debates concerning the source documents on the reprisals have again flared up. According to Attila Szakolczai’s 2017 publication Koholt perek (Invented Trials), the “1957 narratives” (the narratives that were constructed by the machinery of repression) tell us nothing of 1956. Even though the book includes a photograph of Ilona Tóth, whose life and execution during the repressions is in the center of the debates among historians and people involved in the politics of memory, Mikó’s analysis does not deal with this question. And yet the study of our knowledge of the events of 1956 and the revolution could become even more complex if we were to apply similar perspectives to the individual requests and amnesty documents.

The individual cases, histories, and sources presented in the book do indeed shed light on the less familiar consequences of the reprisals. The excerpts found in the second half of the book give a strong sense of the social psychological effects of the measures that were implemented and the existential crises in people’s everyday lives (first and foremost the absence of a father or child who supported the family). The documents which constitute the main source base (files found in the Pest County Archive and the Military History Archive) provide an overview of processes which lasted decades. Interestingly, the illustrations in the book demonstrate the difficulty of presenting the local histories. The pictures present the prominent events (the trial of Imre Nagy and his alleged co-conspirators, for instance), but not the procedures which affected the masses, which perhaps cannot be presented in pictures at all. When it comes to the closed-door negotiations and the proceedings which took place far from the public eye, at most we have mug shots.

Mikó’s contentions concerning the historical research on the present also constitute a clear stance in the discourse among her contemporaries. Indeed, in many cases her suggestions seem inspiring, for instance regarding the pre-planned process and pace of Sovietizing the administration of justice. Some of her ascertainments, however, may well meet with a critical response, for instance her summary assessment that the 1963 amnesty is depicted as a watershed in mainstream historiography and her comments on the alleged failure, for the moment, of the community of historians to confront and deal with the past.

Another point of (temporal) reference in this book, which was published for the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, is 1989 and the process of regime change. At the beginning of her discussion, Mikó, drawing on the familiar essay by János Kornai, raises the following question: “is seeing justice done a necessary precondition […] of proclaiming the change of regime complete” (p.12). By raising this question, she addresses a topic that again has come into the foreground of the discussions in public life and professional circles. At the book launch of on October 20, 2016, Hungarian historian János M. Rainer, who authored the preface to the book, drew on the writings of Timothy Garton Ash and called attention to the ambivalent results of attempts to confront, study, and narrate Hungary’s past. In Hungary, measures adopted involving injured parties, victims, agents, and questions of responsibility proved both productive and unproductive in various spheres. Fundamental research is indispensable if we hope to untangle these intertwined questions (questions of justice, compensation, open files, the writing of history, and public discourses).

Zsuzsanna Mikó’s book, a monograph on the repressive measures and reprisals implemented by the Kádár regime, is an example of such a research. It is, moreover, a work of scholarship that will inspire further research in part because of Mikó’s use of sources to present the fates of individuals and in part because of the questions she raises in the individual chapters. From the perspective of the structure and organization of scholarly and scientific life, she has also provided an example of the directorial platform of a major institution. Finally, Mikó’s book can be read as a kind of progress report on the state of the historical research and scholarship on the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution.

Gábor Tabajdi
1956 Institute – Oral History Archive

Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR. Edited by Catherine Baker. London–New York: Palgrave, 2017. 259 pp.

This volume, edited by Catherine Baker, lecturer at the University of Hull, on the everyday lives of and activism among women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century is the seventeenth publication in the series Gender and History. The fifteen contributors range from PhD students to the most acknowledged experts of gender studies and women’s history, all of whom teach at universities in England and the United States. In addition to the general introduction, written by the editor, the book consists of 14 chapters. They are organized into four thematic sections which follow a chronological order. Drawing inspiration to write this book partly from social media, users of which have been preoccupied for years by certain issues related to socialist ideology (e.g. sex, fashion, traditions, etc. in the Eastern bloc), the authors seek answers to the following questions: what was the socialist woman and man supposed to be? How was the power to intervene in the structure of gender relations contested under state socialism? How did women experience the positive and negative effects of the democratic transition until the end of the 2000s?

Altogether four chapters focus on gender (in)equalities in the Soviet Union. Additionally, one study discusses the Sovietization of Armenian women, and three chapters analyze gender relations in Yugoslavia (and the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland are each represented by two chapters, occasionally in comparison with other countries of the Eastern Bloc. In contrast with these geographic units, one chapter examines the effects of the Cold War on the region’s gender history and LGBT politics from a transnational perspective. The last chapter of the book, written by Baker, is based primarily on methodologies from sociology and political science. It offers a short overview of LGBT rights after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The first part of the book provides a detailed discussion of the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods in Bohemia, the South Slavic area, and Armenia in the 1920s. The chapter on the artistic depiction of the “Czech National Mother” suggests that women’s lives were not at all separated from Bohemian nationalist politics within the framework of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. Cynthia Paces suggests that maternal symbols like the Jan Hus Memorial in Prague (which features a mother breastfeeding at the feet of Jan Hus) and the images of Anna Fischer-Dückelmann’s Die Frau als Hausärztin (The Woman as Family Doctor) demonstrated women’s fundamental roles in processes of nation building and public health and also embodied the strict expectations placed on women. The second chapter describes the characteristic features of the lesbian relationship of Nasta Rojc, the Croatian/Yugoslavian painter, and Vera Holme, the British suffragette and ambulance driver during the First World War in the territory which became Yugoslavia. Using archival sources (above all, correspondence), Baker and Dimitrijevic have developed a methodology for researching lesbian networks. In the third chapter, Jo Laycock and Jeremy Johnson compare and contrast traditional and modernized features of Armenian women’s lives (customs concerning dress and the wearing of veils, education, and paid work). According to the study, the complete Sovietization of these women did not occur in the 1920s, and the women preserved certain characteristics of their local (rural) lives. Together with the effects of the genocide against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, this created a peculiar mixture of traditionalism and modernity within Armenian society.

The second part analyzes the impact of revolution and war on the lives of ordinary people and soldiers. Erica L. Fraser concludes that revolutions follow different social and geographical trajectories. She studies the Russian Revolution (1917) within the theoretical framework of the French and the Latin American revolutionary models. Kerstin Bischl outlines the wartime conditions of the 800,000 women who fought in the Red Army between 1941 and 1945 as medical orderlies, radio operators, snipers, and pilots. This chapter is distinguished by its reliance on oral history interviews. The study by Katherine R. Jolluck also focuses on the Second World War. She examines the opposition of various groups in Poland to mass arrests, executions, acts of sexual violence, and the deportation of civilians committed by Nazi and Soviet troops. Jenny Kaminer argues that, as a consequence of Stalinization and the brutal intervention into family life in Russia after the October Revolution, the burden of childrearing was shouldered by the collective and also led to the crisis of fatherhood that persisted in the post-Soviet period.

The third thematic unit examines gender politics of state socialist regimes in the satellite states. Judit Takács presents historical evidence about the “lists of homosexuals” compiled for official state use in Hungary beginning in the 1920s. Takács provides an evaluation of the statistical data, and she emphasizes that regimes of different stripes made use of these lists. The chapter by Ivan Simic analyzes how the Yugoslav Communist Party directed its gender policies towards the youth in the second half of the 1940s. He offers a case study related to a large governmental project (“Youth Work Action”), which tried to mediate ideas about desirable gender roles. Maria Bucur applies the methodology of Alltagsgeschichte as developed by Alf Lüdtke to reconstruct the difficulties a woman living in an urban environment had to face during the Ceauşescu regime, such as lack of running water, no central heating, the scarcity of food in the shops.

The last section of the book focuses on gender during and after the democratic transition. Maria Adamson and Erika Kispeter draw interesting conclusions by comparing the labor market of the Soviet Union and Hungary. Even though several legal acts in principle established equal rights for working women, women nonetheless continued to work in positions of low prestige until the 1990s. Anna Muller analyzes gendered representations in the letters of Polish male political activists (some of whom belonged to the Solidarity movement) which were addressed to their wives. She also studies the types of relationships among political prisoners and criminal prisoners. The study by Adriana Zaharijevic delineates the place of women in the violence of war, which erupted during the transition process in Yugoslavia. She argues that feminist activism was highly determined by this war, as it continued to oppose party politics until the turn of the millennium, when feminists started to handle the state as a partner in their efforts to enforce European democratic values.

The volume builds on the growing scholarship on gender in the formerly state socialist parts of Europe, epitomized, perhaps above all, by the pioneering volume Gender and War in Eastern Europe, edited by Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur. It extends the themes and methodologies of gender studies to the post-Communist countries, in which old and new prejudices make LGBT lives the subject not only of scholarly debates, but also of political contestation. Apart from the first chapter on Czech visual culture, the volume is not rich in visual materials. The authors aim to address fellow scholars and call their attention to the importance of reconstructing local gender histories. The accurate historiographical overviews in each chapter and the selected bibliography at the end of the book serve as excellent points of departure for this.

Dóra Czeferner
University of Pécs

A Contemporary History of Exclusion: The Roma Issue in Hungary from 1945 to 2015. By Balázs Majtényi and György Majtényi. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2016. 242 pp.

A researcher in legal studies and a professor of history, both tending to use the tools of the social sciences and be sensitive about the ethical and methodological aspects of their own work, this is an excellent combination to raise the questions which are raised in the book under review (henceforth The Roma Issue). The book examines the public discourses and the policies regarding the Hungarian Gypsies/Roma from the end of World War II until the present. Despite the seeming simplicity of this formulation, the mere naming and definition of the protagonist group are far from simple matters. In the international literature, writers frequently opine that the term Roma ought to be regarded as the single correct name (analogous to the contemporary use of African American) because the more conventional cigány (Gypsy) is considered pejorative. This is not “just” a moral or political issue, but a methodological one as well, because in Hungary many more people are regarded as “Gypsy” by their non-Gypsy environment than identify themselves as Gypsy or Roma. The reasons are, on the one hand, the apparently negative associations of the word and, on the other, the fact that in most cases the mother tongue of person who is identified as “Gypsy” by the people in his or her surroundings but who does not identify as “Gypsy” him or herself is Hungarian. However, the situation is more complicated, because there are people in Hungary, including some young intellectuals and students, who, instead of the term Roma, prefer the term cigány as their self-label. The Majtényi brothers (the authors of the book under review are siblings) reflect on this problem and take neither self-evidence of the terms nor consensus concerning the definitions for granted. Instead of ignoring this question by opting for a single term, they use both as synonyms, they use both terms, in each individual case preferring one over the other for a specific contextual reason, and in some cases using the terms together: “Roma/Gypsy.” This solution is perhaps adequate inside the book, where there is room for explanation, but the term “Cigánykérdés,” or “Gypsy question,” in the original Hungarian title has been changed to “Roma Issue” in the English. This may have been a prudent choice on the part of the translator, but it does somewhat sidestep the problematic nature of the terminology.

Cigánykérdés in Hungarian, because of the secondary meaning of the word question as “problem,” is less adequate as an analytical term than the Roma/Gypsy issue in English, but it is a useful term to deal with the (social) policies and the (public) discourses regarding the Roma with the same theoretical tools. The use of this term is often met with the criticism that this kind of history cannot be equated with the history of the Roma. This is eminently true, but any attempt to narrate Roma history from inside raises other, similarly grave moral/epistemological issues, the most relevant of which is the inherent risk of ending up depicting the Roma communities in an ahistorical, essentialist manner. The perspective of The Roma Issue, to formulate it in a slightly provocative way, theoretically integrates the Roma/Gypsies into Hungarian society, even if it does so through an analysis of the social mechanisms that were and are used to discriminate, exclude, and disintegrate communities.

The book presents an exciting narrative. Between the theoretical Introduction and Summary, The Roma Issue consists of four chapters divided according to historical sub-periods. In the first of these chapters (“Comrade, If You Have a Heart…” The History of the Gypsy Issue, 1945–1961, pp.31–62) we encounter a paradox. After 1945, the communist regimes initiated and implemented radical (although not always planned) changes in every sector of society. The life of Roma, however, changed probably less than the lives of any other group, even if discrimination against them may have become less harsh and the neglect of the Roma in public discourses became less definitive in this first sub-period than it had been in the interwar era. The paradigmatic types of sources in that period were produced by the authorities, very often by the police, at a time when these institutions were “overburdened” by endeavors to discipline the whole of society. For those familiar with the history of the socialist system, the most surprising findings might be that high inherited unemployment rates among the Roma did not decline, at least not until the early 1960s, because later and for some years there was indeed almost full employment among the male Roma/Gypsies.

The Roma underwent radical social changes from the early 1960s to the end of the socialist system, as discussed in the next chapter (“Life Goes On…” The Hungarian Party-State and Assimilation, pp.63–118). The prevailing discourses of the period tried to present this development as the product of the social policy initiated due to the benevolence of the leadership and of “society” (in that order). Meanwhile, the real driving force of the process was the soft budget constraint (a concept introduced by János Kornai), in other words the insensitivity of the socialist economic units to the costs of and insatiable demand for any and all kinds of sources, including the manpower of unskilled industrial workers. This key tendency ultimately led to the fall of state socialism, but it had a favorable side-effect: the positive change of the Roma/Gypsy population’s social situation from around 1960 to the system-change in 1989/90.

During this same period, there was an (admittedly slow and limited, but in the context of the Soviet bloc, nonetheless highly relevant) process often referred to as the “softening” of the political dictatorship. Paradoxically, the authorities’ disciplinary measures taken against the Roma became harder or, more precisely, more systematic in this period. Meanwhile, the Roma and the non-Roma populations’ housing conditions, working status, lifestyle, etc. began to resemble the housing conditions, working status, and lifestyles of the non-Roma population more than even before, but the everyday expression of prejudicial attitudes and sentiments in everyday life also became more common than ever. A redefinition of the relationship between the Roma/Gypsies and the non-Roma majority would have required profound and sustained change in social discourses. But the proposals and attempts to promote this kind of discourse in the Kádár era were labeled an “oppositional political activity” (which was just a little “softer” than calling these acts “the political activity of the enemy” would have been).

It is a cruel irony of history that the system change which ushered in the freedom of political organization and the freedom of the press, while in theory it brought new opportunities for the Roma too, in fact combined the old and the new disadvantages without the advantages of any of the two previous periods (see the chapter Roma Policy after the Regime Change, pp.119–86). To cite two examples, first, the most important development of the Kádár era—full employment among the Roma—faded with the regime change. Second, although a new and more extensive discourse has emerged regarding the Roma/Gypsies in the twenty-first century, this discourse has not been defined by representatives of Roma movements or civil right activists. Furthermore, the “civil rights activism” on behalf of the Roma is again viewed as an illegitimate form of political activity in present-day Hungary (Panopticon: Roma Policy, 2010–2015, pp.187–203).

The Majtényi duo strove throughout their inquiry to remain scholarly and analytical. The thoroughness with which they approached the issues and questions made it inevitable that they would highlight moral and political aspects. Theirs is a dangerous, but respectable enterprise.

Csaba Dupcsik
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2014_1_BookReviews

pdfVolume 3 Issue 1 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

 

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder. New York: Basic Books, 2010. xix + 524 pp.

Soviet style Communism may not have lost all of its appeal. Stockholm “boasts” a bar aptly named KGB after the dreaded Soviet political police and dedicated to the Soviet Union. The walls are adorned with tasteless communist memorabilia. Would a public place commemorating the Gestapo, complete with swastikas and Nazi memorabilia, be conceivable? In a brilliant analysis, Timothy Snyder explains two of the worst genocides in modern history as products in part of interaction between the two most repressive and tyrannical regimes. The nature of this interaction is exemplified by the fact that “Stalinism had displaced east European Jews from their historical position as victims of the Germans, and embedded them instead in an account of an imperialist conspiracy against communism. From there, it was but a small step to present them as part of a conspiracy of their own. And thus the communists’ hesitation to distinguish and define Hitler’s major crime tended, as the decades passed, to confirm an aspect of Hitler’s worldview” (p.376).

Timothy Snyder’s now almost iconic Bloodlands has debunked Stalin and the communist leadership of the Soviet Union as the perpetrators of one of the most massive crimes against humanity in history and the rulers of a terroristic state rivaled in Europe only by Hitler’s regime —after 1939. The novelty is not the comparison of the two states and tyrannical systems, but the analysis of the two regimes without the usual bias towards the Soviet Union and the focus on the role of the dynamics of Soviet and German policies in the escalation of mass killings, which yields the revelation that the ideologically motivated quest for (absurdly conceived) security led them both to mass murder. The implication of Snyder’s work is that in the competitive quest between the Stalinist Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany for the creation of an ideologically grounded empire and the attainment of world domination, the Soviet Union was in no way a morally superior system. Both were equally monstrous, tyrannical, oppressive, disdainful of human dignity and murderous. Stalin had no desire to oppose Hitler. Had he had a choice, he would have chosen cooperation with the Nazis. Hence Hitler’s attack does not make the Soviet system more virtuous than the National Socialist, which does not diminish the merit of the efforts mounted by Soviet citizens in fighting the German invaders for their home and sheer survival. Stalin’s war against Hitler was not a crusade against tyranny, but a life and death struggle for the survival of his regime. The defeat of Hitlerism was a result of this struggle for self-preservation; the liberation of Europe from the Nazi yoke was not the motivating factor in Stalin’s war. After all, in 1937 Stalin toasted “the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin” (p.72) and declared that “people belonging to national minorities should be… shot like mad dogs.” By then he and his entourage had murdered millions. The question was why. One of the main merits of Snyder’s work is to show that Stalinist genocides targeted both class enemies and ethnic minorities to an equal extent.1

However, some of the arguments in the book are problematic. Snyder asserts that Stalin was “abandoning” the kind of Marxism according to which people “opposed the revolution because of their class background.” According to Snyder, “with Stalinism something was changing; normal state security concerns had infused the Marxist language and changed it unalterably.” In the show trials the accused were charged with having betrayed the Soviet Union to foreign powers: “Theirs was a class struggle, according to the accusation, only in the most indirect and attenuated sense: they supposedly had aided states that represented the imperialist states that encircled the homeland of Communism” (p.85). In fact Snyder concludes that existence “no longer preceded essence,” “politics was no longer comprehensible in terms of class struggle,” (p.109) and most emphatically, “the Soviet Union was no longer an ideological state” (p.116). Of course if one reduces Marxist/Stalinist ideology to the dimension of internal (but not external) security, Snyder’s argument could be plausible. Even then it would be good to see a sociological analysis of the national victims of Stalin’s killings. Yet “ideology” and “class struggle” were not uni-dimensional. For anyone who was educated in a communist state, the proposition that state security is part and parcel of class struggle does not sound like the antithesis of class struggle at all. On the contrary, the extension of the enemy status to ethnic groups allegedly in the service of foreign powers plotting to undermine communism was the logical conclusion of the struggle against class enemies, resistance to which, according to Stalinist logic, intensified even though the relentless struggle against them allegedly diminished their numbers. The script of the Rajk trial in Hungary demonstrated this link. Leninism and Stalinism extended class struggle to the international scene, and in fact the “theory” of communism encompassed an international struggle between the progressive forces of history and retrograde imperialism. The Novikov telegram (Novikov was the Soviet ambassador in Washington at the time, but the ideas put forth in the document are usually attributed to Vyacheslav Molotov), which was penned in 1946 in order to underpin ideologically the Bolshevization of Eastern Europe and the schism with the West, attests to this logic. Communism was more than a struggle with domestic enemies: it was conceived as a global struggle. In addition, communist ideology was more than a fight against enemies.

Stalin’s absurd security concerns stemmed from the fact that he looked at the world through the lens of a communist ideology that he himself formulated. Moreover, communism encompassed more than just class struggle. It was a belief in progress towards “communism,” which meant the withering away of the state, the ability of economic planning to overcome economic cycles, unemployment and exploitation. One would have to overlook the mountains of evidence and the history of the Soviet export of communism to Eastern Europe to claim that the Soviet Union was not an ideological state. Societies in Stalin’s USSR and in Eastern Europe, where the Stalinist system was transplanted, were permeated with communist ideology, and plenty of people cherished a belief in communist ideology. As the historian Peter Kenez, who grew up in Stalinist Hungary, put it, “Many were careerists… but… genuine hypocrisy is difficult… It is better and easier to convince ourselves that what we say is true. There was a group of people who had become Communists long ago and had spent their lives remaining faithful to their original commitments.” Kenez also noted that in the Soviet Union “the people who consciously and completely repudiated the lies that are at the foundation of every repressive society were in a tiny minority.”2 Economic history also underscores the fact that the Soviet Union adhered to Marxist notions to the end of its existence, although it should be noted that economic development did have a security dimension. Let it suffice to say that when in 1946 Eugene (Jenő) Varga revised a basic tenet of Marxist economic thought, he was forced to revoke his thesis.

Bloodlands attributes the two greatest genocides in modern history, Stalinist and Nazi killings, to Stalin and Hitler’s attempts to construct a self-sufficient empire. They both targeted agriculture, albeit for different reasons. Stalin murdered kulaks to promote collectivization in order to support Soviet industrialization; Hitler turned east to provide a lasting source of food for Germans through colonization and the murder of the indigenous population. In Poland both Hitlerites and Stalinists first targeted the same group for extinction: the Polish intelligentsia. In the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltics, German liquidation squads committed mass murders in the very places where the NKVD had done so before them, sometimes killing the sole family member to have survived Soviet slaughters. Nazi and Soviet systems interacted to produce the mass killings. Mayhem descended into an irrational vortex in the murderous German occupation of the Soviet Union, in which the initial support enjoyed by the occupiers was fueled by the locals’ hatred of the system to which many of their friends and family members had fallen victim before the Germans came. “Germans killed Jews as partisans, and many Jews became partisans. The Jews who became partisans were serving the Soviet regime, and were taking part in a Soviet policy to bring retributions upon civilians.” The partisan war in Belarus was “a perversely interactive effort of Hitler and Stalin” (p.250).

Snyder is at his best in his interpretation of the dynamics of the events; the escalation of Stalinist murder, the interactions that brought about the brutalization of the war in the east to levels unmatched in Europe’s not terribly peaceful history. However his explanation of Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union and the related German decision to annihilate European Jewry is weakened by contradictions within his argument.

How could so many lives be brought to a violent end? Snyder seems to say that the killings were products of failed policies. In his assessment, the failure of collectivization in the USSR and the failure of Operation Barbarossa brought about the Holocaust. Thus genocide appears to have happened almost by default as a result of Hitler’s and Stalin’s botched utopic visions: “they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory” (pp.387–88). Yet the death of millions may not have been ersatz victory for the two dictators, but their primary purpose. Furthermore, they did not act alone, but required the collaboration and cooperation of countless people from many walks of life in order to carry out the mass murders, and these murders were often committed with great enthusiasm or opportunism. The broad array of motives (greed, ideological zeal, racial, national and ethnic hatred) remain largely unexplored, so the killings are not sufficiently explained.3 Is it convincing to argue that the failure of collectivization caused Stalin’s policy of starvation, or that Hitler shifted to mass murder and presented it as an end in itself after the defeat in Moscow and the United States’ entry into the war?

The narrative leading up to Snyder’s explanation of the Final Solution starts with the road to war. The author takes it for granted that Hitler’s aim was to colonize the East, meaning Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, in order to satisfy his vision of German colonization there. Yet if this was the case, why did Hitler first wish to destroy not Poland but Czechoslovakia, and preferably by way of war? At first glance, this might seem irrelevant to Snyder’s narrative, but if these were indeed Hitler’s long-term goals, he was taking a risk regarding their attainment. If colonization in the East was what he sought, why risk defeat in Czechoslovakia? One should remember that on paper at least Czechoslovakia was guaranteed by France and the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia had absolutely no importance in a future campaign against Poland or the Soviet Union. Thus it was an odd choice to take on one of Central Europe’s strongest military powers when the Wehrmacht was not yet ready. Furthermore, what would have happened if Poland had decided to accept the German demands for Danzig and an extraterritorial passage to East Prussia? Some historians believe, moreover, that Great Britain was Hitler’s main prize, and knocking out the USSR, Hitler hoped, would force the British to come to terms.4 Contemplating Hitler’s goals in the war sheds light on the ultimate aims of Nazi policies. Yet the British option is not discussed at all, and Snyder makes no attempt to offer an explanation as to why Hitler attacked Britain. In fact there is evidence to suggest that the Germans may have been amenable to the idea of prolonging the truce with Stalin. Molotov went to Berlin in November 1940 to negotiate a modus vivendi in Europe. It was only after the talks failed due to Molotov’s refusal to cede Bulgaria to Germany that Hitler gave the final order for Operation Barbarossa. Yet Snyder does not mention the Berlin talks. More recently a debate emerged on the notion of preemptive attack, more precisely the contention was made that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union because he learned that Stalin was preparing for war against Germany. This position is incompatible with Snyder’s position. Perhaps one does not want to buy into this assumption, but the pros and cons of this argument brought new facts to light and gave rise to new interpretations regarding Hitler’s and Stalin’s motives.5 As Snyder’s arguments revolve around the two dictators’ concepts of security, it would have been useful to have presented the main ideas of this debate.6 I would tend to agree that given Hitler’s worldview, the destruction of Bolshevism may have been his main war aim, but I feel that the reader should be made aware of the dilemmas and controversies, as well as the lacunae in our knowledge.

Snyder’s explanation of the war against the Soviet Union is also problematic. He argues that “Hitler’s economic vision could be realized only after actual military conflict” (p.159). According to Snyder, “the Soviet Union was the only realistic source of calories for Germany and its Western European Empire” (p.161). Colonization was motivated by access to agricultural space, which in turn was allegedly needed to grow enough food to supply a growing number of Germans. Potentially there was ample food available for Hitler’s Germans without the resort to war as a result of exploitative bilateral clearing agreements. Through this ingenious arrangement, Germany received essential items, including foodstuffs, from the Soviet Union, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In fact the latter three sold much of their surplus to Germany, the market of which helped them emerge from recession. Eventually Germany was not paying for the shipments it received (the mechanism of the clearing agreements made this possible with impunity). The fact that exports from Southeast Europe declined after 1939 can be partly attributed to the war.7 Mark Mazower’s conclusion that Nazi racial goals were the raison d’être of the war in the East seems more convincing.8

Snyder’s explanation of the evolution of the Final Solution flows from his presentation of the war against the Soviet Union as having been ineluctable. Originally, or so Snyder argues, Hitler sought a peaceful solution, the emigration of European Jews to distant lands. Only when this turned out to be impossible did killing come to the forefront. Again this idea is presented without any attempt at a dialogue with other positions on this complicated issue. Snyder claims that deportation to Madagascar was the original “plan.” Snyder claims that, “In late 1940 and early 1941, the Royal Navy prevented Hitler’s Oceanic version of the Final Solution,” as the British still controlled the sea lanes (p.160). Madagascar definitely floated around as a “solution” to the “Jewish Question.” For instance, the Hungarian Nazis openly talked about it in the early 1940s and even after extermination became official policy in Germany. Was this a plan in a technical sense? On page 159 Snyder asserts that the Germans lacked the ships necessary to invade Britain. If the Germans lacked the capacity to carry a few hundred thousand troops across the channel, how would the deportation of millions of people to an island in the Indian Ocean have been possible? Ground transportation was also a problem: German planners understood that the deportation of 160, 000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto to the Generalgouvernement would require 200 days.9 As Saul Friedländer put it, Hitler may have used “the Madagascar idea as a metaphor for the expulsion of the Jews from the continent.”10 Hitler was aware of the logistical problem. When Martin Bormann asked how they were to be shipped there, he answered ironically, “A Strength through Joy Fleet?”11

Bloodlands runs into a similar difficulty with the claim that the Nazis hoped to use the Soviet Union as a dumping ground for Jews. Snyder notes that “[t]he allied Soviet Union had rejected Germany’s proposal to import two million European Jews” (pp.160–61). How serious this proposal was we do not actually learn, but Snyder contends that “if Germany conquered the Soviet Union, it could use Soviet territories as it pleased” (p.161). Later in the book he argues that, “Russia is vast: the Germans never even aimed to colonize more than its western fifth” (p.336). It is hard to see how they could have dumped millions of unwanted people there if the full stretch of the country was not to be a German colony.

In Snyder’s view Hitler and his leaders did not originally intend to kill all the Jews. The Final Solution, rather, was the result of a lack of other options and the German failure in the war against the Soviet Union. “Six months after Operation Barbarossa was launched, Hitler had reformulated the war aims such that the physical extermination of the Jews became the priority” (p.187). “When the war was lost, Hitler called the mass murder of the Jews his victory” (p.388). The question is whether Hitler knew in early December that he had lost the war. And could he ever openly call the killing of the Jews his victory and hence substitute it for victory in the war to the German people? We know that everything about the killings was kept secret as far as possible. Snyder contends that the physical liquidation of European Jews was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, according to him it was a resolution that evolved during the first phase of the war.

Snyder’s argument may be problematic on several important points. In the fall of 1941 Hitler did not know that the invasion of the Soviet Union would fail, and neither did anyone else, including people with a far more astute perception of the situation than Hitler. Snyder himself claims on page 211 that “Even after the failures of Operations Barbarossa and Typhoon, Hitler… seemed to believe that he could conquer the USSR in early 1942.” It is more reasonable to assume that even in 1942, “victory was assumed to lie only a few months away” (p.379). It is therefore difficult to believe that the Holocaust was a substitute for a victory that Hitler thought he could still obtain. However, Snyder’s argument rests on this claim if we are to believe that Hitler adopted the Final Solution in response to a dramatic constellation of events. One factor was the alleged realization that Germany could not win the war; the other was the formation of the grand alliance: “Jews as such would be killed as retribution for the U.S.–U.K.–USSR alliance” (p.217). Hitler announced on December 12 that “the world war is here. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.” As Snyder asserts, Hitler became convinced that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy had brought Germany into war with all three powers. This would make sense only if the United States had declared war on Germany, which was not the case. Snyder admits that the United States reciprocated the German declaration of war. Even Hitler’s warped mind could not have missed that point. Thus the question should be why Hitler actually brought about the Grand Alliance by declaring war on the United States.

In addition, Snyder’s own chronology throws into question the argument that Hitler made up his mind to kill the Jews only in December. Himmler, as Snyder asserts, “endorsed the killing of women and children in July 1941” (p.197) and “the total extermination of Jewish communities in August 1941” (p.206). The “death factory” of Bełżec was established in “late October 1941” (pp.255–56), and the Chełmno facility was gassing Jews “as of December 1941” (p.258). This was hardly a result of a new policy initiative after the coalition came into existence later that month. Goebbels stated on November 16 that the fate of the Jews would be annihilation. Finally, one would need to demonstrate that there was a change of paradigm in Jewish policy before and after December 1941. In fact, mass killings to exterminate Jews were already taking place in 1941. Even though it was the preferred option, exterminating the Jews may not have become automatic, even after 1941. The policy of exterminating Hungarian Jews was an evolutionary policy in 1944, and immediate, total liquidation was the desired outcome, although it conflicted with a pressing need for forced labor in the Jägerstab program.12 Snyder constructed a timeline of events that would support his argument that the extermination of the Jews became the only Nazi option when Hitler no longer believed in victory. In doing so, he may have underestimated the murderous propensity of Hitlerism. Victory was not yet beyond reach for the Germans in 1941 or even 1942, although it was delayed. My intention is not so much to address the question of whether German extermination policies were predetermined or escalated (radicalized), but rather to observe that by introducing the formation of the Grand Alliance as the trigger for the implementation of the policy to kill all Jews, in my reading Snyder has rationalized a policy the real foundation of which, in my assessment, was irrational hate.

Snyder argues that Hitler could still have reversed his policies in December 1941, much as Antonescu did. This statement obscures the difference between the two leaders. Antonescu may have been a murderous anti-Semite who presided over the annihilation of 300,000 people in territories attached to Romania after the Soviets were pushed back by the Wehrmacht. Yet he was a Romanian nationalist first and acted in (his perception of) Romania’s national interest. The Jews in Romania proper were his Jews, not the Germans’ Jews, and their fate would be decided according to the perceived national interests of Romania. Unlike Hitler, Antonescu did not construct an ideology around mortal struggle for the survival of his race.13 Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Hungarian National Socialists, understood that Hitler’s mission was to “struggle against international Jewry.” Szálasi was a self-professed Jew hater. He called the Jews “executioners of the peoples,” and he sought to expel all Jews from Hungary and the continent, but he did not share other aspects of Hitler’s racist ideology. He too was first and foremost a nationalist. This explains why Szálasi refused to hand over Hungary’s remaining several hundred thousand Jews to the Germans after they installed him in power in October 1944. Eichmann had to content himself with 60,000 forced laborers who were “lent” to him by the Hungarian Nazi leader, but whom Szálasi expected to get back after the war.14

Robert Jervis has remarked that in order to kill Jews the Germans sacrificed security.15 This would be true if German politics had been anything close to rational. In fact, for Hitler and many of his followers killing Jews was a prerequisite of security, indeed of the very survival of the German race. Snyder actually cites sources to support this claim, but he fails to go as far as his sources potentially could have taken him. He understates the essence of Nazism and presents the drive to kill all members of a group of people as a product of rational politics. An Austrian policeman wrote to his wife of his emotions while killing Jews: “I aimed calmly and shot surely at the men, women and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat the same, if not ten times worse.” General Gustav von Becholsteim advocated the mass murder of Jews as a preventive measure, arguing that had the Soviets invaded Europe, the Jews, who were “no longer humans,” would have exterminated Germans (pp.205–6). As Goebbels put it, Jews were “suffering a gradual process of annihilation” that they had “intended for us.” In a recent book Wendy Lower has reconstructed the genocidal mindset of the many thousands of German women who went on a torture and killing spree against the Jews in the East. Lower cites a wartime letter penned by a woman who “took dictation” from Hitler: “Our people immigrating here [to the Ukraine] do not have an easy task, but there are many possibilities to achieve great things […] One comes to the conclusion that the foreign people are not suitable for various reasons […] an admixture of blood between the controlling strata, the German element and the foreign people would occur. That would be a cardinal breach […] of the need to preserve our Nordic racial inheritance and our future would then take a similar course to that of… the Roman Empire.” Killing may not have been “a substitute for triumph” (p.215).16 In Snyder’s portrayal, economics (the “foundation” in Marxist thought) underlay Stalin’s and Hitler’s killing sprees. But Hitler did not need to kill in order to get all the food he needed and more from the East. The bilateral clearing agreements that Hitler had signed with his clients (Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union) worked well, and Germany was receiving goods even when it was no longer paying for them. Even when one considers the food needs of a “thousand-year” Reich, more traditional colonial practices would have sufficed, assuming that food shortage was a primary factor in Nazi politics at all.

The thesis that the killings of 1932–1945 were an interaction between the two tyrannical powers is persuasive for many of the areas under discussion. It breaks down for Hungary and even Yugoslavia and Slovakia, where the Holocaust had nothing to do with Stalin or the Soviet Union. The statement that Hungarian Jews (or most but not all of them I should say) were murdered in the “Bloodlands” does not help explain why this last chapter (one of the most rapid and devastating episodes) of the Final Solution took place. For a clearer understanding of the motivations of the many participants in the politics of genocide it would have been interesting to compare the motivations of leaders like Antonescu, Szálasi, Tiso and Ante Pavelić, as well as to contrast the peculiarities of the Romanian Holocaust, which created its own “bloodlands,” with the Holocaust in Hungary, which used its own territory as a killing ground to a much smaller extent. In one sentence, for a more universal explanation of Nazi genocide, the geographical scope ought to have been slightly extended.17 After all, the title of the book does claim to discuss “Europe.” This is not to say that I fault the author for not providing a more systematic, country-by-country account of Nazi or Communist rule in Europe. Yet the vast number of victims of the Holocaust in the Yugoslav territories and in territories under Romanian and Hungarian jurisdiction would have justified a comparison with “bloodlands,” all the more so since a comparison of the methods that were used would have provided further insights into the mindsets and motives of the perpetrators.

In Snyder’s account, as in many recent accounts of the genocides that occurred in twentieth-century Europe, the comfortable notion of a leader-centric world (Stalin and Hitler and their close knit group) is shattered. No longer can we comfort ourselves with the thought that the tyrants’ maniacal visions were shared by only a few. Mass murder was not just part of Hitler’s and Stalin’s agendas, but rather was part of an agenda shared by many of their compatriots of every rank and file. Mass murder, dehumanization, and the persecution of tens of millions on racial and social grounds was a product of a quest for state/racial security that is not security understood in the normal sense. The Stalinist and National Socialist security dilemma arose through the lens of two ideologies of hatred and prescribed the annihilation or at least the incarceration of millions as a sine qua non of state/national survival. Snyder underestimates the scope of communist genocide perpetrated against foreign nationals after the war. On page 318 he asserts that the Soviets took 287,000 people as laborers from East European countries, but he makes no mention of the tremendous death toll. From Hungary alone almost 230,000 civilians were taken in so-called cleansing actions, and together with POWs some 600,000 Hungarians languished in labor camps, where roughly a third of them may have perished.18 And this is just the Hungarian figure. Snyder is also mistaken that Noel Field was not tried in the Rajk trial (p. 318). He was, and he was held in prison until his release after Stalin’s death. Moreover, Rajk’s main crime was not that he was allegedly an agent of Field, although this may have been the first script of the trial. Rather, he was convicted primarily for his purported service to Tito’s Yugoslavia, revealing a new, ominous turn in Stalin’s lethal paranoia.

These qualifications notwithstanding, Bloodlands is a brilliant analysis and a deeply emphatic and humanistic approach to suffering and its causes in an all but forgotten part of Europe. It is likely to be read and debated for a long time to come.

László Borhi

1 In an important book on Hitler’s rule in Europe, Mark Mazower contrasted national socialist killing to Stalinist killing by claiming that the purpose of Soviet policy was “social revolution and not national purification.” Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 98.

2 Peter Kenez, “Dealing with Discredited Beliefs,” Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 369–77, 376.

3 For the strength of microhistory in explaining the complex web of motivations in both participation in and resistance to persecution, see Omer Bartov, “Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941–1944,” in Shatterzone of Empires – Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands, ed. Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press, 2013), 399–422. Alexander Prusin, “A ’Zone of Violence’: The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Eastern Galicia in 1914–1915 and 1941,” ibid. 362–77.

4 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 137. See also John Lukacs, The Duel: 10 May – 31 July 1940: the Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2001). We know that Hitler and the German military leadership were still interested in a landing in Britain shortly before they launched the attack on the Soviet Union. See Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941 (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe, 1965).

5 Several authors have argued that the doctrine of “interimperialistic contradictions” shaped Stalin’s policy. This again proves the ideological nature of Soviet thinking.

6 For good overviews see e.g. Chris Bellamy, Absolute War – Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Gerhard Wettig, Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: The Emergence and Development of East–West Conflict, 1939–1953 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

7 György Ránki, The Economics of the Second World War (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993).

8 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 104.

9 See on this and more details on the “Madagascar Plan” Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’ Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1990).

10 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination – Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 81.

11 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 120.

12 Gábor Kádár, Zoltán Vági, A végső döntés: Berlin, Budapest, Birkenau 1944 [The Final Decision: Berlin, Budapest, Birkenau 1944] (Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó, 2013). For a similar argument see also Tim Cole, Holocaust City – The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York–London: Routledge, 2003). For a view that the Germans had a “master plan” when they invaded Hungary, see Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide – The Holocaust in Hungary, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

13 For an outstanding biography of Antonescu see Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

14 Rudolf Paksa, Szálasi Ferenc és a hungarizmus [Ferenc Szálasi and the Hungarist Movement] (Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó–MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, 2013), on his views regarding Jews and Hitler’s struggle: 66–67. See also László Karsai, Reflektor a sötétbe. Szálasi Ferenc naplója 1943. szeptember 15–1944. július 18. 1–-2. [Reflector in the Dark. The Diary of Ferenc Szálasi] Beszélő 13, no. 3. (2008) 54–76; Beszélő 13, no. 4. (2008), 60–79.

15 Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York–London: Routledge, 2005).

16 Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013), 215.

17 For a geographically broader approach to violence in twentieth-century Europe see Keith Lowe, Savage Continent – Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2012).

18 Stark Tamás, Magyar foglyok a Szovjetunióban [Hungarian Prisoners in the Soviet Union] (Budapest: Lucidus, 2006).

 

Régi könyvek, új csillagok [Old Books, New Stars]. By Gábor Farkas. (Humanizmus és Reformáció, 32. kötet.) Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2011. 282 pp.

Few people would think that a supernova in the Early Modern Era would be of much interest to anyone apart from a few small circles of historians of the science of astronomy. Yet the “new star” that appeared in the skies in 1572, the glow of which was visible for a time even in daylight, has become a central character in numerous works of scholarly literature, including studies written on the history of philosophy and accounts of the emergence of the modern concept of the world. How can an exploding star have attracted interest from such an array of fields of inquiry? The answer to this question lies in the role it played in a paradigm shift, for interpretations of its appearance in the sky prompted a shift in visions of the world. In the Middle Ages it represented a sudden and unexpected assault on (or at least challenge to) the ruling Aristotelian-Ptolemaic conception of the universe. According to this conception of the world, change, creation, and destruction could only take place in the sphere beneath the moon, in other words on the planet earth, which was at the center of the universe. The celestial bodies beyond the moon were in a realm of perfection in which only the most perfect form of motion, the circle, was possible, and stars were neither created nor destroyed. It was not possible for a celestial body to move in an ellipse in the sphere of perfection, and naturally comets could not orbit among them, since they were regarded as atmospheric phenomena, similar to falling stars, rain, clouds, fog, wind, and lightening. This conception of the universe, which gradually began to lose its plausibility over the course of the seventeenth century and today is regarded as elegant but utterly inadequate and inaccurate, was accepted for over a millennium. It constituted an entirely satisfactory framework for interpretation of celestial phenomena. Its unraveling was a long and gradual process one of the most important milestones of which was the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, or On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in 1543. From the perspective of the impact it had on thinking at the time, however, the new star that flared up in 1572 in the sphere of the fixed stars (in other words in the part of the universe where such things were not supposed to happen) but then vanished some 18 months later (in fact it was a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia) was even more momentous than Copernicus’ work, which only later acquired the revolutionary significance we attribute to it today.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, Gábor Farkas’ new book documents the effects of this momentous occurrence. He examines the impact of the event on cultural circles in Hungary and the broader European context in the Early Modern Era. Since the celestial phenomenon represented something of a shock to the scholars at the time and could hardly be accommodated to their understanding of the universe, observations and reflections on the significance of the supernova appeared in great numbers and numerous debates were held on its meaning (in all likelihood the star mentioned by Barnardo in act 1, scene 1 of Hamlet is a reference to this). Farkas demonstrates clearly that the responses to the event cannot be divided simply into an acceptance or a rejection of the Ptolemaic understanding of the cosmos. Many other possibilities were raised. For instance, some people understood it as a unique divine miracle, a celestial sign that did not contradict the medieval vision of the universe. Others insisted that it was an atmospheric phenomenon, merely a comet that somehow had lost its tail. It was also understood simply as the light released by the celestial bodies, concentrated in a given point in the skies.

The methodology on which the book rests is a close reading of the many responses given to the event and a thorough examination of the dissemination of the ideas on the basis of the history of books and readings (this is hardly surprising, since the author is a student and colleague of István Monok, a distinguished and prolific scholar of the field, as one reads in the acknowledgements). Farkas uses materials in libraries currently in use and data regarding the collections of libraries that once existed to examine which books were owned by whom in the Carpathian Basin, whether or not we can presume that the owners of these books actually read them, and what marginal notes they contain. This philological inquiry develops into a kind of history of mentalities. Farkas’ comparison of the various sources, the reactions to the real and imagined celestial events, and the astronomical, theological, and astrological interpretations casts light on the scientific theories, superstitions, and religious and political ideas that preoccupied scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study of responses to the supernova offers insights into the mentality of the intelligentsia of the era, which was influenced by the celestial event, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) by its classical education.

The appearance of comets and the celestial phenomena that accompany comets have traditionally been associated with natural disasters, plagues, and the commencement of severe cold fronts. One of the interesting aspects of the book is the contrasts it brings to light between the observations we would have expected people to make and the observations they actually made. People of the time often made no mention whatsoever of celestial phenomenon that took place in their lifetimes and that we consider significant today, while other occurrences that according to contemporaries were in some way related to natural disasters or important political events are given considerable attention in the sources, including occurrences that today we think may well not actually have taken place. For instance, as noted in the micro-historical discussion of the 1595 military campaign of Zsigmond Báthory in Wallachia, the allegedly inauspicious appearance of an eagle was linked to the appearance of a new star, but the existence of this new star is not confirmed by other sources. Thorough and methodical study of the textual sources and the depictions that have survived in old prints reveals how the prince’s court and the Jesuits used a topos familiar from the works of classical authors, tying a political shift to a celestial event in order to legitimize the acts of the prince. At times this was the foundation for an observation concerning the movements of celestial bodies.

One of the most interesting chapters of the book concerns the reception of the ideas of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler (in other words the reception of the new understanding of the heavens) in Hungary. Farkas first discusses the extent to which these works were disseminated across Western Europe (surprisingly Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was read in far wider circles than traditionally thought or than Arthur Koestler contends in his famous book, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe). He then examines which editions of these works can be found in Hungary today (or were ever in Hungary) and how the ideas they contained were received. As Farkas notes in his summary, this reception did not go beyond a very narrow layer of the intelligentsia, and some of these intellectuals purchased the books of the three “world-shattering” astronomers second-hand. Boldizsár Battyhány, András Dudith, Ferenc Krasznai and János Zsámboky were perhaps the only people in Hungary to purchase the books soon after their publication. As this inquiry into this aspect of the history of reading in Hungary demonstrates, while the reception of works of modern physics in Hungary was not entirely negligible, until the end of the seventeenth century Aristotle continued to be regarded as the primary authority in the natural sciences.

The book is a pleasure to read, its rich, lengthy list of sources notwithstanding, and its publication constitutes an important contribution to the study of the history of science in Hungary. If I were to venture one critical remark, I would have been curious to have read a bit more about the extent to which the author, given his knowledge of the sources, regards physics and astronomy in Hungary as peripheral or able to catch up. While he does give a brief answer to this question at the end of the book, Farkas could have devoted a bit more attention to the impressions he gathered in the course of his study of the sources. The book concludes with a detailed appendix in which the reader finds data concerning editions of the works of the three great astronomers in Hungary, a list of observations of comets in the sixteenth century, and a considerably longer list of observations of alleged celestial phenomena that scholars have been otherwise unable to confirm.

Translated by Thomas Cooper

Benedek Láng

 

Köleséri Sámuel tudományos levelezése 1709–1732 [The Scientific Correspondence of Sámuel Köleséri]. By Zsigmond Jakó. (Kölesériana 1.) Edited by Zsuzsa Font. Latin text edited and summaries written by László András Magyar. Cluj: Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület, 2012. 256 pp.

In 1969, Zsigmond Jakó, one of the most prominent medievalists in international scholarship, wrote a captivating article in German on the early period of Enlightenment thought in East Central Europe and, within this, one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment in Transylvania in the early eighteenth century, Sámuel Köleséri. Although the article was published also in Romanian and Hungarian, to this day only the members of a small circle have a grasp of the importance of the array of sources on which it rests. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jakó pursued research in libraries and archives in the cities of Sibiu, Braşov, and Cluj, where he compiled an indispensable collection of documents from Köleséri’s correspondence with other scientists and scholars. However, he did not publish the documents he had assembled, but rather, in the interests of facilitating further research, passed them on to Bálint Keserű, with whom he had been continuously exchanging ideas on the unsolved questions of Transylvanian cultural history, and the Department of Hungarian Literature at the University of Szeged. Thanks to Keserű’s efforts, a team was organized under the leadership of Zsuzsa Font, and the 112 letters that had been collected by Jakó were published, along with 14 additional letters collected by the group in Szeged.

This book is particularly significant in part simply because of the remarkable personality of Köleséri, who was born in 1663 and died in 1732. As we learn about the various twists and turns in his life, we get an impression of the exceptional breadth and span of his career. He was the child of a Hungarian Calvinist family. His parents had intended for him to adhere to family tradition and become a pastor, but he decided not to complete a doctorate in theology, but rather to pursue studies in the medical sciences and mine-engineering and then to immerse himself in the world of the natural sciences, which was beginning to gain increasing importance. This decision was soon followed by a political event that was to have a shaping effect on his life, namely the incorporation of Transylvania into the Habsburg Empire. As his family was Calvinist, one would assume that he would not have welcomed this change and would have showed signs of at least passive resistance, along with many other Transylvanian protestants. Köleséri did not do this, but he also did not simply bide time and wait to see what would come. Rather he sought out fields in which he could make useful contributions while also satisfying his curiosities and interests as a scientist. Various signs suggest that he attempted to do this in part by regarding his homeland as part of a larger Southeast European region and working to promote cultural growth and development in the interests of cultivating a “civilized” society. (His recommendations concerning methods of containing plague epidemics, which were repeatedly breaking out, and his suggestions regarding hygienic measures and important tasks in the economic sphere offer concrete examples of his commitment to his vision, which derived from his profound sense of mission as a doctor.)

Naturally not every aspect of the career of a scientist, even a scientist who is acting out of motives such as these, is so clearly oriented towards the practical. Keeping pace with the scientific tendencies of Europe in the early eighteenth century, he authored works that deal with the geology and history of the region (of these, one of the most important is Auraria Romano-Dacica, which was published in 1717), as well as notions regarding the history of Earth as a whole, notions that made the fossils found in the cliffs both in the Alps and in the Carpathian mountains exciting findings for him. This is an additional reason why he deserves a place of distinction in the history of science, for he was one of the first people to accept the “diluvial doctrine” (in other words the belief that world history was drastically affected by a great flood or floods) in the study of rock deposits, and alongside Johann Jacob Scheuchzer he played an important role in enriching the source materials on which this doctrine was based. Miklós Kázmér, a Hungarian natural scientist, recently identified eight findings sent by Köleséri in the Cambridge Woodwardian Collection (which is named after John Woodward, the inventor of the doctrine). While neither Scheuchzer nor Köleséri was timid, they were clearly accepted as members of the Royal Society because of the importance of their findings (Scheuchzer’s son was also made a member of the Society).

I have already mentioned one of the principal topics of the correspondence, but as is perhaps not surprising given that we are speaking of the exchange of ideas between two natural polymaths in the eighteenth century, the correspondence addresses an array of other subjects pertaining to the sciences. Köleséri was intensely interested in the questions of linguistic relationships, and in his writings he touches for instance on the practical problems of compiling a Finno-Ugric glossary and also on the possible relationship between Romanian and Welsh. Influenced by one of the prominent traditions of Central European humanism, he was preoccupied with the antiquities, understood in the broadest sense, of the Roman province of Dacia. He also deals with questions that were being raised at the time in philosophical inquiries, though to a smaller extent. As his exchange of letters with Michael Gottlieb Hansch reveals, he was remarkably versed in these question as well, and Christin Wolff, whose privations in Germany he seems to have looked on with great compassion, had a significant influence on his thinking. Some of the references indicate that for a time at least he exchanged letters with Wolff himself, although these letters have not survived. His other letters not only give a clear impression of his insatiable thirst for knowledge, but also reveal the difficulties with which he had to contend in order to maintain his erudition and his knowledge of many fields of inquiry, both of which were virtually unparalleled in East Central Europe.

What Köleséri wrote on the religion of the pagan Dacians is interesting in part simply because, perhaps surprisingly, neither theological nor denominational questions figure among the topics. But it is also interesting because it is the only document in which it becomes clear that Köleséri’s letter to András Huszti begins to gesture in the same direction. Like many of his contemporaries, Köleséri showed an interest in a kind of ancient religio naturalis. The strength of his interest in the creation of a religion that would be above denominational differences is illustrated clearly by many of his other statements and gestures, first and foremost his republication of the texts of two significant theologians and philosophers (Pierre Poiret and Jacobus Gardenius) with his own commentaries on them. (The publication, as part of a continuation of the series that has begun with this volume, of these and similar introductory commentaries will constitute a major step forward in the research on the religious Enlightenment in Transylvania.) If one applies to Transylvania the approach developed by Johannes van den Berg and David Sorkin (among others), the century that preceded mature Enlightenment thought, sometimes treated as something of a stepchild of Hungarian cultural history, appears in an entirely different light, and the works of many interesting authors, predominantly Protestants, emerge from obscurity as writings worthy of our attention. This volume is indispensable, however, not simply because of the importance of Köleséri and the topics with which he was preoccupied, but also because of the exemplary thoroughness with which the team following in Zsigmond Jakó’s footsteps prepared the material for publication. The preface and the afterward provide a concise and objective description of the situation with respect to the sources. For instance, we learn which letters belong to which period of Köleséri’s life, and which letters came from which collection. There is also a separate summary of where these documents can be found today. As collections that serve as sources for the inquiry have been moved many times in recent decades, the task of locating them cannot have been simple, even if the editors were able to count on the assistance of young Transylvanian scholars. Naturally at the beginning of the book there is a precise list of the letters that are included, and of course there is also an index of names and places and a summary in German and Romanian.

The admirably detailed index of subjects, which betokens discriminating philological precision, will make the book remarkably easy to use. The thoroughness of this breakdown was made possible by the erudition of András László Magyar, a scholar of the history of medicine and the history of the sciences who worked together with the editor in the preparation of the source materials for publication. Thanks to the work of this precise scholar, who compared the Latin texts with the originals, there are, alongside Jakó’s succinct but sometimes sparing summations (which indicate the subjects of the letters), comprehensive summaries that touch on the relevant details at the beginning of each letter. Given the wide array of topics, the composition of these summaries must have required meticulousness and unusual breadth of knowledge, since in the majority of cases we are speaking of an exchange of ideas between people who made casual and frequent use of the technical terms and jargon of their fields of inquiry.

The notes, which have been done with the proper degree of attentiveness to the sources, make the historical background (including the history of science) comprehensible and the material engaging and useful to a wide readership. Zsigmond Jakó’s precision and legendary erudition as a historian combine with Zsuzsa Font’s knowledge of the institutional, philosophical, and scientific history of the Early Modern Era. The secondary literature on the individual figures offers the reader an image of the network of relationships among scientists and scholars within which Sámuel Köleséri, a man who by no means sought isolation, but who nonetheless was in many respects a lonely figure, pursued his work.

This book, which is indispensable to anyone who is interested in the cultural history of Central Eastern Europe, is the product of a rare, harmonious encounter between generations of scholars, ateliers, and individuals capable of cooperating in the interests of furthering the sciences. The Transylvanian Museum Society was responsible for the last stages of publication. Hopefully and presumably it will become a part of the collections in the most important libraries and research institutions where scholarship is pursued on the Early Modern Era.

Translated by Thomas Cooper

 

Mihály Balázs

Unfinished Utopia. Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56. By Katherine Lebow. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2013. xiv + 233 pp.

Unfinished Utopia is more than what it claims to be in its title. It draws a narrative framework that encompasses the entire socialist period, and this narrative also seeks links between elements of the experiences of the Stalinist years and longer structures of modern Polish history. Choosing a well-defined locality as the focal point also allows Lebow to challenge aspects of the chronology of the Socialist era. Both Stalinism and the thaw of the years of Gomułka after 1956 appear more heterogeneous than the periodization itself suggests.

The six chapters address two major themes. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are about features of Modernity and modernization as embodied by postwar reconstruction and industrialization in Poland. Chapters 3, 5 and 6 address the problem of resistance against the regime. Lebow argues that the paradox of Nowa Huta serving as one of the major centers of Solidarity in 1970 and in 1980 can be explained by the continuity of the tradition of collective action that was kept alive in the city by local identity and class-conscious worker solidarity. Lebow makes these themes a good read by maintaining a focus in each chapter on individual experiences.

Postwar reconstruction lends itself as a topic for global history. Local elites published plans from 1943 onwards in such distant parts of the globe as India and Italy. Reconstruction as a term was applied to a number of situations throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Europe had to be reconstructed after 1814, the USA after the Civil War, and the world after 1920 and again after the economic crisis. In 1943 the Fabian Society published a booklet that contained essays on various aspects of postwar reconstruction, such as medicine, diet, agriculture and international migration. John Marrock, one of the authors, advised that since planning would be based on science, it must start before the end of the war: “When the fighting ends they will be hungry and exhausted, in no mood for experiments.”1 Postwar reconstruction was not about reinstating the pre-war world. The Fabian Society, the ministries of India led by the Indian National Congress, and the communist parties of Italy or Belgium and the newly formed Eastern Bloc wished to create a different world. Lebow takes issue with the assumption that the craving for normalcy in the postwar world created an atmosphere in which things went back to an earlier stage: “[...] wartime exposure to a wider world had often been compulsory and far from pleasant, this did not necessarily make it easier to settle down again at home with the return to ‘normalcy’” (p.44). She demonstrates that Poland was uprooted, with migrants all over the country, so restoration was not an option.

In this context, the construction of a large steel plant in the vicinity of Krakow in the early 1950s had multiple meanings. It was not only about countering and controlling a stubbornly “bourgeois” city. The plan for such a venture itself carried the long-term dream of Polish Enlightenment about modernization and industry, the strategic need to relocate industrial centers away from the border areas of Silesia, and the zeal of postwar reconstruction. The plans for Nowa Huta were drawn up in the Stalinist period, but this does not automatically mean that they were shaped entirely by monolithic ideas without links or roots. Lebow also asserts that there was no linearity between plan and practice in the course of the construction of Nowa Huta as the first socialist city of Poland. Many planned features remained only on paper and were postponed to later decades, while many unplanned edifices were built. The plan followed the octagonal shape of many Soviet cities, but it integrated the garden city ideal that was an Anglo-Saxon concept and was ideologically ambivalent in the eyes of the communists. In fact, prefab houses erected in the 1970s and 1980s diverge from the initial design, for which Socialist Realism meant neo-renaissance buildings for administrative centers, theatres, central squares and greenness.

Taking Nowa Huta as an archetypal example, postwar architectural reconstruction in the Soviet Bloc differed from the Western experience in that the former took housing as a secondary goal after industrialization. A recent volume shows that governments in Western Europe had ambitious plans to improve the living conditions of the working classes, but they implemented public projects on a smaller scale than planned and supplemented them with compensation and cheap loans that facilitated private initiatives. In the case of Belgian cities, the choice of architects reflected ideological preferences and professional recognition, but the houses that were built were often unremarkable parts of the postwar cityscape.2 Moreover, housing schemes were not necessarily integrated with industrial projects. Lebow stresses that Nowa Huta’s housing problems were serious throughout the Stalinist period, but the construction project entirely altered the landscape. The gap between insufficient housing and increasing industrial output was extreme in the Soviet Union in the period between 1946 and 1948. David Filtzer has demonstrated that the space available for workers, which was already scarce during the war due to the extensive damage done to industrial cities, actually decreased during postwar reconstruction on average.

Chapters 2 and 4 address two aspects that have dominated much of the social sciences for a decade, but hardly surface in discussions of Eastern Bloc Modernity: migration and emancipation. In his examination of the experience of moving to Nowa Huta, Lebow focuses on non-official documents, primarily the published memoir of a worker, Edmund Chmielinski. A close look at important junctures in the life of this youth leads Lebow to develop a model of identity formation and change between village and urban life (pp.45–50). However harsh housing conditions may have been at the site, the decision to become a member of a youth brigade could signify an immediate rise in standards of living for many simply because they were given new clothes and a clear goal in life. The visibility of the new sense of belonging brought about conflicts with family members who had been left behind and also with local farmers, in other words, with the world that had once been familiar (pp.59–60). Coexistence with local villages could potentially be symbiotic as long as the urban site did not threaten the existence of lifestyles: workers needed meat and liquor that was produced by locals. However, the city more frequently appeared as the disgraceful “other” in the imaginations of inhabitants of nearby villages. Yet it remained attractive as a destination to large sections of Polish society who had lost their standing in their own localities due to clashes with state, imprisonment and large-scale displacements. It was relatively easy to begin a new life at a muddy, chaotic and enormous construction site like Nowa Huta in the early 1950s.

For Lebow, emancipation is yet another theme from the perspective of which the political history of Stalinist years and their relationship to what followed were more ambiguous than textbooks usually suggest. The recent historiography of Stalinist Hungary emphasizes that images of female roles hardly changed in the postwar years and women essentially continued to be associated with domesticity. Mark Pittaway argues that this feature is a key to understanding the emergence of the double economy in the 1950s: income generated in the villages from agricultural produce was at least as important for the household budget as salaries earned at industrial centers. Women hardly entered heavy industry, and they were almost always poorly paid however vital their contributions may have been to this second economy.3 This picture also holds also for Poland. The rhetorical model, in which “the new woman extended her traditionally nurturing role beyond the sphere of the nuclear family to embrace not only the nation, but also the wider family of international progress and peace,” effectively meant that the workplace did not destabilize traditional roles (p.100). Lebow also shows that Nowa Huta women played an important role in Stalinist society, since “no other Polish women have ever penetrated so deeply into the sanctum sanctorum of national industry” (p.97). Journalists’ descriptions emphasized that women did not wear makeup, but they wore the distinctive rubber boots, just as male workers did, and thus could easily be distinguished from the bourgeois of Krakow on Sundays in the city. The female metal caster brigade was the only such brigade in the country, and it performed well. Plastering brigades also produced Stakhanovite women. Yet while Nowa Huta female workers had a high standing in the official propaganda, their prospects were limited. Although 11.5 percent of the physical labor force was female, they had little chance of entering vocational schools unless they were well connected. Clerical jobs that required minimal qualifications and fit traditional roles were the most easily available throughout the 1950s (pp.102–5). Lebow points out that late Stalinist and post-Stalinist years bore witness to a setback from this perspective. The casting brigade was dispersed on the grounds that the work that they did was a threat to a woman’s health. While families were under heavy pressure due to lack of housing, inadequate childcare and imbalanced division of labor, after 1956 public opinion blamed Stalinism for these problems instead of addressing them through policies. In this period moral panic regarding sexual life and sexual freedom in the city was on the rise. Lebow shows that changes in policies regarding the “Gypsy problem” were influenced by this sense of moral panic. In Nowa Huta official voices believed in integration through work and guardianship, especially as far as hygiene was concerned, and the official stance acknowledged differences among Roma groups. In the 1960s the new policy focused on policing, force and surveillance. Lebow does not construct an image of Stalinist golden years of social mobility. She emphasizes that many of the instances in which the presence of a Roma population in Nowa Huta was a factor before 1956 involved prejudice and conflict, and she also highlights the ambiguity regarding gender that was present throughout the socialist era. Yet she manages to convince the reader that a simple juxtaposition of ‘bad Stalinist years and policies’ and ‘better post-1956 times’ is misleading for the analysis of gender roles.

Lebow’s vision of resistance against the regime and its successes focuses on continuity rather than miracles (pp.152–77). She shows that Nowa Huta played a vital role in building up the tradition of resistance, even if this may seem paradoxical at first glance. Despite the long dominance of the totalitarian paradigm, the historiography of the Soviet Union reveals a great deal about the problem of resisting the regime. While there is an array of available sources, historians studying Soviet Society have often found themselves compelled to confront the problems of silence and the comprehensibility of speech. One of the outstanding undertakings of recent years is The Whisperers by Orlando Figes. The volume, which is based on written memoirs, personal documents and the oral histories of hundreds of families, attempts to decipher the logic of the disintegration of society and the reach of Stalinist oppression. Figes focuses on the contrast between the public reality and the reality that existed as a whisper and hardly found expression, even at the family level. From this perspective, actors remain passive throughout, except during the years of the Second World War, when alienated central rule could not silence individuals to the same extent as it had before.4

Sarah Davies, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola have argued that there are a number of voices still to be uncovered. Davies believes that it is possible to some extent to allow these voices to speak for themselves by rearranging police reports. Researchers who believe in the existence of popular protest against the regime accept the content of police reports on the continued presence of a will to uproot it. In this context, the regime fought a successful war for rule over voices, but fear did not triumph over resistance.5 However, one of the strongest arguments against the resistance thesis is that well-documented dissenters revolted against exclusion, but not against the foundations of the regime.6 Figes argues that whispers are cries for help from pioneers who broke down during the period of terror, and these whispers do not constitute a fight for freedom.

Labor history of the Soviet Union often addresses the question of resistance, but does not arrive at definitive answers. In 1994 the landmark volume Making Workers Soviet, edited by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, was hesitant about theoretical frameworks.7 A decade later Jeffrey J. Rossmann openly challenged previous wisdom regarding the Soviet Union as a totalitarian society. On the basis of a close analysis of a textile factory, he describes collective action and resistance as mass phenomena during the 1930s.8 Looking at the postwar years, Donald Filtzer found a diffuse form of resistance in evasion and flight. Importantly, he points at vocational training as one of the major sites of such protest.9 Lebow argues that the potential for resistance stemmed from the faith of part of the population in ideas about a workers’ state throughout the 1950s and 1960s that in turn facilitated collective action and also maintained the memory of such action. On the other hand, the protest regarding the cross clearly demonstrates that the idea of rights, and thus the moral economy of Nowa Huta workers, did not match the ideal type of Homo Sovieticus, who should have thought of religion as ‘opium.’ Lebow also emphasizes the generational aspect of resistance. This feature links Stalinist Poland to global trends of youth culture in the 1950s and creates important cultural bridges among countries of the Eastern Bloc. Although the author pays attention to gestures during moments of conflict and offers a thick description of some of them, she does not list any occasions when youth culture and the moral economy of workers interacted, combined or clashed. She comes closest to this question in Chapter 5 when looking at the “Poem for Adults.” In August 1955 Adam Wazyk, a party hardliner, published a piece that wounded Stalinist sensitivities almost as much as Khruschev’s speech did some months later. The poem asserts that Nowa Huta was a political failure where young males were bored and did nothing apart from desperately seek opportunities to copulate with girls waiting for them in their corrupted ‘convents,’ i.e. hostels (pp.146–7). The critique of Nowa Huta from a dissenting figure rebuked youth culture on the same grounds as the official voices: sexual promiscuity and the number of unwanted children.

Her appreciation of the significance of individual life stories and situations enables Lebow to locate freedom, dreams and struggle in Nowa Huta under Stalinism. She convincingly links many of these to longue durée trends of modern Polish history. She uses a variety of archives, though with more innovative readings she could have overcome two problems that arise in the course of her examination. First, she does not render the dynamics of communities within the city perceptible. She makes mention of groups, such as the voluntary brigades, the theater groups, and informal youth circles, but these groups seem to function only as frameworks without internal lives and forces. By showing individuals, she highlights the importance of individual agency and choices in creating new spaces, but she unintentionally confirms the totalitarian model according to which society is atomized. This is in contradiction to her larger narrative about collective action. One way to overcome this paradox would have been to use photographs as archival sources instead of illustrations of arguments. Second, while the change of landscape was the essence of the story of creating a new city, there is no discussion regarding how the rural landscape was transformed into an urban one. At one point we see peasants in conflict with brigades, and in the second chapter she stresses the role of changes in the hinterland of would-be workers, but no picture emerges of the role that was played by environmental change or how an old landscape changed, merged with, or remained part of the city, nor is there any characterization of the new human ecology that replaced the old one. Lebow often quotes descriptions that stress mud. Contemporaries were so preoccupied with getting stuck in the mud that the author seems to have forgotten to consider how it might have looked from a bird’s-eye view.

The book is a well presented case study that provides the reader with a firm foundation on which to develop ideas regarding some of the most salient historiographical issues of Stalinism, such as Modernity, the role of the Second World War, repression and resistance. Lebow talks about her actors with empathy and skill. She is good at describing events and personal dramas. She does this with warmness, sensitivity and understanding, but without pathos. And she has chosen themes, including housing issues, moral panic, sexuality, youth culture, and women’s emancipation, that make her work useful for those interested in global histories. The book also demonstrates how much an analysis of this period can reveal about the social history of Central Europe. These features make the volume relevant for a large number of students and researchers working on the postwar history of the region.

Róbert Balogh

1 John Marrock, “Food for Starving Europe,” in When Hostilities Cease. Papers on Relief and Reconstruction Prepared for the Fabian Society, ed. Julian Huxley, H.J. Laski et al. (London: Fabian Society, 1943), 79.

2 Fredie Flore, “Housing for War Victims, 1946–1948. A Problematic Building Project by the Belgian Government,” in Living with History. Rebuilding Europe after the First and Second World Wars and the Role of Heritage Preservation 1914–1964, ed. Nicholas Bullock, and Luc Verpoest (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011), 263–80.

3 Mark Pittaway, “Retreat from collective Protest: Household, Gender, Work and Popular Opposition in Stalinist Hungary,” in Rebellious Families. Household Strategies and Collective Action in the 19th & 20th Centuries, ed. Jan Kok (New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books), 198–228.

4 Orlando Figes, The Whisperers. Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

5 Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

6 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

7 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet. Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

8 Jeffrey J. Rossmann, Workers Resistance under Stalin. Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

9 Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism. Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

 

Hungary and Romania Beyond National Narratives: Comparisons and Entanglements. By Anders E.B. Blomqvist, Constantin Iordachi, and Balázs Trencsényi (eds). Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. 855 pp.

This is an ambitious volume whose goal is no less than to rewrite the history of East Central Europe from an integrated transnational perspective, using the entangled histories of Romania and Hungary as a point of departure (p.8). By adopting this approach, the editors hope to overcome the ethno-national based perspectives that have so dominated the historiography on the two countries and the region, opting for a multi-layered framework for transnational research and analysis that can open new lines of inquiry for historians and others (p.34). Chronologically the contributions cover roughly the last 160 years, beginning with the Hungarian and Romanian nation-building projects that grew out of the Revolutions of 1848 and ending with the postmillennial bid to reach a political and historiographical modus vivendi. Many of the volume’s articles emerged out of the “Shared/Entangled Histories” international conference held in Cluj in 2008, which brought together an array of historians from around the world, including some of the leading experts in their respective fields. The volume itself marries a number of these well-established scholars with an invigorated new generation of historians.

In the auspicious introduction, which should be required reading for any student working on the transnational history of East Central Europe, the editors have drawn on the history of transfers and especially histoire croisée,1 citing Franco–German historical reconciliation as a model for writing a common history of Hungary and Romania.2 Using these frameworks, they hope to refocus the attention of scholars on the two countries’ shared patterns of experience. As the introduction also makes clear—and as anyone who has lived in Hungarian–Romanian borderlands knows well—there is indeed a long if also overlooked tradition of fertile intercourse between Hungarians and Romanians, intellectually, culturally, and otherwise.

With over 20 chapters spanning 855 pages (and weighing in at 1.2 kg), there is certainly much to like in this volume and, doubtless for some readers, enough to dislike. With such a mélange of topics, the volume could benefit from segmentation into different parts, though perhaps that would defy the logic of “entanglement.” The sheer size and scope of the volume make reviewing it all the more difficult, especially as some contributions tally 50, 60, and even 70 pages. Consequently, the chapters highlighted in this review reflect some of the reviewer’s own interests.

One of the major themes tackled in this volume is the representation and perception of the “Other,” in other words, Hungarian views of Romanians and vice versa. In the opening chapter Sorin Mitu takes a theoretical stab at the heart of the “story of Romanian–Hungarian hostility” that has seemingly existed for a millennium. Whether the negative images of one another are “imagined realities” or “real images” is beside the point, argues Mitu, as these images often have tangible effects on the relations between the two communities and on the everyday lives of individuals (pp.37–38). Mitu locates the genesis of Hungarian–Romanian negative imagology and stereotypes in the overlapping Hungarian and Romanian national projects, which began in the first half of the nineteenth century and converged in Transylvania. Mitu describes how the modern Hungarian self-image was constructed against a Byzantine Romanian one so as to circumscribe Catholic/Protestant Hungary within the enlightened Western Europe. Turn about was fair play, as the Romanian self-image as Latinate inheritors of the Roman legacy was constructed against an image of the equestrian Finno-Ugric from the steppe, which depicted the Hungarians as cultural and geographical interlopers in Europe’s hapless eastern periphery. The postcolonialist paradigm of Orientalism and its various adaptations have become axiomatic in explanations of self-imagining and Othering in the European East.3 However, it does not always explain the countervailing trends in both countries that led to positive conceptions of identity using explicitly Eastern-oriented, mystical, and indigenous notions of spatiality, temporality, and being.4 In some respects these self-imaginings had greater identity-building ramifications than the nesting discourses from the West.

Judit Pál offers a fascinating look at the use of flags as symbols of cohesion and mass mobilization in Transylvania during the Revolution of 1848. Pál shows how “the struggle of colors” symbolized the political disunity that plagued the Hungarians, Romanians, and Saxons in Transylvania. Flags expressed newly formed national and ethnic identities and corresponded to specific political discourses about national belonging (p.122).

Keith Hitchins provides a typically masterful account of the aspirations and apprehensions of majority and minority elites in dualist Hungary and interwar Romania. Examining periods of intransigence, reconciliation, and separation between the competing nationalities, Hitchins argues that their point of divergence was ultimately not political but rather fundamentally cultural and spiritual, giving rise to a Kulturkampf of sorts that, for generations, impacted the status and treatment of minorities in Transylvania (p.126). The idea of ethnically based nation-states as the only legitimate form of social organization prevailed over attempts at accommodation.

Several chapters in this volume deal with the entanglements of economic nationalizing in the contested ethnic borderlands. In his case study of Szatmár/Satu Mare County between 1867 and 1940, Anders Blomqvist depicts the struggle for supremacy on the “internal front,” where local minority and majority elites “cut their political teeth” while Budapest and Bucharest experimented with nationalizing policies (p.170). Blomqvist makes a convincing argument that excluding minorities from the economic life of a town or region can have devastating consequences for majorities alike. He also shows the uncanny ability of some minority elites to adapt amphibious-like to the realities (and sometimes perks) of majority rule, only to co-opt the selfsame strategies of nationalizing whenever their turn to rule. Barna Ábrahám’s chapter compares the modernization and embourgeoisement processes of the Slovaks and Transylvanian Romanians in dualist Hungary, specifically their respective efforts to achieve social and economic progress and ultimately to construct ethnically based national economies independent of “the encompassing context of Hungary” (pp.203–4). Gábor Egry likewise examines through the lens of regionalism the parallel processes of Romanian and Hungarian national building. Egry looks at regionalist programs, organizations, ideologies, and discourses that took place in apposition and frequently in opposition to the nationalizing and statist agendas from Budapest and Bucharest. He challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about what unites people beyond the creed of nationhood.

The history of science and medicine in East Central Europe is a neglected field, which, as Marius Turda shows, has the potential to fulfill the kind of research agenda envisioned by the volume’s editors. Within a broader overview of the history of anthropology in Hungary and Romania, Turda discusses the “entangled epistemologies of race” that anthropologists in both countries worked to disentangle in the first half of the twentieth century (p.306). Turda shows how this research was impressed into national service and used as a weapon in the political war over disputed territories and peoples.

One of the strengths of this volume is the collection of chapters dealing with the politicization of history writing and education, from the rewriting of school textbooks to the reorganization of universities. Zoltán Pálfy gives a prosopographical account of elite formation and the nationalization of higher education in Transylvania before and after 1918, while Lucian Nastasă provides a timely study on the development and vicissitudes of the Hungarian University in Kolozsvár/Cluj since 1875. Nastasă shows how the politics of higher education in this most important Transylvanian town reflected the national and international politics of Hungary and Romania. Eric Beckett Weaver looks at the League of Nations’ initiative to review and improve foreign texts. Hungarian politicians and historians enthusiastically supported the initiative, frustrated as they were by the “false” histories portraying Hungary as oppressive and “inhumane,” and thus deserving of its fate as a defeated and diminished country (pp.422–23). To revisionists in Hungary, such discourses not only enabled the disaster of Trianon but also prevented its revision and justified de-nationalization policies targeting Hungarian minorities in neighboring states. In detailing this historiographical counteroffensive for “re-narrating” Hungarian history abroad, Weaver shows that, even with the best intentions, the efforts to arrive at a common understanding of the past can often lead to greater mutual misunderstanding.

Holly Case paints a reflective portrait of a young historian’s pursuit of a promising line of research, in this instance her own discovery of a personal letter written by a dispirited woman in Northern Transylvania to a friend across the border in Romania. How did such an innocuous letter, which lamented the difficult local conditions under Hungarian rule, spark an international dispute between Hungary and Romania that eventually drew in Axis allies Germany and Italy? Contemplating this question, Case traces her own journey from writing a “micro-social history” as a graduate student to writing a “different sort of big history,” one that was transnational and accounted for the multiplicity of contexts in which individuals, communities, and states interacted with one another (pp.467–68). Case’s contribution is all the more satisfying, as it answers the editors’ call for historians to consider their own involvement in the process of knowledge production (p.7).

In his chapter on “national essentialism” in post-World War II Romania and Hungary, Balázs Trencsényi provides a welcome coda to his book on “national character” in interwar East Central Europe, showing how communist regimes in both countries appropriated the essentialist national discourses of the interwar past to serve the aims of the communist present. Hungarian and Romanian communist regimes incorporated the national(ist) canon into the framework of “socialist patriotism” by selectively appropriating the national bona fides of the populist (népi) tradition in Hungary and the “young generation” in Romania, respectively (pp.516, 520). In the context of de-Stalinization, especially after the 1956 Revolution, and increasingly inadequate class narratives, the “national turn” served as a mediator between the regime and the pre-communist cultural traditions. It helped, moreover, to indigenize a new generation of communist elites eager to distance themselves from the old cadre of “foreigners” and internationalists. In Romania the topoi of national essentialism lent succor to autochthonist and protochronist discourses and the re-emergence of a national metaphysics, while in Hungary it facilitated an emerging “neo-populism,” enabling a diverse group of intellectuals and political actors to speak in familiar terms about the nation and the plight of the Hungarian minority across the border (pp.527–28). Trencsényi also assesses the legacy of the interwar ideological tradition of national essentialism since 1989, suggesting that in both Hungary and Romania ethnic revivalism has lent itself to many of the “therapeutic” projects in an effort to break out of the transition process (p.563).

Martin Mevius takes a fresh look at the controversial 1986 publication of the three-volume history of Transylvania, Erdély története.5 The volumes were assembled and published in large measure as a response to Romanian propaganda and historical writing under Ceauşescu. In this respect, Erdély története was “not only a work of scholarship but also a political weapon,” exemplifying the recurrent theme of history as an open battlefield for international disputes over the symbolic territorial spaces and the treatment of minorities (pp.571–72). Mevius shows how historians and politicians of both regimes instrumentalized history for reasons of national legitimacy, promoting increasingly national(ist) perspectives on history in lieu of increasingly inadequate Marxist ones. One of the assets of this contribution, and of the volume as a whole, is the great range of sources used. Mevius draws on many forms of research available in the historian’s toolkit, including personal interviews with the “hard-line (vonalas) party hack” Béla Köpeczi, the volume’s lead editor and author (p.537).

Several chapters deal with the seemingly intractable issue of rapprochement and reconciliation after 1989, giving a kind of history-of-the present critique of reconciliation processes in Hungary and Romania. In a comparative analysis of history textbooks in Hungary and Romania, Csaba Zahorán revisits the issue of rival national narratives that continue to obsess over ethnogenesis, state foundation, and demographic unity. Zahorán notes, however, that a more accommodating space is beginning to open up, which can allow for multiple perspectives and the de-mythologizing of traditional national heroes and events. Michael Shafir sets out to explore cross-border attitude grouping of Hungarians and Romanians, but for the most part offers a discourse analysis of Cristian Tudor Popescu’s and Horia-Roman Patapievici’s writings on such topics as the Roma (“Gypsies”), anti-Semitism, race, and political correctness. While certainly provocative, the upbraiding of two high-profile Romanian public intellectuals makes an awkward fit for a pioneering volume aiming to forge a common history of Hungary and Romania.

Shafir’s dismal portrait of Hungarian–Romanian reconciliation stands in stark contrast to Constantin Iordachi’s assertion that the ever-closer integration of the two countries through participation in European and global institutions has positively redefined the nature of their interstate relations. Iordachi’s chapter is another fine example of the potential of histoire croisée to yield fruitful results on under-researched topics. His sweeping overview and analysis of the development and evolution of nation-state citizenship in Hungary and Romania show how the citizenship issue has moved from one of “disentanglement” to “interdependence,” having finally overcome the pre-World War II demographic-territorial mixing (p.712). The citizenship issue is an important category of analysis, argues Iordachi, as it has a number of heuristic advantages, one of which is to bridge the institutional (state) and the subjective (nation) dimensions of modern identity construction (p.717).

Despite the editors’ clarion call to break new paths in the historiography on Romania and Hungary, many of the contributions deal with well-trodden issues of national and ethnic identity, the minority question, and elites and their institutions (invariably in Transylvania). This is not so much a criticism as it is an endorsement of the editors’ conviction that a common history of the two countries should go “beyond national narratives.” As the editors readily acknowledge, “[w]riting the history of Romania and Hungary from a unitary perspective is a difficult if not a self-defeating exercise, a genuine test for the uses and abuses of history” (p.4). This makes the contributions on flag colors, textbooks, regionalism, and citizenship all the more outstanding. The book’s great achievement is not so much that it fills a historiographical gap but that it exposes this gap and offers new ways to fill it. One can envision a new generation of scholars working on the entangled traditions of Hungarian and Romanian art, architecture, music, food, and even sex (miscegenation, anyone?). Also, there is certainly more room for the life stories of individuals, small communities, and local cultures, all of which can be made relevant as a sort of connective tissue supporting or uniting larger themes. Employing innovative and transnational frameworks such as the ones proposed in this volume will be necessary if the historian’s craft is to have wider appeal and application across disciplines. For these reasons, the book represents a seminal contribution to the recent historiography not just on Hungary and Romania but also on the wider region.

R. Chris Davis

1 Cf. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30–50.

2 Notable examples of “entangled history” include Bénédicte Zimmerman, Claude Didry, and Michael Werner, eds., Le Travail et la Nation: Histoire croisée de la France et de l’Allemagne (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1999); Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov, and Diana Mishkova, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vols 1–2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013).

3 See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York–Oxford: OUP, 1997); Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51 no. 1, (Spring, 1992): 1–15; Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54 no 4, (Winter, 1995): 917–31; and Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on Self-Colonizing Cultures,” in Rethinking the Transition, ed. Ivaylo Znepolski et al. (Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridsky University Press, 2002), 361–69.

4 In recent years scholars working on the region have begun to challenge or at any rate counterbalance post-colonialist discourses that depict “Eastern” Europe as a space of passive receptivity and reproduction of “Western” European models of easternness. See especially Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2008); Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France (c. 1740–1880) (Oxford–New York: Peter Lang, 2006).

5 Béla Köpeczi, ed., Erdély története, vols 1–3 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986).

 

Notes on Contributors

Balázs, Mihály (University of Szeged), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Balogh, Róbert (Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Borhi, László (Indiana University and Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Davis, R. Chris (Lone Star College–Kingwood, U.S.), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Gruber, Siegfried (Laboratory of Historical Demography, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Holubec, Stanislav (Imre Kertész College, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Kövér, György (Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Láng, Benedek (Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Mátay, Mónika (Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Nagy, Sándor  (Budapest City Archives), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Pakot, Levente (Hungarian Demographic Research Institute), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Szabó, András Péter (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Szołtysek, Mikołaj (Laboratory of Historical Demography, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

2013_4_Book Reviews

pdfVolume 2 Issue 4 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

Erdélyi külpolitika a vesztfáliai béke után [Transylvania’s Foreign Policy following the Peace of Westphalia]. By Gábor Kármán. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2011. 484 pp.

The period following the Peace of Westphalia was an era of exciting and far-reaching structural change in the history of Europe. In this book Gábor Kármán, a prominent scholar of the history of the Transylvanian Principality and the diplomatic history of the early modern period, guides his reader through the first ten years following the conclusion of the treaties in 1648, a decade rich with decisive events. He examines the shift that took place in foreign policy over time as denominational elements gradually came to play a smaller and smaller role in the decisions of policy makers, not to mention the justifications given for these decisions, yielding gradually to simple reason of state, which used old sectarian arguments at most as a tool in order to mask other goals. For readers unfamiliar with the subject it may seem a bit odd that Kármán seeks to illustrate this process with the example of the Transylvanian Principality, which was one of the vassal states of the Ottoman Empire, but in the seventeenth century, its limited sovereignty notwithstanding, this successor state of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom, under the leadership of Calvinist rulers, sometimes pursued a remarkably independent foreign policy and appeared as an important actor on the stage of European politics.

The book essentially offers an overview of the foreign policy of Transylvanian Prince György Rákóczi II (1648–1660) up until his entry in the Second Northern War (the military campaign launched in 1657 in alliance with Sweden against King John II Casimir of Poland), which had disastrous consequences for Transylvania. However, since Kármán is most interested in the structural changes that took place, he also includes at the beginning of the book a brief overview of the campaign (1644–1645) led by the Prince’s father, György Rákóczi I, against Ferdinand III, as well as the justification that was given for this campaign. He considers the role that the Transylvanian Principality played in the last stages of the Thirty Years’ War among the Protestant countries and the place it was given in the Westphalia system. In the course of his analysis Gábor Kármán makes use of excellent source materials, including a number of historical syntheses published in Western Europe, publications of annotated sources by nineteenth-century historian Sándor Szilágyi, and works by Ágnes R. Várkonyi, Katalin Péter and Sándor Gebei, twentieth-century historians from the postwar period. In 2010 a collection of essays on the period of György Rákóczi II’s rule was published1 (as it so happens a collection that Kármán and I edited together) that provided a firm foundation for further study of many important questions regarding the period. Kármán’s book, however, differs from other studies of the era in Hungary in that he contextualizes his assessment of the events in a broader theoretical framework and scrutinizes the motivations and justifications behind the various foreign policy maneuvers with considerable skepticism.

The theoretical framework of Kármán’s inquiry is comprised of three paradigms: Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard’s theory of confessionalization, which links the formation of denominations to the emergence of the modern territorial state, structural political history, which offers a new approach to the narration of political conflicts, and finally discourse theory, which provides new methods in the analysis of communication. Of these three pillars, the book rests perhaps most firmly on the second, structural political history, which is hardly surprising since the focus of Kármán’s study is foreign policy. One of the virtues of the book is that Kármán only refers to the theoretical underpinnings when actually necessary. Moreover, he does not treat the theories as axioms, but rather as heuristic tools. He therefore offers not simply an array of examples, but an engaging and highly readable analysis which always strives to shed light on the actual motives that lay behind the official explanations of foreign policy decisions.

The main chapters of the book are arranged in chronological order. They address individual nodes of Transylvanian foreign policy. These attentive case studies are followed by a conclusion in which Kármán summarizes the transformation that took place in the strategies that were used to win legitimacy. The point of departure is the campaign launched in early 1644 by György Rákóczi I, in alliance with France and Sweden, against Ferdinand III, one of the conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War that has been characterized with stubborn persistence in the secondary literature as a continuation of the earlier, similar military campaigns of Gábor Bethlen (1613–1629). (It is worth noting that this interpretation is not merely the work of later historians, rather it is implied by the rhetoric of the proclamation issued by Rákóczi, in which he alludes to Bethlen.) The two enemies in the conflict, György Rákóczi I and Palatine Miklós Esterházy (the representative of the royal Estates), had their proclamations published in printed form. Since there were no regularly appearing organs of the press in Hungary in the seventeenth century, Kármán consulted personal correspondence. He makes no mention of the circular letters (which had the tone of manifestos) written by the Prince, the Palatine, and other officials as a separate kind of source, but he makes use of them in his inquiry as well. The Transylvanian Prince presented himself as the defender of the royal Estates in a manner that had been customary since the uprising led by István Bocskai in 1606, but Kármán persuasively demonstrates that Rákóczi quite deliberately placed less emphasis on denominational considerations in his justification of the campaign than his predecessors had, and he presents these considerations more as affronts to the Estates. In contrast, the Palatine’s characterization of the conflict implied that the Prince represented not the Estates, but only Protestant interests, and he consistently added that Rákóczi was motivated by little more than personal avarice.2 Esterházy was not entirely wrong, for alongside the concerns of the Protestant denominations and the Estates, often condemned self-interest also played a role in the launch of the campaign. In the end it was seen as a sectarian enterprise, the Prince’s intentions notwithstanding. As he clarifies this point, Kármán also persuasively refutes two widespread but (at least in my assessment) mistaken views. First, he notes that Transylvania cannot be considered to have been a denominationally neutral state in the seventeenth century. The frequently alleged notion of the multi-confessional nature of the Principality is undermined by the power position of the Calvinist Church over the other denominations (first and foremost the Unitarians and the Catholics). Thus Transylvania should be regarded more as a distinctive example of unfinished confessionalization. Second, Kármán alludes briefly to the fact that the campaign led by Rákóczi should not be linked to the idea of the “national kingdom,” a somewhat vague notion that was given too much weight in postwar Hungarian historiography.

In the subsequent chapter Kármán examines the place occupied by the Transylvanian Principality in the hierarchical international system before the Peace of Westphalia, and his examination rests not on representations of power, but on concrete political acts and the reactions of the great powers. Basing his depiction on the negotiations that took place in 1644–1645 between Transylvania and Sweden and Transylvania and France, the reception of the separate peace concluded by the Prince in Linz in 1645, and the trifling role of Transylvania at the Westphalia peace negotiations, Kármán offers a very disillusioning portrayal of the prestige of the Principality, if nonetheless more precise than any portrait so far. The Protestant powers reckoned with Transylvania, but they hardly considered it an ally or partner of equal rank. As a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, Transylvania was regularly regarded with palpable suspicion, and this became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when it came to decisions such as Rákóczi’s arbitrary withdrawal from the war. In the end neither Transylvania nor the Protestant powers of Europe showed much mutual trust. Transylvania did not even send an emissary to the Westphalia negotiations, though the Principality did manage to obtain the modest achievement of being included in the Treaty of Osnabrück as one of the allies of Sweden (and at the same time of the emperor!).

The question of relations with Poland was an issue in 1648, when György Rákóczi II succeeded his father, and it remained an issue throughout his rule. Influenced by the (admittedly somewhat distant) example set by Transylvanian Prince István Báthory (1571–1586), the Rákóczi house also sought to obtain the Polish royal title. They had perhaps the best chance of doing so in the fall of 1648, immediately before the death of the elder György Rákóczi, when the Polish elite suddenly found itself in need of military assistance because of a Cossack attack. However, the fact that no one was even named indicates the haphazard nature of the plans. The Transylvanian emissaries sometimes strove to win support for the older Prince and sometimes endeavored to curry favor for his younger son, Zsigmond Rákóczi (1622–1652). (The book has perhaps only one structural flaw, namely that this fact is only mentioned in the middle of the chapter.) The supporters of the Rákóczi house in Poland, however, were almost exclusively either Protestants or Orthodox, and the possible support of the Cossacks, who were also Orthodox, meant more of a disadvantage than an advantage in Polish politics. Furthermore, the efforts of the Transylvanian Principality did not have the support of the European Protestant Powers. György Rákóczi II used the Polish–Cossack war to continue his father’s efforts up until the summer of 1651, though with decreasing chances of success. In 1653 Transylvanian–Polish relations warmed as a consequence of the Cossacks’ armed intervention in Moldova, but this proved only transitional.

György Rákóczi II was able to pursue a relatively independent foreign policy in part because at the beginning of his rule he managed to secure his position with regards to the Ottoman Empire (which was gradually weakening) and Ferdinand III. He came into conflict with the Turks over a threatened (and in the end accepted) rise in taxes and with the Habsburgs over the official expulsion of the Jesuits from Transylvania in 1652. The Viennese court also regarded the marriage of the Prince’s younger brother Zsigmond Rákóczi to Henrietta Maria von der Pfalz (the daughter of Frederick V of Pfalz, who for a short time had been King of Bohemia) in 1651 as a hostile move, though Kármán persuasively argues that the alliance was not based on any concrete political plan, but rather simply on considerations of prestige.

The two chapters on the complex relationship between the Transylvanian Principality and the aristocracy of the Hungarian Kingdom (which at this time for the most part was Catholic) are particularly interesting. Building on the work of Katalin Péter and making small changes to her model, Kármán examines the process whereby, following the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Linz at the 1646–1647 National Assembly (in other words the relatively enduring resolution of debates between the denominations), the traditional coalitions in domestic politics, which were essentially divided on the basis of denominational differences, fell apart and a relationship based on mutually beneficial cooperation developed between the Catholic Palatine Pál Pálffy and the Calvinist Prince György Rákóczi II. Kármán considers the role of the Prince’s brother Zsigmond (who resided in the Hungarian Kingdom) to have been significant only in the maintenance of relationships in the early 1650s, and he contradicts the widely familiar view of Ágnes R. Várkonyi with his assertion that there is no trace in the politics of the younger György Rákóczi of any thought of going to war with the Ottoman Empire until the crisis of power in Transylvania after 1657. At the same time this would have meant that the two sides, having set aside denominational differences, must have profoundly misunderstood each other, since the elite of the Hungarian Kingdom had always sought to expel the Turks from the region. (The presence of anti-Turk nobiliary nationalism in the letters of György Rákóczi II does seem to suggest that he entertained the idea of a struggle against the Turks before 1657.) With the death of Pál Pálffy in 1653 the relationship between the Principality and the Hungarian Kingdom weakened, and in the subsequent political life of the Kingdom, which was dominated by Archbishop of Esztergom György Lippay and was rife with personal and rekindled denominational strife, the Transylvanian Prince could only count on individual members of the aristocracy, such as Miklós Zrínyi (also a famous poet) or Ferenc Nádasdy. (His close relationship with Ádám Batthyány did not begin then, as Kármán suggests, but rather in the early 1650s.)

The need arose in connection with the plans regarding Poland in the early 1650s for the Principality to develop a more detailed and denominationally neutral strategy of legitimation in order to justify any aggressive steps, and Kármán discerns a similar effort in connection with the 1653 Moldovan crisis. When György Rákóczi II removed Vasile Lupu, the inimical Voivode of Moldova, after launching a military campaign in 1653 he characterized his actions as a preventive measure.3 As a consequence of the 1653 military campaign in Moldova and the 1655 campaign in Wallachia, the Romanian Voivodships, which were also among the vassals of the Ottoman Empire but which were in a considerably weaker position, became subordinate to the Transylvanian Principality.

In 1655, following Sweden’s attack on the Polish Kingdom, György Rákóczi II, having gained greater scope for action and increased self-assurance, revived his plans for the Polish lands, and in 1657, in an alliance with Sweden and the Cossacks, he attacked the Rzeczpospolita Polska. Kármán disputes the view of Sándor Gebei and makes a persuasive case in support of the following points: 1) the Prince initiated the relationship with Sweden, 2) in the period of rapid advance, the Swedes did not intent to divide the Rzeczpospolita, and 3) in the course of negotiations with the Transylvanian Prince Swedish King Charles Gustave X conducted himself in good faith. Indeed it was György Rákóczi II who did not ratify the Radnót treaty and throughout the military campaign against Poland he continuously maintained ties with the Poles.4

In the last chapters of the book Kármán offers a kind of summary characterization of the foreign policy of György Rákóczi II and the role of denominational considerations in foreign policy decisions. First he refutes the misconception, prevalent in Swedish historiography, according to which György Rákóczi II was a religious fanatic. Although Comenius and his circle did everything they could to pull the Transylvanian Prince into their political plans, György Rákóczi II himself showed little interest. While he may have taken advantage, from time to time, of the Moravian fugitive scholar’s vast network of connections, he did not share his views, and the Polish military campaign was not prompted by Comenius’ ideas. Kármán provides a detailed explanation as to why he doesn’t accept earlier hypotheses of Hungarian historians regarding the reasons for the campaign and then presents the Prince’s official justification. In his manifesto, Rákóczi emphasizes the earlier offer of the Polish throne, Christian mercy, and the restoration of the rights (first and foremost freedom of conscience) that had been violated in the course of the fighting. He also makes strong appeals, stronger than in his earlier proclamations, to the concept of the just war (bellum iustum). Finally, Kármán endeavors to answer the question regarding the true reason for the military campaign. In his view, it lies primarily in dynastic considerations. Through his conquests (which were presented as peaceful occupations), György Rákóczi II sought to strengthen his family’s reputation and power. If one finds credible the detailed account of György Horváth-Kissevith, an emissary of the Hungarian Kingdom who sought an audience with the Prince before the military campaign was launched, Rákóczi himself alluded to this motive in confidential conversations.5

In his conclusion, Kármán again traces the shift from a foreign policy that was based on denominational interests (or at least derived its legitimacy from denominational considerations) to the autocracy of the reason of state, which served both the interests of the ruler and the welfare of the public and was always able to incorporate other kinds of reasoning. In his view Rákóczi’s Polish military campaign might well have served both his own personal interests and the interests of the Transylvanian state, but given the Prince’s failure to prevail it is assessed as a blunder from the perspective of reason of state.

One should make some mention of the book’s flaws, as well as the underlying concept. It contains an almost trivial number of factual errors. Ever since the publication of János Heltai’s monograph on the subject few historians would claim that the Querela Hungaria was compiled by Alvinczi Péter (p.46),6 the 1645 Colloquium Charitativum (referred to in the book as the Collegium charitativum) was not the initiative of Comenius, but rather King Ladislaus IV of Poland (p.121),7 and the wife of Palatine Ferenc Wesselényi, who visited Zsuzsanna Lorántffy in 1655, was not Zsófia Bosnyák but Mária Széchy (p.289). But these are essentially the only mistakes. Kármán’s analysis of the foreign policy of the Transylvania Principality is a work of unparalleled cogency and precision. However, one may nonetheless entertain doubts concerning the thesis of the work, according to which denominational concerns were gradually relegated to the background. The comparison drawn between the legitimation of György Rákóczi I’s military campaign against the Hungarian Kingdom in 1644–1645 and the theoretical justifications given for the Transylvanian foreign policy of the 1650s is misleadingly simple. Given the strong mental and material connections between the two countries and György Rákóczi I’s expansive estates in Hungary, the first cannot really be considered simply as a foreign policy decision. Its legitimation reminds us far more of the propaganda of a civil war, and the Prince’s attempt to disguise his denominationally motivated statements as non-denominational is suspicious at best. György Rákóczi II’s military campaigns of the 1650s had no real “antecedent,” since no Transylvanian prince had ever interfered so directly in the affairs of a neighboring state, with the exception of the Hungarian Kingdom, which was regarded as part of the Hungarian “homeland.” (Had György Rákóczi I actually helped Wallachia in the conflict with Moldova in the 1630s, there might be some comparison.) In 1653 György Rákóczi II could hardly cite the defense of Protestantism as an explanation for the campaign against Moldova. Drawing distinctions between various strategies of legitimation is also problematic. In the case of conflicts for which we have plentiful sources it is clear that the Prince used a variety of different kinds of justifications, depending on the audience. (Kármán emphasizes this in connection with the campaign of 1644–1645.) However, there is a dearth of sources on the legitimation strategies used in the 1650s, and we have only a small slice of the communications on which to base tentative conclusions.

Whatever we may think of the shift towards reason of state (depicted on the cover of the book with a two-headed figure), Gábor Kármán’s eloquently written, clearly structured book is a milestone in the study of Transylvanian foreign policy and more broadly Hungarian politics of the early Modern Era. It offers new methodological approaches and corrects many misunderstandings found in earlier secondary literature. In its theoretical sophistication, its use of sources, and the equipoise of its analyses it sets an admirably high standard.

Translated by Thomas Cooper

András Péter Szabó

A rohonci kód [The Rohonc Code]. By Benedek Láng. Budapest: Jaffa, 2011. 227 pp.

If there is anything that makes a scholar get out of his armchair and pace his room like a man possessed, chewing on the stem of his glasses or pulling at his beard, murmuring to himself and going through the whole gamut of emotions from optimistic outbursts to utter despair, then it is one of the well-kept secrets of history, an undecipherable text or unbreakable linguistic code. No historian who believed these writing systems to be absolutely unbreakable would take his chance and dedicate a huge amount of his time, money and energies into trying to decipher them. He must have the itchy feeling that he might be the one who finds the missing clue, puts the pieces of the jigsaw into a coherent whole and either breaks the code or proves that it is, indeed, unbreakable.

There are a number of such long known but hitherto undeciphered puzzles in historical research, from the Linear A writing system of ancient Crete and the Rongorongo writing of Easter Island, through the pictorial codes of the Voynich manuscript to the nineteenth-century Beale ciphers. People with very different backgrounds, scholars with an interest in the codes’ historical context, amateur code breakers, experts employed by intelligence agencies, mathematicians, linguists, treasure-hunters and many more have attempted to unveil their mysteries. While the efforts may be heroic, the rewards are often meager. Many famous or ill-famed codes have turned out to be forgeries, (dirty) tricks played on contemporaries and later generations for riches and fame, an intellectual challenge taken a tiny bit too far.

While all of these cryptic writing systems have received intense scholarly interest and been the subjects of large numbers of studies and monographs, a similarly intriguing and undeciphered code had to wait a long time before getting the attention it deserved. The Rohonc code is contained in a 450-page codex, a richly illustrated book with long sequences of ciphers handwritten on 10 × 12 cm paper sheets. It derives its name from the Castle of Rohonc (now Rechnitz, Austria) one of the aristocratic residencies of the Batthyány family, who accumulated an unmatched collection of over 30,000 books there, many of which—the codex in question included—ended up in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1838. The Batthyánys had always been known for their bibliophilia, and their passion for collecting caused them to acquire books from the most diverse sources. It is therefore almost impossible to know where this particular codex came from.

After the codex passed to the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a few enthusiasts saw in the code some form of ancient Hungarian writing and attempted to decipher it accordingly. When they realized it was not, the codex was discarded as a mere forgery unworthy of a gentleman’s attention. And so it largely remained until a fatal encounter with historian Benedek Láng some time in 2006. How much Láng paced his room rubbing his beard cannot be known for sure, but it seems safe to conclude that the appeal of the Rohonc codex was impossible for him to resist and prompted him to engage in years of research. The result is a monograph that both educates and entertains.

Láng starts with an overview of the nineteenth century, which was undeniably a golden age for forgers, particularly those specializing in documents of historical interest. There were many ambitious attempts to fill awkward gaps in the big narrative of small nations and produce examples of greatness of mind and culture, testimonies promoting the cause of people who felt deprived of historical justice. Hungary had a particularly rich pool of well-qualified and even well-known historical and literary scholars who indulged in forays to the dark side and became expert forgers. Such was their skill that some of their alleged products are still sometimes thought to be authentic. Two notable examples are Kálmán Thaly (1839–1909) and Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1794–1842): one because of his peculiar duplicity, being a historian who took great pains to save original documents from decay but at the same time a forger who created historical letters and “old military songs” in the style of eighteenth-century anti-Habsburg movements; the other because of his (possible) connection to the codex of Rohonc.8

Literáti Nemes was an antiquarian who worked for many of Hungary’s best-known contemporary booklovers. He brought to light a great number of fantastic items, but was not averse to supplying his clients with exquisite forgeries. Some of these he made himself, others he probably only passed on to unsuspecting enthusiasts. These forgeries, twenty-three altogether, are now kept in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest.9 They include old maps, diplomas, Hungarian language prayers from the eleventh century and many richly illustrated genealogies and chronicles. Some are better than others, and interestingly, despite firm evidence to the contrary, there still are a few amateur historians who believe in their authenticity, largely because they would support one or another airy theory, such as the linguistic kinship between Hungarian and Sumeric.

It is important to note, however, that all these forgeries were short, a couple of pages at best. Even though Literáti Nemes’ alleged involvement in the appearance of the Rohonc codex certainly casts the shadow of suspicion over its originality, Láng warns that the sheer size of this work sets it apart from the other well-known forgeries associated with Literáti Nemes. Nonetheless, such was the magnitude of the scandals and the wave of disappointment surrounding the documents which Literáti Nemes sold to various clients that the Rohonc codex was too easily assumed to be another of his mischiefs.

The Rohonc codex stands out from other hitherto undeciphered codices by its plainness: it contains no rich, colorful illustrations, indeed its pictures are almost primitive, as if radiating certain piety, and the codes are not especially decorative (unlike those in the Voynich manuscript, for instance). If it is a forgery, it must have been difficult to sell as something precious, and the immense efforts of the forger (he wrote 446 pages, after all) may not have been financially rewarding. All these aspects lend weight to the idea that the codex of Rohonc is not a forgery.

But before revealing any potentially conclusive evidence, Láng goes through the fascinating and occasionally almost ludicrous theories which have been associated with the code. From the Hungarian engineer who simply “read” the characters of the two pages of the codex at his disposal as an Ancient Hungarian prayer (he was not discouraged when it turned out that he held the pages upside down), through the even more far-fetched “reading” of the Romanian archaeologist who dedicated twenty years and a massive volume to deciphering the codex (without realizing she had read the characters in the wrong direction), to the Sanskrit kinship theory, one thing is common: they all serve different ideologies, each heavily loaded with historical-political implications, desires, grudges and ambitions. Other, less biased attempts at deciphering the code did not reach a solution but developed a promising methodology and offered more help for future attempts.

After this overview of his predecessors’ work, Láng tells his own story: how he approached the problem, and what he discovered. From down-to-earth physical examination methods, especially those directed at the watermarks, he found that the paper of the Rohonc codex was made in Northern Italy—Vicenza or Udine—in the mid-sixteenth century, although Láng is cautious about narrowing down the time and place it was made. He further analyses the paper, the ink, the type of pen used to write the codes, and the hand(s) which wrote the lines. With the help of an international expert, Joe Nickell, he draws the cautious conclusion that the writing is probably not (much) later than the paper itself, and goes right to left. There is no obvious indicator of the text being a forgery. Still, the possibility remains that the sixteenth-century paper remained unused, unwritten for centuries, possibly lying low in the Batthyánys’ enormous library, and so Láng determines the terminus ante quem as 1838 and the terminus post quem as 1530.

A close examination puts the possible number of characters at between 120 and 150, but the final figure is still to be determined. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no punctuation, one does not know where one word or sentence ends and where the next begins. Neither can the presence of a natural or artificial language behind the codes be determined, and if it is a natural language, which one it could be. One is left with more questions than answers, but Láng reminds the reader that whatever the motivation for the making of the codex, and whether or not it contains a natural, shorthand or perfect language, the goal is clear: cryptoanalysis and code-breaking.

Finding little to go on in the codes, the author turns to the 84 peculiar images in the codex. Some of these are relatively easy to recognize: they tell stories from the life of Christ, among them the Annunciation, the Three Magi with the Star of Bethlehem, Christ before Pilate, and so on. Others, however, are less obvious. An art-history analysis of the images—based on the types of churches and buildings, the distorted gothic shapes—suggests that they were drawn in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries; they also have a marked East European tinge. It may thus be possible to narrow down the potential languages associated with the codes (assuming that we are dealing with a natural language) to Latin, German, Hungarian, South Slavic and Romanian.

Láng then goes on to try and identify “cribs” in the text, starting from the short inscriptions in the images. The frequent repetition of certain figures, Christ included, under the same set of codes suggests some promise for this line of attack, but the breakthrough is yet to come. Similar conclusions regarding these inscriptions have recently been reached by other workers. Gábor Tokai and Levente Zoltán Király seem to have produced the most convincing results thus far, and their ongoing work is more than promising. It seems then that the codes of Rohonc conceal notions rather than letters, character strings refer to words, but single characters do not correspond to single sounds.10

If the author’s partial conclusions are true, then we are dealing with a Biblical text of some sorts. This throws up some very exciting possibilities, such as an apocryphal text written for and by a sect like the Bogumils, but something like a Book of Hours, a much more widespread form at the time, is more likely. The fact that the text runs from right to left could indicate the influence of Hebrew or Arabic/Turkish languages. But what is that text? Who encrypted it? Why and for whom? So many are the possibilities in the colorful East European scenario that the question remains open for the time being.

Finding no satisfying solution based on the content, Láng goes on to approach his text from a more technical/practical angle. The following chapter offers an exciting overview of the secret writing systems known in Western Europe and Hungary: monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic methods and homophonic writing, which was the predominant method until the end of the seventeenth century. These code systems were first applied in diplomatic correspondence and were also widespread in seventeenth-century Hungary: the codes used by György Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania, Imre Thököly, Miklós Zrínyi and even Archbishop Péter Pázmány are all examples of homophonic writing. These were by no means easy to break—the code used by Pázmány, for instance, was deciphered only through close collaboration between a historian and a code breaker.11 The historian’s knowledge of historic facts and faces was crucial in suggesting what names of persons and geographical places the nomenclators could stand for, while the code breaker lent his expertise in cryptography and the mathematical regularities in secret writing.

Cryptography was not the only technique. Stenography was also widely used, and when the table matching characters to words or syllables is missing, the text becomes hard or even impossible to read. The Rohonc code may even be an example of shorthand writing, although its pool of characters seems too complicated and unusual for that.

Returning to the problem of what actual language lies behind the codex of Rohonc, Láng discusses the many efforts at creating (or finding a long-lost) perfect single language, a key to all mysteries, a common ground between cultures and religions, and ponders the possibility that the Rohonc code is one of these. Artificial languages were especially popular at the time it was most probably made, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Still, the earliest known example of an artificial language project from Hungary is the work or the eighteenth-century Hungarian intellectual vagabond, György Kalmár.12

Benedek’s highly complex and intellectually challenging tour-de-force concludes with a chapter which, rather than promising a grand breakthrough, a final solution, a fantastic discovery, modestly offers the reader a summary of “what we know for sure, what we are quite sure we know, and what we have no idea about.” I will not spoil the pleasure of future readers by giving away the author’s conclusions, but I would like to highlight some of the merits of this monograph.

It is unusual for a book on the Hungarian market, combining high erudition (and a digestible amount of endnotes after each chapter) as demanded by academics with a down-to-earth, even entertaining narrative style accessible to general readers. Láng revives a tradition of popularizing science, something snug academics tend to frown on. Having proved enough times his knowledge of sources and methods, he has now made use of them to cater for a much wider audience. In the 1980s, the tradition of renowned academics reaching out to a more general public through popular versions of their scholarly work still flourished in Hungary.13

Nonetheless, the book is not for the faint hearted, delving deep into the world of combinatorics, paleography and historical research, although the reader may choose how far to follow the details. The appendices, one with a list of the illustrations in the Rohonc codex and one with a summary of code breaking methods, actually invites the reader to have a go and try for him/herself. And this is one of the great strengths of the book: it does not state unquestionable truths but invites us to think along. Who knows, maybe the final key to the code of Rohonc lies with one of the future readers of Benedek Láng’s book.

Dóra Bobory

Határok, vándorok, kémek. A magyarokról és a románokról alkotott kép Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli írásaiban [Frontiers, Wayfarers, Spies. The Image of Hungarians and Romanians in the Writings of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli]. By Levente Nagy. Budapest: Lucidus Kiadó, 2011. 286 pp.

Born in Bologna, Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730) entered Habsburg service in 1683 and spent nearly twenty years in the Southeast European region as a solider, diplomat, traveler, scientist and collector. Between 1682 and 1701, he devoted his activities to the liberation of Hungary from the Ottomans: he fought as a soldier in the army of Emperor Leopold I, was active as a diplomat in the peace talks with the Ottomans in 1690–1691 and 1698–1699, and in marking out the frontier between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire after the Peace of Karlowitz. He had started preparations for the latter work many years earlier, using scientifically based methods. As scientist and collector, he gathered together all kinds of objects, manuscripts, codices, maps, original documents, Roman remains and more, and all kinds of information: geographical, current political, historical, demographic, religious, etc. The lasting outcome of his work is a body of several thousand manuscript pages14 on Hungary and the whole Carpathian Basin, partly based on his own observations and partly drawing on local sources. Through modern analysis, it has yielded much information about the region and gives an accurate account of contemporary political thinking of the time, including attitudes towards the Hungarian people.

Much has been published about Marsigli himself, including his own autobiography15 and biographies large and small by authors of various nationalities, chiefly Italians and Hungarians.16 Levente Nagy has been researching and publishing on Marsigli extensively for several decades. In the first part of the book, he sensibly restricted the biography details to those required for an understanding of events in the Carpathian Basin and the time he spent there. Under the heading Kalandok [Adventures], he gives a detailed account of Marsigli’s attempts to research the Matthias Library of Buda and his diplomatic efforts of 1689–1691. A recently-formed hypothesis regarding the latter, first put forward by Hungarian researchers,17 is that there were political purposes as well as scientific zeal behind the Italian count’s thirst for knowledge, i.e. he was working as a spy.

After the introduction, Nagy goes into the details of Marsigli’s principal works. These concern the whole Southeastern European region, and not just the Hungarians and Romanians. One of these documents, Descrittione naturale, civile e militare delle Misie, Dacie e Illirico libri quattordici, was written to serve the legitimization of Habsburg rule over the lands recovered from the Ottomans. The part covering Illyria was not included, presumably because he had already written about the relations with the Dalmatian and Croatian lands and the sensitive question of their connection with the Kingdom of Hungary. He dealt with the former Roman province of Dacia in considerable depth, markedly manipulating the description for political purposes. He greatly exaggerated the size of the province and gave an account that went back to Roman times, one of the first elaborations of modern Daco-Roman continuity. On the basis of the Dacia discourse, the author plausibly demonstrates that Marsigli described the regional units that made up the Kingdom of Hungary using the names of the Roman provinces, by means of arbitrarily changing their boundaries. This was part of an attempt to find precedents, in the form of previously established states, for the restoration a putative past entity (the Roman Empire) within the Habsburg Monarchy.

Marsigli characterized the nation (nazione) in terms of origin, domicile, language, occupation and costume. Nonetheless, he nearly always referred to ethnic groups in terms of a political unit, a state: Monarchia Hungarica (Hungary), Wallachia, Moldavia, Transilvania, Croazia, Impero Romano Germanico (Holy Roman Empire) and Impero Ottomano, and not as Hungarians, Vlachs, Croatians, Germans, Turks, etc.

Marsigli’s activity can be divided into two distinct periods: up to and after his inglorious dismissal from Habsburg service in 1703. The author pays great attention to the gradual progression and refinement of Marsigli’s ideas in his writing. He shows how different texts deal with the establishment of the Principality of Transylvania as an independent state and how Marsigli’s notion of Dacia formed and evolved. Nagy demonstrates how Marsigli used the information he gathered from local intellectuals and politicians in these texts, and particularly what he incorporated and what he left out. He finds that most of the Descrittione is a compilation. Marsigli added little to the text because his aim was simply to gather together information and not to evaluate it. Only in a few places did he interfere radically with what his informers wrote. The purpose of the Descrittione was fundamentally military: the retention of Transylvania and the annexation of the Romanian voivodeships to the Habsburg Monarchy. As regards the latter, Marsigli thought that Moldavia should be dropped, but he outlined an actual invasion plan for Wallachia. The military plan, however, had to be linked to a legal basis for bringing these lands under imperial control, and Marsigli achieved this by interpreting parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as “predecessor states.” Emperor Leopold I (1657–1705), as lawful king of Hungary, could thus take possession of the lands reconquered from the Ottomans. He reinforced this explanation in a later work showing which voivodeships and principalities belonged to “true Hungary.” This is inherent in the title itself: Monarchia Hungarica in sua regna, principatus et ducatus divisa, nimirum: Hungariam veram, Bosnam, Serviam, Croatiam, Sclavoniam, Erzegovinam, Moldaviam, Valachiam, Transylvaniam, Banatum Temesvariensem, Bulgariam.

Nagy devotes a whole chapter to the information Marsigli gathered on the Hungarian and Romanian languages and linguistic relics: Székely runes, an early Latin–Hungarian–Romanian dictionary (the “Lexicon Marsilianum”) and a word list containing 2500 Transylvanian, Moldavian and Wallachian toponyms. In the story of the research behind the latter, Nagy points out something which previous Marsigli scholars have tended to ignore: Marsigli always arranged the texts himself, whether he wrote or collected them. From his categorizations by subject matter, it is possible to establish the time and purpose of their creation. For example, he started work on the vocabulary—compiling it or having it compiled—because it filled a pressing practical need in his border surveying work of 1699–1701. After summarizes the disputes and opinions surrounding the much-researched Lexicon Marsilianum and makes a new attempt to establish its authorship. He concludes that it must have been the work of several authors, and they must have used several existing word lists.

The long chapter Iratok [Documents] explores three documents on the history of the Hungarians which Marsigli wrote entirely himself. Epitome della ribellione dell’ Ungheria con annesso il Prodromo del Protocollo de’ moderni confini Cesarei Ottomanici, probably dating from 1699, takes the most hostile tone. It consists largely of clichés borrowed from Italian pro-Habsburg propaganda writers. The second, which survives only in fragments, is Memorie ed introduzione all’istoria della ribellione d’Ungheria. Nagy considers this and the foregoing work to have been preliminary studies for the third, Primo Abozzo del compendio storico dell’Ungaria per servire d’introduzione al trattato: Acta Executionis Pacis fatto dal generale co(lonello) Marsili18. The latter, written sometime between 1705 and 1718, was translated into Latin and intended as the foreword, a kind of advertisement, for a planned compilation of his writing, Acta executionis pacis.19 Its wording, and the way it judges and condemns the Hungarians differ at many points from the other two documents, which were written before his fall from grace at Breisach in 1703. His main thrust was the possibility of reviving the old Roman Empire on lands which were occupied by the Scythians and their successors. This would form part of a Christianized world empire where order, security and economic prosperity prevailed and whose trustees would be the Holy Roman Emperors and the Pope. The highly original way Marsigli arranged the information he obtained on Hungarian history to fit his defined conception reveals his conception of the peoples and history of the Carpathian Basin region. He highlights only five basic episodes between the Scythians and the Peace of Karlowitz (1699). In the last part of Abozzo he enlarges his own role, considerably distorting the relative significance of events. Like all of his works, his historical writing can be understood as a kind of biography and speech for the defense. The author wryly remarks at several points how Marsigli, the upholder of the nihil mihi principle, often put forward his own personality, ideas and proposals in his writing, plans and descriptions.

In the final part of the book, the author summarizes and places in a wider European context how nations, particularly the Hungarians and the Romanians, appear in Marsigli’s writing. He finds an imagological discourse conforming to strict rules, with peoples being judged on the basis of their position in the structure of states. In the late seventeenth century, premises based on classical traditions, namely Herodotos, Hyppocrates and Aristotle, formed the basis of thinking about other peoples. Facets of these abound in Marsigli’s writing, even where the basic notions go against his own personal experience. Marsigli claimed that the Hungarians inherited their pride, restlessness and querulous tendencies from their ancestors the Scythians and the Mongols, although the Huns and the Turks also entered the picture as relatives. A view of Hungary espoused by a group of largely Italian-born and Militärpartei-linked generals in the Vienna court, following the insights of Raimondo Montecuccoli (e.g. Antonio Caraffa), found its way into Marsigli’s ideology.20 This had at its center integration of Hungary into the Habsburg Monarchy, the key to the rise of the authority and power of Emperor Leopold. Settling the position of Hungary was considered fundamental in the fight against the Ottomans. Besides the militarist conceptions, intended to represent the security of the Emperor’s subjects, Marsigli greatly valued the development of trade, on which he made specific proposals to the highest government circles in Vienna. These all followed the contemporary ideas of establishing Austrian absolutism and making it competitive. For this, in addition to proper government and maintenance of order, Marsigli, as Leopold I’s commissioner directing the work on delineating the frontiers between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires after the Peace of Karlowitz,21 considered the security of the frontiers to be crucial. The frontiers were what signaled alienness, that which was not to be integrated but segregated. The near obsession for seeking out, delineating and defining borders pervaded seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalist thinking. It was an attempt to create a new and meaningful order at a time when the sacred order of things was collapsing. Marsigli’s aims regarding the Hungarians, as Nagy concludes from his discussion of frontier history, were integration, elimination of rebellious elements, and acceptance by Vienna, to which end he presented the Hungarians as peaceful Austrian subjects.

Since the book brings together research which Levente Nagy has pursued in several directions for more than a decade, its structure is not completely consistent. Its five large chapters are only loosely interconnected, while a few major subjects recur, highlighting their importance. The book has a thorough index, and its extensive bibliography will be of great assistance for further reading.

Overall, although Marsigli research in many areas is still unable to get beyond the level of putting forward new questions and hypotheses, Nagy’s book fits excellently into the concept by which the publisher, Lucidus, intends to promote and disseminate scholarly work on the questions of national self-awareness and Hungarian–non-Hungarian relations. Nagy has dispelled many decades-old myths by putting certain Marsigli texts under detailed philological scrutiny. Since the author is competent in current European research and in early modern Hungarian and Romanian literature and history, he interprets the texts in a suitably broad context and sets them against well-selected control sources.

Translated by Alan Campbell

Mónika F. Molnár

Studies in the History of Early Modern Transylvania. Edited by Gyöngy Kovács Kiss. Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 2011. viii + 616 pp.

The cultures of the peoples of Central Europe differ significantly from the cultures of Western Europe. The region is characterized in particular by a diversity of languages, religions, and power structures.22 It is vital for the historians of Central Europe to ensure that their findings and research are accessible to the wider international community. The series entitled Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, which publishes current research on the history of Central Europe, has been an essential contribution to this effort since its founding in 1977. Published by Columbia University Press and consisting now of some 140 volumes, this English-language series addresses not only readerships in Great Britain and the United States, but now, given the spread of English, an increasingly large global audience. As part of the series, a three-volume work on the history of Transylvania was published one decade ago under the editorship of Béla Köpeczi and Zoltán Szász.23 It continues to represent a fundamental work of scholarship on Transylvania. The theme of this collection of essays, Studies in the History of Early Modern Transylvania, is more narrow in its focus. The essays concern the history of Transylvania in the early modern era, i.e. the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Most of the authors are Hungarian historians living in Romania who have studied the history of the region they regard as home.

In the introduction, Gyöngy Kovács Kiss, who is also the editor of the collection, offers a brief historical overview of the Transylvanian Principality. It is not easy task to provide a pithy characterization of the political circumstances and constitutional state of the princedom, since questions pertaining to its status continue to be subjects of debate today. The fact that Kovács Kiss herself refers to Transylvania as a “semi-independent” vassal state of the Ottoman Empire in the opening lines and then, not much later in the text, as an independent state that existed from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth (i.e. until the expulsion of the Turks) is a clear illustration of this. In her brief overview she nonetheless captures with keen insight the essence of the double-dependencies of the princedom (Habsburg on the one hand, Ottoman on the other), and she provides a balanced depiction of the principal characteristics of the reigns of the individual princes. She guides her reader through the political history of Transylvania up until the end of the eighteenth century. The introduction concludes with a description of the nascent Romanian national movements and offers a concluding paragraph on the early nineteenth century, the Napoleonic wars, the Congress of Vienna, and the Metternich Era.

According to the introduction, the essential goal of the essays is to present new perspectives on the complex history of Transylvania in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The contributors to the volume have set aside questions of domestic and foreign policy and focus instead on issues pertaining to social, administrative, cultural, and everyday life. The book is divided into three sections. The first is entitled, “Structure and Organization – Society – Interpersonal Relations.” It includes topics such as the history of the princely court, the organization of the counties, and various social strata.

A study by Annamária Jeney-Tóth entitled “The Transylvanian Princely Court in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century” is the opening essay of this section. True to its subtitle (“On the Basis of the Account Books of Kolozsvár”), the essay presents the structure of the prince’s court during its stays at various times in the city of Kolozsvár (Cluj in Romanian, Klausenburg in German) and the different groups of court society on the basis, first and foremost, of account records, with a separate chapter on the court nobility, court stewards, and court “school,” where the children of the nobility prepared during their years in the court for the later roles they were to assume as adults. In addition to offering portraits of the prince’s postal service, retainers, soldiery, and Master of the Horse, Jeney-Tóth also touches on people (musicians, kitchen staff, people affiliated with the chancellery) who were not strictly part of the court, but who often were with the court during its time in the city. In the conclusion to the essay Jeney-Tóth summarizes the most important elements of the court, determines the approximate number of people belonging to it, and establishes that the composition of the court, which was diverse and complex, depended to a great extent on the personality and family of the individual princes. A separate table offers an overview of the data concerning the courts of each prince. This essay, a valuable contribution based on thorough source work, is missing only a brief introduction to the secondary literature on the subject and an examination of the development of the princely court.24

Veronka Dáné, an expert on the official organization of the counties of the Transylvanian Princedom,25 uses the records books of Torda county as the foundation of her examination of the judicial practices in the county and the institution of the Lord and Deputy Lieutenant (the főispán and alispán). The essay clearly traces the formation of the county sedria in the seventeenth century and Dáné demonstrates that the “golden age” of Transylvanian history (the age of Prince Gábor Bethlen) bore witness to important attainments in the administration of justice (one might think of the achievements in the standardization of legal practice of the 1619 Diet). We must state however that while there were some similarities between the organizations of the individual counties, they nonetheless varied substantially and one should not venture any general conclusions on the basis of only one or two counties.

In the next essay in this chapter Mihály Sebestyén (Spielmann) presents “The Tragedy of Dénes Bánffy.” As the brother-in-law of the prince, Dénes Bánffy established relations on his own authority with the Ottomans and the Hungarian Kingdom, presumably with the goal of averting threats to the security of the Principality. His actions, however, gave rise to the suspicion that he was aspiring to assume the throne. His enemies, a group of influential Transylvanian aristocrats with chancellor Mihály Teleki at their head, looked with mistrust not only on his machinations in foreign policy, but also on the fact that he had acquired enormous estates. In the end the prince had him executed. This is the only essay in the collection that addresses a question pertaining to the higher nobility, although the internal conflicts of the Apafi era are given an even larger role in the story. The author offers a narrative of Bánffy’s fall (1674) on the basis of the available sources and the secondary literature. Sebestyén offers new insights into the story by revealing and explaining the interrelationships between the aristocrats of Transylvania.

Mihály Hermann Gusztáv continues this presentation of the varied social layers in a fascinating essay entitled “The Virtual Székely Past.” He guides the reader through a later centuries on the basis of the Csíki Székely Krónika [Székely Chronicle of Csík] and legends from other forged chronicles. It would have been interesting to have included, alongside this excursion into Geistesgeschichte, an essay on the role of Székely society in the early modern era.26

In his essay on the Romanian nobility of Transylvania in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries Ioan Drăgan offers an overview of the nobility of Romanian descent in the early modern era. He demonstrates that the upper echelon of the Romanian nobility essentially abandoned its Romanian identity and became Hungarian. This process of assimilation among the elite took place in parallel with the immigration of broader Romanian masses from the areas around Kővár (Chioar in Romanian), Fogaras (Făgăraş in Romanian, Fugreschmarkt in German), Zaránd (Zarand in Romanian) and Bihar. The members of this broader social group belonged to the poorer nobility, and in time they came to replace the older nobility of Bánát (Banat in Romanian), Hátszeg (Haţeg in Romanian), and Máramaros (Maramureş in Romanian). In the nineteenth century they were closer to the Romanian speaking population and became part of the Romanian national movements. It might have been nice to have had, alongside this essay on the Romanian nobility, a contribution on the role of the higher and middle Hungarian nobility in the history of Transylvania as well, building for instance on the research that is underway even at the moment on social elites. There are also no essays on the Saxons either, the so-called “third nation,” a regrettable omission given the prominence of their role in the economic, social, and political life of Transylvania.

Judit Pál has contributed an essay on the Armenians of Transylvania in the eighteenth century. As she persuasively shows, the arrival of Armenians in Transylvania cannot be tied to any concrete date. Her thoroughly-footnoted essay acquaints the reader with the story of the spread of the Armenian community, the foundation of Armenopolis, their conversion from the Armenian Church to Catholicism, and the role they played in economic life.

Sándor Pál-Antal looks at the social composition of Marosvásárhely (Târgu-Mureş in Romanian, Neumarkt in German), a Transylvanian city that could hardly be characterized as typical, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Marosvásárhely was the only civitas of the Székely Land, in other words the only settlement to be given the status of royal free city, which it was granted in 1616. One of the distinctive features of the city was the mix of burghers and members of the nobility. The nobility enjoyed a number of privileges, but the burghers dominated the bodies of municipal government, so the differing rights and privileges led to conflicts. It might have been nice to have included something on the long, gradual process of change as the settlement grew into a city. This process slowly freed Marosvásárhely from the influence of Marosszék and created conflicts between the city and the Székelys.

The last essay in this chapter was written by István Imreh (1919–2003), a scholar on the laws in the Székely villages. Regrettably, it is not made clear whether this essay was simply part of his bequest of manuscripts or possibly an extract from one of his writings published in the 1960s and 1970s (these writings are listed in the first footnote). The dominant concept of economic history in the article implies an approach that dates back some forty or fifty years and therefore should be regarded as out-of-date if not obsolete. It seems a bit out of place in a volume that promises to offer “new perspectives” in the study of history. The article provides a brief presentation of the statutes in the Székely villages and the villages belonging to demesnes. There is also some discussion of the regulations in cities and a short presentation of some economic instructions of the demesnes and of the estates belonging to the princes.

The theme of the second section of the book is the intellectual, cultural, and religious life of the era. According to the title there are three topics: “Scholarship – Culture – Architecture.” In the opening essay of this section Dezső Buzogány examines the Reformation in Transylvania from the perspective of theological history. This superb essay acquaints the reader with the eras in which the ideas of the Reformation spread to and took hold in Transylvania. One of Buzogány’s fundamental theses is that the Reformation was not a renewal of faith, or more precisely that the adherents of the Reformation did not demand the establishment of a new Church, but rather sought to restore the medieval Church and return to the model of the Church of the first centuries of Christendom and of the Bible. The formation of a new Church structure was a response to the hostile reaction of the Catholic Church.

In his essay, Gernot Nussbächer’s examines the life of Johannes Honterus (1498–1549), a saxon humanist, polyhistor, church organizer, and reformer. Born in the city of Brassó (Braşov in Romanian, Kronstadt in German), Johannes Honterus was a scholar, pedagogue, publisher, and lawyer all in one, a great figure of the Reformation with a variety of talents. The essay is complemented by a bibliography on Honterus’ writings and the secondary literature on his life and work. Nussbächer is a devoted scholar of Honterus’ work, and he has published numerous articles and monographs on his findings. However, this essay, which essentially offers a summary, seems to have been written as something of an overview for non-experts (as is indicated by the complete lack of footnotes), and it was published in German and Romanian in 2009.

The inclusion of an essay written some twenty years ago by Zsigmond Jakó (1916–2008) is another indication of the heterogeneous nature of the volume. The essay, which examines the life and work of bishop Ignác Batthyány, was originally published in 1991 in Erdélyi Múzeum.27 Its republication in this collection represents a gesture of respect for and commemoration of its author. Jakó establishes that the bishop’s ambitions to become a historian did not begin to take root in the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome, but rather during his years at the University of Nagyszombat. He acquaints the reader with Batthyány’s work collecting sources on Church history, which was an integral part of the Jesuist school of history at the time. One of the indisputable indications of the high standards Batthyány set in his work as a collector is the fact that, of the medieval Latin codices in Romania today, 80 percent are from his library. His death at an early age was a tragedy in part because it prevented him from realizing further plans to create a society of scholars and maintain an astronomical observatory. With his “far-sighted, wide-ranging cultural conception” (p.301), Batthyány was a worthy heir to the cultural and educational efforts of István Báthory, Gábor Bethlen, and György I. Rákóczi. It is regrettable that there is not a single essay on any of the latter three Transylvanian princes in the collection.

An essay by acclaimed art historian András Kovács summarizes the findings of research on the city of Gyulafehérvár, offering a detailed presentation of the history of the most important buildings of the city in the course of the sixteenth century. Kovács begins with a brief discussion of the complexities of research on architectural history and then examines the topography and fortifications of the castle on the basis of available sources, touching on the complexities of establishing a water-supply system and the formation of an armory and a canon foundry. The reconstruction of the seat of the princedom, which was created out of the buildings of the medieval bishop’s palace, raises many questions to which only archeological excavations could give precise answers, such as the date of the construction of the “inner courtyard” or the ground-floor corridor. The illustrations nicely complement the text.

Klára P. Kovács’ essay on the sixteenth-century bastion fortifications is a thorough summary of modern architectural history Kovács takes both pictures and written sources into consideration in her study, but she does not use archeological data, which might have enabled her to provide a more thorough and detailed examination of the subject. The early dating on the basis of written sources of the construction of the castle of Szamosújvár (Gherla in Romanian) seems dubious. The supplemental illustrations are a useful inclusion and complement the text.

The chapter on culture comes to a close with an essay by Albert Fekete in which he examines the garden culture of the early modern era from the perspective of landscape architecture. His goal is not simply to present the sources on Renaissance garden culture, but to present the tools that were used at the time to shape the landscape and to examine how this continued into the second half of the eighteenth century. His principal thesis is that the Transylvanian garden culture (of the Székelys and the Saxons, of the prince’s court and the aristocracy) had a decisive influence on the natural environment. The essay offers numerous illustrations of how prominent gardens (the gardens of castles and curiae) transformed the surrounding areas and how important they were from aesthetic, ecological, and economic perspectives. While this second part of the volume is interesting and at times contains new findings, as an overview it is nonetheless flawed, as it presents only a small slice of the rich cultural life of Transylvania and the research that has been devoted to it.

The third and final chapter, entitled “Claudiopolis – Transylvaniae Civitas Primaria,” presents the social and cultural world of the city of Kolozsvár, quite rightly referred to as the most important city in Transylvania. The essays offer insights into the various social layers of Kolozsvár and the everyday lives of the denizens of the city. These essays were already published in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Hungarian, with the exception of the essay by András Kiss, only the first part of which had already been published.

The essay by László Pakó examines the conflicts between the burghers of Kolozsvár and the members of the nobility who settled in the city. The denizens of the city tried many times and adopted various strategies to prevent the nobility from purchasing real estate in the city, and when a member of the nobility succeeded in buying a house, they attempted to purchase it back from him.

In her essay Ágnes Flóra presents the elite of Kolozsvár in the early modern era. She touches on historical precedents, the so-called “geréb patricians,” and the rotation of the Saxon and Hungarian nations in the governance of the city. Endogamy was common among the elites of the city, as Flóra demonstrates with the example of the daughters of Tamás Budai, a Kolozsvár goldsmith. The lifestyle of the elite of Kolozsvár resembled the lifestyle of the nobility in the rest of the country. Renaissance tastes prevailed and book collecting was a common passion. Flóra also notes that while the meaning of the word patrician varies from case to case, there are general criteria, and the burgers of Kolozsvár in the sixteenth century did not meet these criteria, since they did not constitute a closed community possessing privileges, unlike for instance the burghers of Nuremberg. In time, the more influential families would leave the city and integrate into the nobility.

The essays by Gyöngy Kovács Kiss and András Kiss take the reader into the world of everyday people of Transylvania. Kovács Kiss provides insights into the everyday lives of the citizens of Kolozsvár. The first part of her essay deals with games and leisure spaces. It presents the practices surrounding wine retail and the regulations pertaining to the importation of wine. The customers in the taverns in Kolozsvár came from various backgrounds and social layers. Alongside the local burghers one also found soldiers and “idlers.” The shooting range was another site of leisure activity. Young men came to indulge in target practice with bows and arrows. The essay also informs the reader which games were popular among the people of Kolozsvár in their free time (dice, cards, ninepins, etc.). The second half of the essay examines the modes of gossip and slander (accusations of witchcraft, lechery, debauchery, and illegitimate pregnancy) and the most important sites. The reader is acquainted with the market, where various implements and remedies were sold, the public bathhouse, the mill, and the bakery.

An essay by András Kiss constitutes a fine conclusion to the collection. He recounts the story of the first and last witch trials of Kolozsvár and examines the social and psychological motives behind witch trials in general. In the first trial the accused, Prisca Kewmies (Piroska Kőmíves), was a midwife who was condemned to death in 1565, before Klára Bócy, who earlier had been seen in the secondary literature as the first woman to have been burnt at the stake in Kolozsvár. Kiss suspects that one of the people who may have played a significant role in instigating the trials was a tailor named Péter Grúz, and he identifies some of Grúz’s possible motives. The last “witch,” a hapless beggar named Kata Kádár, was executed in February, 1734. Kiss provides a vivid and well-documented account of her life, the gruesome tortures to which she was submitted, her beheading, and the incineration of her body. This chapter, gripping as the stories are, would have been more interesting had it not been limited to the city of Kolozsvár, but rather had also included the cities around the salt mines, the Saxon cities, Marosvásárhely on the western fringes of the Székely Land, and the princely capital of Gyulafehérvár. This would have given the reader some perspectives on the scholarship of the last few decades concerning urban history and urban society.

One of the strengths of the collection is that it contains biographical details at the end of the essays concerning the more important historical figures mentioned. This represents a useful complement to the essays themselves, and it is followed by brief introductions of the authors, a selected bibliography, and an index of places and proper names. Regrettably, there are inconsistencies in the use of English. For instance the term főispán is translated as “lord lieutenant” in some articles and “main county head” in others.

There are some printing mistakes in the volume, as well as typos, for instance, the contention according to which Dénes Bánffy was born around 1630 but nonetheless was 54 or 55 years old at the time of his death in 1674. According to another contention in the essay Mihály Apafi was freed from Tatar captivity sometime around 1600 (in fact this happened 60 years later).

Nonetheless, considering the thoroughness of the essays, this volume constitutes a valuable collection that will be highly useful to scholars both in and outside of Hungary.

Translated by Thomas Cooper

Angelika T. Orgona

A városi élet keretei a feudális kori Magyarországon. Kassa társadalma a 16. század derekán [The Settings of Urban Life in Feudal Hungary. Kassa (Košice) Society in the Mid-Sixteenth Century]. By György Granasztói. Budapest: Korall, 2012. 415 pp.

Urban history did not come into the focus of Hungarian historical research until the second half of the twentieth century, before which research on urbanization and urban society was regarded as the reserve of local historians. It was only when the history of events started to lose some of its dominance and disciplines such as economic and social history made more headway that Hungarian scholars turned their attention towards towns as the mediator spaces of craftsmanship and commerce.

Historians researching the towns of medieval and early modern Hungary cannot rely on the same sources as are used for the study of, for instance, political history. In addition to charters and other legal documents, they have to use accounts, tax lists, wills, tithe lists, etc. These sources were discovered by archivists as early as the late nineteenth century and many of them were even published then or in the early twentieth century, but they attracted little attention from researchers.

The first written urban privileges date from the early thirteenth century, and literacy became widespread in Buda, Sopron, and towns in the north of the Hungarian Kingdom (in present day Slovakia) in the fourteenth. Literacy became slightly more diverse as some of the towns employed professional notaries. In the late medieval period, the free royal towns (towns subject to the direct jurisdiction of the kings of Hungary, and having the most privileges) had quite sophisticated systems of administration28 This increasing complexity is well reflected in the appearance and rapid diversification of town books (Libri civitatum).29 Apart from their judicial affairs, towns had their own tax administration, and numerous tax and tithe lists are preserved from fifteenth and sixteenth-century Hungary. Apart from these serial sources, one finds household conscriptions and—in the case of Kassa—ambulations (ambulationes), documents that served both economic and military purposes.

Despite the early publication of these sources, they were not subjected to systematic research until the 1960s. That was when more and more scholars began to follow historians of the Annales-school who were increasingly shifting their focus to serial sources.30 Systematic analysis of these sources went on in parallel with the development of computer technology, which gained the attention of several French historians of the period.31 Hungarian historians also showed growing interest in the use of computers in fields such as historical demography and economic history, where the use of mathematics and quantitative methods was fundamental.32 These included some historians who were already well established, such as Erik Fügedi, Vera Bácskai and József Kovacsics, and others, such as György Granasztói, who were at early stages of their careers.

Granasztói’s extensive volume on the sixteenth-century society of Kassa (Košice) is a fruit of the early phase of computer-based quantitative historical research in Hungary. He started to work on towns in Hungary in the early 1960s, and from early on his output had two facets: one was social structure and demography, and the other urban layout. In the 1960s and 1970s he analyzed serial sources to gain insight into the urban structure of major towns from the Hungarian Kingdom such as Győr, Sopron, Kassa and Nagyszombat (Trnava).

The book reviewed here is not new; Granasztói wrote it in the early 1970s, and completed it in 1975, when it earned him a degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It remained a manuscript, however, until the editors of Korall, a leading journal of social sciences and social history, recently decided to publish it as part of a new series: Társadalomtörténeti Monográfiák (Studies in social history).

Kassa, the scene of Granasztói’s book, first rose to significance in the Kingdom in the Middle Ages. In the classification of medieval Hungarian towns according to a detailed set of criteria devised by the influential Hungarian urban historian András Kubinyi, Kassa accompanied eight other towns in the highest category. Kassa stood out even in this group, and only Buda, Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) and Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) are thought to have been more significant centers.33 Kassa’s importance in many respects decreased during the sixteenth century, but that certainly did not affect literacy there: only Sopron and Pozsony have equally rich archives from this period. Despite its shrinking role as a center of the urban network, Kassa remained an important town.

An analysis of this transformation is part of Granasztói’s agenda for the book. He attempts to reconstruct as many parameters of the sixteenth-century Kassa society as possible using serial sources and with the aid of a computer analysis. Before turning to that, he lists some factors that might influence the accuracy of the datasets he used: 1) the total population of the inner town; 2) the occupations of the population as derived from the tax lists; 3) the ownership of the estates; 4) the distinction of family and household; 5) missing streets. These are all valid problems, especially considering the sensitivity of the analyses he based on the datasets. They could have been partly treated by the study of other sources preserved in the archives of the town, such as the large number of charters or letters which are known from this period. These sources could have greatly helped him to determine, for example, what proportion of the inner town population was represented in the documents. It is also true, however, that at several points in the book, Granasztói carefully refers back to these problems, and makes an indication that they are all general methodological problems when using tax lists and conscriptions to reconstruct the characteristics of a certain society.34

Granasztói starts the analysis of social structure of the town by reconstructing the population of the (inner) town. His precise figures, based on conscriptions, show that it fluctuated between 2000 and 2700 during the sixteenth century. The population was relatively high in the late medieval period, but decreased significantly during the 1530s as the town was deeply affected by the wars of succession to the Hungarian throne. The analysis goes into the details of the family structure of the town center population, but omits a significant part of the population—those living in the suburbs and those connected with the military. The latter are particularly important as most of them lived in the direct surroundings of the “Ring”, the main market street of the town, and as such were important factors in its everyday life.35 In recent years—thanks to the works of István Németh H.—scholarship has a better insight to the problem of military population living in the town of Kassa.36 Despite this problem, Granasztói’s analysis of the inner-town population makes a fundamental contribution to two long historiographical debates concerning: 1) the distinction between the family and the household in the urban context in pre-modern societies 2) the size of families in towns. Here Granasztói places his results in the international context by comparing his results with those of similar investigations of towns elsewhere, mostly in the German speaking areas and England.

The value of computer-based analysis shows up best in the chapter on professions and social stratification in Kassa. Granasztói applies a method by which he clearly demonstrates, for example, the strong correlation between the amount of grain and wine kept in households and the wealth of families. Later scholarship has shown that many burghers had a share in the export of Hegyalja wine to Poland,37 and those who were involved in long distance trade seem to have had more reserves than others in the town.

After the analyses of social stratification, the presence of professions in the town and the financial status of the burghers, Granasztói turns to Kassa’s role as a trade center in the region. He is most interested in determining why Kassa never became as important as Buda, Kraków or Vienna in the urban network of Central Europe. Granasztói shows how the town lost its importance in long distance trade by the mid-sixteenth century. The two key factors were the loss of medieval privileges and a lack of assets. Without investments, Kassa could not play a role in the long distance cattle trade, provenly one of the most profitable businesses of the century. Granasztói also shows the structure of industries to have changed, putting Kassa at a disadvantage against other towns in the region. As the price of agrarian products rose after the end of the Middle Ages, Kassa’s industrial role decreased and its market shifted towards the exchange of agricultural products. The change in the town’s industry was accompanied by a transformation in the composition of its population by nationality. Throughout the late medieval period, like the other major towns of the Hungarian Kingdom, Kassa was dominated by a German elite, but the influx of a substantial Hungarian population in the period following the battle of Mohács changed power structures of the town.38

In the 1970s, Granasztói’s work was a ground-breaking study in many senses. He pioneered the use of computer-based quantitative methods to reconstruct characteristics of the population of an area, and was one of the first to study the social dynamics of a community based on previously underestimated serial sources.

Granasztói’s monograph remains an undoubted achievement even if significant improvements in two areas over the last 40 years have challenged the validity of his results. Firstly, historians and archivists have studied a huge amount of archival material kept in the archives of the Habsburg central administration and apart from that hundreds of charters, private letters and accounts relating to the history of Kassa are now available online or in source publications. These sources have led to significant progress in issues such as the military population and the changes in Kassa’s economic role in the late medieval period and the first decades of early modern times.39 Secondly, the computer methods used by Granasztói have gone through significant transformation, and historians have expressed their doubts about the validity of studies based exclusively on the analysis of variables. Despite these changes, the results of Granasztói’s painstaking analysis of the unique sources preserved in the archives of Kassa are still used by Hungarian historians. It has therefore been well worth publishing the study, and we can only regret that it did not happen in 1970s.

Translated by Alan Campbell

András Vadas

1 Szerencsének elegyes forgása. II. Rákóczi György és kora [Mixed Turns of Fate. Rákóczi György II and His Era], ed. Gábor Kármán and András Péter Szabó (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009).

2 It is worth noting one detail not mentioned in the book. On November 6, 1644 at one of the sittings of the peace negotiations in Nagyszombat (today Trnava in Slovakia) the emissary of Bártfa (today Bardejov in Slovakia), who was a supporter of Rákóczi, thus recounted Miklós Esterházy’s words: “Nu, vos domini conjicitis culpam huius mali in nos, cum tamen vos estis autores, vos praetenditis speciosum titulum religionis et libertatis, sed falsa sunt, ut etiam Betlehemus fecit, ad quae haec tria potissimum ipsum appulerant: 1. Cupido habendi. 2. Libido dominandi. 3. Ambitio ulciscendi. Ita et vester princeps non aliis rationibus motus, quam his, et pretiosum vel speciosum titulum, et hac ratione vult vos subjugare, immo jam colla vestra subjugavit, privabit vos libertatibus, devastabit regnum. – et alia plurima incompetentia dixit.” Štátny archív v Prešove, pobočka Bardejov, Archív mesta Bardejova, Mestské kníhy, Nr. 690, Acta diaetalia 1644–1655. f. 47r.

3 Kármán presents the justification given for the war on the basis of a letter that the Prince wrote to the Polish King John II Casimir, though one finds other signs of the legitimation strategy in Transylvanian sources as well, such as in the unpublished chronicle of the notary of Beszterce (today Bistriţa in Romania): “Ob supra memoratas procul dubio nefandas practicas per Basilium Moldaviae despotam ac vaivodam in Porta Othomanica motas, quamobrem jure merito insurrectio publica contra eundem facta est.” Serviciul Judeţean al Arhivelor Naţionale Cluj-Napoca. Primăria oraşului Bistriţa, a. III, p. 3, 329.

4 Kármán recently published an engaging article on the diplomat steps taken during the Polish campaign of György Rákóczi II. Kármán Gábor, “II. Rákóczi György 1657. évi lengyelországi hadjáratának diplomáciai háttere” [The Diplomatical Background of the 1657 Military Campaign in Poland of György Rákóczi II], Századok 146, no. 5 (2012): 1049–84.

5 György Horváth-Kissevith’s report to the King on his visit to the Transylvanian Prince in early December. At the end of the last meeting the emissary, at the suggestion of chancellor György Szelepcsényi, praised Transylvania and Rákóczi, who had conquered Wallachia and Moldova and even had control over part of Hungary and therefore could be quite satisfied with his attainments: “Respondit princeps: eam esse naturam principum et quorumvis aliorum, ut modum, quo familiam suam ad altiora evehere, et dignitatibus maximis ampliare et condecorare possint, studeant adinvenire, sic et se dictus princeps, si – ita inquit – Deo visum foret, eiusmodi occasionibus merito parere posse.” Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, A 98, Magyar Kancellária, gyűjteményes fondok – Transylvanica, b. 12, f. 16 (1650–1658), no. 47 (cs. 13, f. 1117.) Kármán makes use of the source in his discussion of the standpoint of Zsuzsanna Lorántffy, but does not refer to it with regards to this.

6 János Heltai, Alvinczi Péter és a heidelbergi peregrinusok [Péter Alvinczi and the Heidelberg Pilgrims] (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 1994), 129–54.

7 Milada Blekestad, Comenius. Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komenský (Oslo–Prague: Universitetsforlaget–Academia, 1969), 398–407.

 

8 Ágnes R. Várkonyi, Thaly Kálmán és történetírása [Kálmán Thaly and his History Writing] (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1961); Ákos Kelecsényi, “Egy magyar régiségkereskedő a 19. században. Literáti Nemes Sámuel (1794–1842)” [A Hungarian Nineteenth-Century Book Collector, Samuel Literati Nemes], Az Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Évkönyve 1972 (Budapest: OSZK, 1975), 307–27.

9 National Széchényi Library, Fol. Hung. 1365/1 and 2.

10 Gábor Tokai, “Az első lépések a Rohonci-kódex megfejtéséhez” [The First Steps Toward an Undeciphering of the Rohonc Codex], Élet és Tudomány 55–56, no. 52–53 (2010), no. 2 (2011): 1675–78, 50–53; Levente Zoltán Király, “Struktúrák a Rohonci-kódex szövegében. Helyzetjelentés egy amatőr kutatásról” [Structures in the Text of the Rohonc Codex: A Status Report on an Amateur Research], Theologiai Szemle 54, no. 2 (2011): 82–93.

11 Péter Tusor, “Pázmány bíboros olasz rejtjelkulcsa: C.H. Motmann ‘Residente d’Ungheria’: A római magyar agenzia történetéhez” [Cardinal Pázmány’s Italian Codebook: C. H. Motmann ‘Residente d’Ungheria’. On the History of the Hungarian Agenzia in Rome], Hadtörténelmi Közlemények 116 (2003): 535–81; Zoltán Révay, Titkosírások. Fejezetek a rejtjelezés történetéből [Ciphers. Chapters from the History of Cryptology], (Budapest: Zrínyi Katonai Kiadó, 1978); idem, II. Rákóczi Ferenc és korának rejtjelezése, XVIII. század [Cryptography of Ferenc Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania and His Age] (Budapest: Magyar Néphadsereg Híradó Főnökség Kiadása, 1974).

12 Praecepta grammatica atque specimina linguae philosophicae, sive universalis (Berlin: D. Iacobaeer, 1772).

13 Many such books were published in the Magyar História (Hungarian History) and the Labirintus (Labyrinth) series.

14 Endre Veress, A bolognai Marsigli-iratok magyar vonatkozásai [Hungarian Aspects of the Marsigli Documents in Bologna] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1906).

15 Emilio Lovarini ed., Autobiografia di Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli messa in luce nel secondo centenario della morte di lui dal Comitato Marsiliano (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1930).

16 See inter alia John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Magda Jászay, “Marsili, a katona, diplomata és tudós Magyarországon a török kor alkonyán” [Marsili: a Soldier, Diplomat and Scientist at the Twilight of the Ottoman Era in Hungary], Történelmi Szemle 41, no. 1–2 (1999): 42–49.

17 For the history of research in Hungary, see Levente Nagy, “Le generazioni di studiosi ungheresi e il Fondo Marsili,” Quaderni di storia 59 (2004) gennaio/giugno: 205–22; idem, “Magyar kutatógenerációk és a Marsigli-hagyaték” [Generations of Hungarian Researchers and the Marsigli Legacy], in Humanizmus, religio, identitástudat. Tanulmányok a kora újkori Magyarország művelődéstörténetéről [Humanism, Religion, Identity. Studies in the Early Modern Cultural History of Hungary], ed. István Bitskey and Gergely Tamás Fazakas (Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetem, 2007), 252–73; Mónika F. Molnár, “Le ricerche ungheresi del Fondo Marsigli di Bologna,” Annuario. Studi e documenti italo–ungheresi (Rome–Szeged: Accademia d’Ungheria in Roma Istituto Storico ‘Fraknói’–Università degli Studi di Szeged, Dipartimento di Italianistica, 2005): 38–49. Significant Marsigli researchers in Hungary today, apart from Levente Nagy, include Sándor Bene (Croatian aspects), Deák András Antal (maps), Mónika F. Molnár (Ottoman contacts) and Zsuzsa Kovács (bibliographic history, catalogues).

18 In Hungarian, see Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, A Magyar Királyság történetének kivonata [Extract from the History of the Kingdom of Hungary], trans. Levente Nagy (Máriabesnyő: Merhavia, 2009).

19 On the Peace of Karlowitz and its implementation, i.e. his collection concerning the marking out of the frontier. For more detail on this, see Sándor Bene, “Acta Pacis – Béke a muzulmánokkal. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili terve a karlócai béke iratainak kiadására” [Acta Pacis – Peace with the Moslems. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’s Plan to Publish the Documents of the Peace of Karlowitz], Hadtörténelmi Közlemények 119 (2006): 329–72.

20 See Fabio Martelli, “Generali italiani a Vienna tra scienza nuova, empirismo e ideali assolutistici,” in La politica, la scienza, le armi. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili e la costruzione della frontiera dell’Impero e dell’Europa, ed. Raffaella Gherardi (Bologna: Mulino, 2010), 45–100; Raffaella Gherardi and Fabio Martelli, La pace degli eserciti e dell’economia. Montecuccoli e Marsili alla Corte di Vienna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009).

21 A small part of the surviving documents on this have appeared in print: Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Relazioni dei confini della Croazia e della Transilvania a sua Maestá Cesarea (1699–1701), ed. Raffaella Gherardi, vols 1–2 (Modena, 1986).

22 See the preface to the series by Ignác Romsics (viii.).

23 Zoltán Szász and Béla Köpeczi, eds., A History of Transylvania from the Beginning to 1919, vols. 1–3, Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, no. 106–108, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000–2002).

243 One finds these, however, in another writing by Jeney-Tóth: Annamária Jeney-Tóth, “A fejedelmi udvar az Erdélyi Fejedelemségben” [The Princely Court of the Transylvanian Princedom], Korunk 24, no. 3 (March 2013): 27–33.

25 Veronka Dáné, “Az Őnagysága széki így deliberála.” Torda vármegye fejedelemségkori bírósági gyakorlata [“His Honor’s Bench thus Rules.” Jurisdictional Practice in Torda County in the Time of the Princedom] (Debrecen–Kolozsvár: Debreceni Egyetem–Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2006).

26 The author does this in an essay that was published later: Gusztáv Mihály Hermann, “Pillantás Erdély fejedelemség kori társadalmára” [A Glimpse of Transylvanian Society in the Era of the Princedom], Korunk 24, no. 3 (March 2013): 43–49.

27 Jakó, Zsigmond, “Batthyány Ignác, a tudós és a tudományszervező,” Erdélyi Múzeum 53 (1991): 76–99.

28 Katalin Szende, “Towns and the Written Word in Medieval Hungary,” in Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I, ed. Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) (in preparation).

29 On the role of town books in urban administration, see Judit Majorossy and Katalin Szende, “Libri civitatum. Városkönyvek a középkori Magyar Királyság közigazgatásában” [Libri Civitatum. Town Books in the Medieval Hungarian Administration], in Tiszteletkör. Történeti Tanulmányok Draskóczy István egyetemi tanár 60. születésnapjára [Lap of Honor. Historical Essays in Honor of Professor István Draskóczy on his 60th Birthday], ed. Gábor Mikó, Bence Péterfi, and András Vadas (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2012), 319–30. On urban administration in late medieval towns, see also Judit Majorossy and Károly Goda, “Städtische Selbstverwaltung und Schriftproduktion im spätmittelalterlichen Königreich Ungarn—Eine Quellenkunde für Ödenburg und Pressburg,” Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung [NF] 13 (2008): 61–100.

30 For instance, see the collection of the studies on the topic written by Pierre Chaunu between 1960 and 1975: Pierre Chaunu, Histoire quantitative, histoire sérielle (Paris: A. Colin, 1978).

31 For instance, see the works of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

32 Judit Pál, “‘Wouldn’t it be Better for Me to Enroll in the Mathematics Department?’—Interview with the Historian Vera Bácskai,” Colloquia. Journal of Central European History 18 (2011): 186–95, esp. 189–90.

33 András Kubinyi, Városfejlődés és vásárhálózat a középkori Alföldön és az Alföld szélén [Urban Development and Urban Network on the Great Hungarian Plain and its Fringes in the Middle Ages], Dél-alföldi Évszázadok 14. (Szeged: Csongrád Megyei Levéltár, 2000); András Kubinyi, “Városhálózat a késő középkori Kárpát-medencében” [Urban Network in Late Medieval Hungary], in Bártfától Pozsonyig: Városok a 13–17. században [From Bártfa (Bardejov) to Pozsony: Towns between the Thirteenth and Seventeenth Centuries] (Társadalom- és Művelődéstörténeti Tanulmányok 35), ed. Enikő Csukovits and Tünde Lengyel (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet, 2005), 9–36.

34 For the example of Sopron, see Károly Goda, “The fluctuation of the number of taxpayers and the sum of the annual regular tax in Sopron, 1424–1686,” in Hungarian Atlas of Historic Towns No. 1 – Sopron, ed. Ferenc Jankó, József Kücsán and Katalin Szende with the contribution of Ferenc Dávid, Károly Goda and Melinda Kiss (Sopron: Győr-Moson-Sopron Megye Soproni Levéltára, 2010), 55–57 and the associated maps.

35 On the conflicts between the army and the burghers, see István H. Németh, “Kassai polgárok és katonák a 16. században: a hadsereg beköltözésével járó társadalmi és közigazgatási jelenségek a felsőmagyarországi városok életében a Mohácsot követő évtizedek során” [The Košice Burghers and Soldiers in the Sixteenth Century. Social and Administrative Concomitants of Military Settlement in Upper Hungarian Towns after the Battle of Mohács], Levéltári Közlemények 68, no. 1–2 (1997): 143–97.

36 Cf. footnote 8.

37 István Draskóczy, “Borkereskedelem a 15–16. század fordulóján” [Wine Trade at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century], in Borok és korok [Wines and Eras], ed. Ferenc Benyák and Zoltán Benyák (Budapest: Hermész Kör, 1999), 99–114, 325–30. (2nd ed. Budapest: Hermész Kör, 2002, 115–30, 379–82).

38 Zsuzsanna J. Újváry, “Kassa polgárságának etnikai-politikai változásai a 16. század közepétől a 17. század első harmadáig” [The Ethno-Political Changes of the Kassa Bourgeoisie from the Mid-Sixteenth to the First Third of the Seventeenth Centuries], in A magyar polgári átalakulás kérdései. Tanulmányok Szabad György 60. születésnapjára [Questions of the Hungarian Civic Transformation. Studies in Honor of György Szabad on his 60th Birthday], ed. Iván Zoltán Dénes, András Gergely, and Gábor Pajkossy (Budapest: ELTE BTK, 1984), 9–36.

39 See the works of István H. Németh and Zsuzsanna Újváry in the topic.

 

2013_3_Book Reviews (3)

pdfVolume 2 Issue 3 CONTENTS

Horvátország a 7. századtól napjainkig [Croatia from the Seventh Century up to the Present Day]. By Dénes Sokcsevits. Budapest: Mundus, 2011. 846 pp.

 

Once upon a time there was an 800 year-old Hungaro–Croatian confederation. Croatia was the only single ’foreign’ state that permanently stood under the reign of the Holy Crown of Hungary. An occupation army from Hungary was never stationed on Croatian territory—it simply was not necessary. The coexistence of these states was based on a general agreement and was secured by several internal and external interests. This peaceful coexistence made this confederation unique in Eastern Europe. In general Croatia had had no secessionist ambitions, even when the existence of the Hungarian kingdom was thrown into question by the Mongol invasion of 1241 and the interregna of 1301–1308 and 1526. The first considerable differences appeared in the seventeenth century, when the Croatian ambitions for autonomy gained strength. An armed conflict between the two states broke out only once during the 800 year period of coexistence (in 1848–1849). But even that war was far from being a real obstacle in the later political negotiations between Hungary and Croatia. Despite these facts, both national historiographies turn a blind eye to the history of this coexistence.

The book by Dénes Sokcsevits is the first monograph about Croatia published in Hungary.8 The author based his work primarily on Hungarian and Croatian archival and secondary sources. The book is very informative with regard to historical events and it has a clear train of thought. The different periods are presented through political, economic, social and church history. The author sometimes focuses his investigation on a region like Dalmatia or Slavonia, sometimes on a town like Trogir/Trau and Dubrovnik/Ragusa, sometimes on a family like the Šubić family, or sometimes on a politician like Martinuzzi Fráter György/Juraj Martinušević. His main aim is to demonstrate that the history of country and nation cannot be regarded as a straight line of historical events. In contrast with traditional Croatian historiography, which constructs a simplified history of Croatia with the nation in its center, Sokcsevits intends to present the history of the state as a whole made up of several different mosaic tiles. It is a particular virtue of the author’s approach that he interprets and analyzes each and every disputed question and opinion with regard to Croatian history. One should also note that Sokcsevits does not fail to deal with problems to which Hungarian historiography has turned a blind eye (e.g. why the Croatian nobles refused to join the uprising led by Rákóczi).

From a structural point of view the book can be divided into three major parts. The first part deals with the history of Croatia until 1918, focusing on Hungarian–Croatian coexistence and later the process of succession. The differences of opinion and interests between the political elites of the two states appeared in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the Hungarian king proved unable to protect the Croatian counties from Ottoman attacks. That is the very beginning of the relationship between Croatia and the Habsburg dynasty. Two important phenomena of the seventeenth century influenced the Hungarian–Croatian relationship profoundly in the long run. On the one hand a difference in the interpretation of constitutional law emerged between the two states. While the Croatian estates began to emphasize that the state connections were based on equal rights, so Croatia had to be regarded as a joint and not as a subordinate state, the Hungarians insisted on their concept of Croatia as a conquered state (i.e. in their perception Croatia had been conquered by the Hungarian kingdom in the eleventh century). On the other hand, the aristocratic conspiracy against the Habsburg dynasty in 1671 proved an especially tragic turning-point in the relationship between the two states. The conspiracy was organized by families that were the main representatives of Hungarian–Croatian coexistence. After exposing the plans for an uprising, the Habsburgs practically ruined the families of Zrínyi/Zrinski and Frangepan.

The period of 1790–1848 can best be characterized by the fact that the national idea gained primacy both in Hungary and in Croatia. Due to the perception of Hungarian nationalism as a threat, Croatian politicians began to build up closer connections with Vienna, and the Habsburgs refused to take the Hungarian opinions into consideration in their Croatian policy. According to Sokcsevits, however, even in that period both nations shared a common feature: their nation-building process and language reforms were modeled on the same patterns. It was Lajos Kossuth who in 1848 questioned the autonomy of Croatia on the basis of constitutional law, and it was also Kossuth who adamantly rejected any proposal regarding the federative transformation of Hungary. Furthermore, he intended to make the Hungarian language compulsory south of the Sava. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Croats could be easily instrumentalized by Vienna during the 1848–1849 Hungarian War of Independence. It was the first time that these countries had gone to war with each other. It is worth noting, however, that the troops of Banus Jelačić were regarded as enemies by the Croats of the Transdanubian counties. And as a “reward” for having sided with the Habsburgs, Croatia lost its autonomy and sank to the level of a crown-land.

Both political elites turned a blind eye to the consequences of the 1848–1849 events. They proved unable to reach an acceptable compromise during the negotiations of 1866–1868. One the one hand, the Habsburg Empire was transformed into a Dual Monarchy, which was obviously unacceptable to the majority of the nations of the empire. On the other hand, the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement in 1868 was judged by the Croatian politicians as a bad compromise. It had the potential, however, to bring about positive change. It was Ferenc Deák who suggested a real union and broad autonomy for Croatia, but his suggestions were ignored by the other members of the Hungarian delegation (Gyula Andrássy and Menyhért Lónyay). It is also an unknown detail of the 1868 negotiations between Pest-Buda and Zagreb that Deák warned his Croatian colleagues against South-Slav unity. According to Deák, South-Slav unification would be led by Belgrad and not Zagreb. On the whole, Croatia could attained autonomy than it had set out to win, but it is important to mention that the autonomy it did obtain was unique in Europe at the time. The Home Rule Bill, elaborated by William E. Gladstone in 1880, was modeled on the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement. (The British parliament refused to accept the bill, because the members wanted to save imperial integrity.9)

After the Settlement of 1868 was accepted, the quality of the relationship between Pest-Buda and Zagreb went from bad to worse; trust was gradually lost. Both sides began to pursue a policy based on emotions. One illustrative example suffices to demonstrate the regrettable aftermath: Croatia had a bad economic structure and taxation moral in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was one of the most underdeveloped countries within Austria–Hungary (pp.400–1). The Hungarian authorities tried to transform the economic structure and develop a taxpayer culture on an administrative basis. (The construction of an effective bourgeois state can be characterized by authoritative methods in the whole of Eastern Europe – even in Hungary.) The structural reforms were regarded by the Croats, however, as new forms of oppression. At this point, citing the Czech example, Sokcsevits refutes the popular thesis of Croatian historiography according to which independence was the most important condition of economic development. By 1918 the dual system of Austria–Hungary had fallen. The political forces of Croatia anticipated the total defeat and the reorganization of the empire; but it remained an illusion.

The second part of the book deals with the position of Croatia within Yugoslavia. The creation of the new state was due first and foremost to the policies of Great Britain and France. The concept of the new federal state was laid on uncertain foundations from the outset. On the one hand, the idea of a united South-Slav nation was a simple utopia. On the other hand, the most crucial assurance of internal state cohesion was the violence practiced by the government on administrative and military grounds. The responsibility of the different Croatian political groups must also be emphasized. In the very moment of the collapse of Austria–Hungary it was only Stjepan Radić who consistently protested against giving up all Croatian national ambitions during the negotiations with Belgrad. In the end Croatia became part of a South-Slav state that was ruled by the Serbs. The Croats, who were accustomed to living in a constitutional state, found themselves in a Balkan country where democracy and state administration stood at a lower level than before 1918. The federal government adopted a violent policy towards Croatia and solved the main political problems with the use of security forces. The Serb politicians were simply unwilling to make any compromises until 1939. The sabor was not convoked for 20 years. The new situation provoked new social ruptures in the twentieth century. The transformed party structure of Croatia was characterized by more or less radical attitudes towards autonomy, federation and independence. The political ambitions restricted and hindered by violence and the disappointment in the federal states resulted in a complex set of armed conflicts in World War II. There was a war between Croats and Serbs on the one hand but also between Croats and Germans and Italians. The warriors of the Ustaša movement and civil organizations fought against the communist partisan divisions. The last scene of genocides can be regarded as particularly tragic, because it was supported by the British and Soviet armies. The allied forces handed thousands of Croat prisoners of war over to the partisan troops of Tito, who let them be butchered. The denial and memory of this event have remained one of the heaviest burdens in the relationships between the South Slav nations.

The second Yugoslav federal state was born in blood and could only have been governed by a dictator. Although the system of Tito brought some novelties, such as federalism and the intention of assuring equal rights to all nationalities, it was characterized by state violence, the inability of the political leadership to reach compromises, dictatorship, and collective amnesia forced upon the population. The Yugoslav states in the interwar and post-war periods shared another common feature: the most essential external cohesive force of the federal state was primarily the interests of the great powers. The fake propaganda image of Tito’s Yugoslavia, according to which the Croats could be regarded as fascists and the Serbs as victims of the war, also proved a grave burden. According to one of the extreme but tenacious assessments of Tito’s state, the 1960s and 1970s were a period of economic development and material growth. Since the archival materials are far from completely processed, Sokcsevits’ aim is to approach the history of the second Yugoslavia from many points of view. The conclusion of the second part of the book is that Yugoslavia was on the verge of collapse in the late 1980s from all points of view and its existence was maintained only by the Western great powers.

Although there are numerous monographs and articles dealing with the period between 1991 and 1995, because many of the archival sources remain closed, the history of the war of independence has to be interpreted extremely cautiously. Sokcsevits has done so. The interpretation of the events is laconic and analytical. He outlines the psychological path that led to the bloody showdowns, lists the acts of violence committed by both sides, and criticizes European policy, which was unable to handle the armed conflict. The very last chapter of the book summarizes the post-war history of Croatia.

The author often reflects on the assertions of Croatian historiography. According to Sokcsevits, the majority of historians more or less submit to the national discourse. They are inclined to neglect Hungarian–Croatian coexistence and search instead for separatist movements in the past. (Sokcsevits often compares and exemplifies the differences between the conclusions drawn by Hungarian historians and the conclusions reached by Croatian historians; see the maps on pp.270–71). The author criticizes the East European view of the British historiography as well. According to Sokcsevits, even today the majority of British historians approach the history of this region from the point of view of the (imperial) British state, and they are therefore unable to understand local problems and realities (see the assessment of fascism and communism).

As far as the weaknesses of the book are concerned, the presentation of the Hungarian–Croatian relationships is sometimes too dominant. In order to demonstrate the main problems of Croatian history better, Sokcsevits would have to provide a wider historical background and give more reference points (about the Orthodox commonwealth of the Balkans, the overseas empire of Venice, the imperial ambitions of the Habsburg dynasty and the nation building processes in Italy). It is not clear how the different territories (like Dalmatia or Slavonia) and social groups (like the Italian speaking Dalmatians) and strata became “Croatian” in the nineteenth century.10 The author often refers to how the Serbian Orthodox Church made “Serbs” out of the different Orthodox groups of Vlachs and Balkan Slavs. This statement, however, is also true in the case of the Croatian Catholic Church: it was not just the Orthodox population that had escaped from the Middle and South Balkans. Dalmatia, Szerémség/Srem and Határőrvidék/Vojna krajina (Military Frontier) were the last station for Catholic Albanians as well. E.g. Arbanas (in Hungarian Orbonás, ital. Borgo Erizzo) near Zara and the Catholic villages of the regiment of Pétervárad / Petrovaradin were established by Albanians, and it was the Croatian national church that made them Croatian in the nineteenth century. (Not to mention the origins of several villages in Slavonia that were established by Hungarians from Transdanubia.)

According to Sokcsevits, Croatian history only began to share close affinities with Serbian history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp.200–2). Considering that the abovementioned nations lived next to each other and spoke closely related languages, this claim needs to be challenged, too. The Christianization of the Serb territories was organized in Rome, and not until the thirteenth century was it decided that the Serb state would be Orthodox. The Serbs were part of the Catholic world for centuries.11 Furthermore, South Dalmatia had connections to the Serb zhupas that were similar to the connections between Croatia and Middle-Dalmatia.12

In the chapters dealing with the history and the collapse of the second Yugoslavia, Sokcsevits does not touch upon one essential factor: the Tito system tolerated and contributed to organized crime. Furthermore, Tito instrumentalized crime to promote his political aims: several intellectuals and politicians of the opposition were killed by criminals in the service of the Communist Party. Organized crime became an independent factor after 1989–1991 and played a significant role in the South-Slav wars. The clarification of this role calls for complex and refined research.

The writing of the history of a nation or a country can never be finished. As time passes, new sources and approaches emerge that raise new questions and offer new answers. Sokcsevits’s book, however, will remain a valuable part of this ongoing conversation in the long run.


8 The most crucial Hungarian historians dealt with the Croatian history: Endre Arató, Kelet-Európa története a 19. században [The History of East-Europe in the Nineteenth Century] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1971); László Bíró, A jugoszláv állam 1918–1939 [The Jugoslavian State 1918–1939] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2010); László Katus, “A nemzetiségi kérdés és Horvátország története a 20. század elején” [The Nationality Question and the History of Croatia in the Early Twentieth Century], in Magyarország története, vol. 2 of 7, ed. Péter Hanák (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1978); Gyula Miskolczy, A horvát kérdés története és irományai a rendi állam korában. [The History of the Croatian Question and Its Writing in the Period of the Estate State], vols. 1–2. (Budapest: MTT, 1927); Emil Niederhauser, A nemzeti megújulási mozgalmak Kelet-Európában [National Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1977); Imre Ress, Kapcsolatok és keresztutak [Connections and Crossroads] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2004).

9 Imre Ress, Kapcsolatok és keresztutak, 120–21.

10 Cf. Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung: Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution (Munich: Oldenbourg,,2001).

11 Cf. Viktor Novak, “The Slavonic-Latin Symbiosis in Dalmatia during the Middle Ages,” The Slavonic and East European Review 32, no. 78 (1953): 1–28.

12 It follows from the foregoing that according to the writer of this review the pope of Duklja is neither part of Croatian nor Serbian history, he belongs to the history of Duklja.

2013_3_Book Reviews (2)

pdfVolume 2 Issue 3 CONTENTS

The Politics of “National Character”: A Study in Interwar East European Thought. (Routledge Studies in Comparative Political Thought). By Balázs Trencsényi. London–New York: Routledge, 2012. 227 pp.

 

In his most recent study on the history of national characterology in Eastern Europe, Balázs Trencsényi provides the reader with an in-depth and comparative analysis of intellectual discourses on national specificity in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria respectively. This highly erudite study is published in Routledge’s series of “Studies in Comparative Political Thought,” which aims to “change the landscape of political theory by encouraging deeper comparative reflection on the structure and character of the discipline and to arrive at a richer understanding of the nature of the political” (p.II). It is in this ambitious spirit that the book is written, and it is the author’s background in philosophy that lends the study an impressive level of creative intellectual interdisciplinarity. Trencsényi, Associate Professor of history at the Central European University, has written extensively on the topic of modernity and identity discourses in East European political thought and belongs to a very exclusive category of scholars intellectually equipped to undertake a comparative study of three countries, modulating virtuously between the national case studies and covering an exhaustive range of intellectual activity in all of them.

The author’s main objective is to demonstrate the development of discourses of national specificity and national character in the interwar period, in relation to the advent of radical nationalism and transforming notions of historicity and temporality. Seemingly antagonistic concepts such as modernism and anti-modernism, autochthonism and Westernisation, constitute the conceptual framework for the analysis of the divergent discourses on national specificity in the three countries. In his approach to the complex subject of national characterology, Trencsényi is inspired by Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘political romanticism’ and Armin Mohler’s idea of ‘conservative revolution’, originally referring to the cultural and political currents in post-World War I Germany. Both of these concepts accommodate the portrayal of the long-term evolution of identity discourses, and connect them to intellectual developments preceding the interwar period. Taking into account the influence of older currents, like Romanticism´s role in the disconnection of national institutions and national identity, or Nietzschean justifications of collective egotism, the character of the interwar discourse is determined by the unprecedented association of national character with the problem of political modernity. Traditional linear conceptions of history were in many cases replaced with a new cyclicity, linking the realization of the primordial national to modernism as much as to anti-modernism, and complicating historicism’s traditional call to restore some glorious past. The dehistoricization of national character and changing attitudes towards time itself are recurring themes in the book and are discussed with considerable profundity.

After having introduced these general themes in the introductory chapter, Trencsényi points out that, even though they may all have played an important part in the countries under scrutiny, the three local discourses are not in the least identical. Initially, the author had planned to include only two case studies in his comparative analysis, but he decided to include Bulgaria as well in order to accentuate the differences and similarities between national discourses in Eastern Europe. Although the book focuses primarily on developments in the interwar period, the case studies are embedded in their historical contexts, and each chapter introduces the reader to the early modern and (especially) nineteenth-century debates on national characterology as well. This is important, since many of the interwar debates on the topic of national identity refer back to these earlier discourses.

The first case study is Romania, which consisted of the Old Kingdom of Romania and Transylvania prior to 1918. In his investigation of the historical roots of Romanian characterology, Trencsényi points out that the advent of political journalism, a lively pamphlet culture, and a new public sphere in the 1830s and 40s revolutionized the debate on Romanian identity, divided between revolutionary and evolutionary thinkers. Especially in the wake of the national-liberal revolutions of 1848, the question of whether the Romanians should follow foreign examples (as proposed by Mihail Kogălniceanu) or, instead, focus on their own autochthonous culture became a pressing one. A new phase in the debate occurred in 1860, when the Junimist movement, championed by Titu Maiorescu and inspired by German philosophy and Romanticism, challenged the dominant narrative of Romania´s undefiled Roman origins. The Junimists propagated an unprecedented new version of Romanian history, in which they accentuated the evolution and organicity of the people, while at the same time criticizing modernity and its detrimental effect on the national character. This organic conception of national identity radicalized towards the end of the nineteenth century and gave shape to A. D. Xenopol’s Romanian adaptation of Völkerpsychologie and the idea that a people without a history was necessarily a people without character (D. D. Drăghicescu). Through the authochtonists, who sought to reconcile political modernism with traditional and rural culture, the Romanian self-image had become a very ethnically orientated one by the early twentieth century. This trend radicalized in the interwar period, especially in the works of those considered part of the politically divergent young generation. Trencsényi traces the intellectual career of influential thinkers like Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade and highlights their contributions to what he refers to as the ‘a-historical turn’ in Romanian national thought. To Eliade, myth and symbol, not history, became the primary denominators of national identity. A nation had to transcend its own history and aspire to universality. It was this paradoxical blend of nationalism and universalism, characteristic of the interwar period, that contributed to the emergence of a Romanian brand of Fascism.

In the next chapter, Hungary is subjected to a similar discourse analysis. After having traced the concept of Hungary back to a multi-ethnic, pre-modern nobility, Trencsényi outlines the relationship between these earlier ideas and nineteenth-century debates on national character. The Hungarian intelligentsia, more influenced by Herderian philosophy than the Romanians, developed (especially from the 1860s onwards) a strongly ethno-cultural sense of identity, which is interesting in a country that eventually consisted of over fifty percent non-Hungarians. Attempts to Magyarize an ethnically mixed population and create a national school of philosophy based on national characteristics balanced between reason and sentiment (Gusztáv Szontagh) are scrutinized and presented in their relation to opposing intellectual camps. Many of the main themes resemble those from the previous chapter on Romania, e.g. the discussions on the importation of foreign culture (which those connected to the periodical Szép Szó applauded), and the ambivalent relationship between political progress and cultural specificity. Interestingly, the Hungarian discourse of the interwar period resembled the Romanian one in that the nation became a spiritual category (Bálint Hóman), rather than a character based on national history, and that the political ideas of the new generation were so amorphous and ambivalent that they formed the intellectual breeding ground for later generations of fascists and communists alike. A typically Hungarian feature is the Asian, nomadic component of the interwar debate. The Hungarians differed from the rest of Europe, since they regarded themselves as descendants of a wandering steppe people which embodied the ‘soul of Asia’, rather than that of the West. Consequently, Sándor Karácsony could argue that national characteristics typically considered vices in a European context were actually virtues from the oriental perspective and fundamental constituents of the Hungarian soul. Amidst this myriad of competing and overlapping models of identification and ‘alternative histories’, it is remarkable that the author hardly mentions the Habsburg legacy at all. Did the Austro-Hungarian past leave no traces in post-1918 Hungarian characterology? Furthermore, the Finno-Ugric connection, which at times was rather unpopular in Hungary but which had a major effect on ideas about the origins of the Hungarians, is entirely discarded.

The last case study, Bulgaria, is the only Slavic nation in Trencsényi’s comparative study. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the protochronistic idea that Slavs were the original progenitors of European civilisation played a significant part in the Bulgarian identity-discourse, arguably in part to compensate for the very narrow historical and institutional foundation of modern Bulgarian identity. One of the primary markers of this discourse was a sense of ‘inbetweenness’ and belatedness, of being caught between ‘not anymore’ and ‘not yet’. By tying the Bulgarian nation to the former greatness of the Slavs and even to that of the Indo-Europeans, the ancient cultures responsible for the cultural and political oppression of Bulgaria (Byzantine Greece and the Turks), as well as Western civilisation (e.g. ancient Gaul), could be presented as being indebted to and having originated from the Bulgarians’ mythical ancestors. These images of prehistoric greatness notwithstanding, many Bulgarian intellectuals came to the agonizing conclusion that modern Bulgarians were barbarians, and that the Turks, who functioned as the ‘significant others’ with which the Bulgarians contrasted themselves, were to blame for this. In order to achieve national emancipation, Bulgarians have looked to foreign examples like Germany and even Japan, and to a more authentic pagan past, before Byzantine Christianity had defiled the free and sensitive national spirit. Inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Bulgarian intellectuals like Pencho P. Slaveykov envisioned a pagan resurrection, a messianic return to primordial Bulgarianness. After 1918, in the wake of the traumatic Second Balkan War, the Bulgarian brand of national psychology, narodnopsihologia, became an important factor in the formulation of Bulgarian identity. Throughout the interwar period, the lack of historical continuity posed a serious problem for Bulgarian intellectuals, who sought their refuge in narodnopsihologia (Naydew Sheytanov) and glorifications of the medieval past (Peter Mutafchiev).

In the final chapter, the author offers an outline of the “common features and factors of divergence” in his comparative study, and concludes that, although the developments in all three countries are in many respects similar, the regional character of the three discourses should not be downplayed; they all had to “cook with local ingredients”. In all three cases, Trencsényi identifies nineteenth-century Romanticism as the starting point of the modern identity discourse, and crucial years like 1918, 1933 and 1940 as turning and breaking points in their intellectual development. In the conclusion he also provides the reader with a concise overview of the legacy of these interwar identity discourses after 1945, when some of their anti-Western tendencies found themselves strangely in line with Soviet ideology. The trauma of being considered peripheral and not fully Europeanized, at a time when Europe itself was entering a period of ideological crisis, has in many ways determined the ambivalent and antagonistic position of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria towards the West, and has left a mark on their national self-images. The herculean task of describing, analysing, and comparing these complicated developments in three equally complex case studies makes the work necessarily a densely argued intellectual tour de force in which little space remains for the proper introduction and contextualisation of its many protagonists. Arguably, the book may, with its 227 pages, simply be too thin to do justice to the immense complexity of Trencsényi’s endeavour. However, to those properly introduced to the intellectual history of all three countries and Eastern Europe in general, this study constitutes an innovative and fascinating contribution to the field.

 

Simon Halink

 

2013_3_Book Reviews (8)

pdfVolume 2 Issue 3 CONTENTS

The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958. By Mark Pittaway. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. ix + 386 pp.

 

Who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes, and if you do, what consequences can you expect? How does a system craft legitimacy, and where are the limits of power? How did the Communist Party in Hungary manage to win, in addition to the support of Soviet tanks, the support of a significant proportion of the Hungarian population, without actually having to use force in every case? How did they manage to convince people of the myth that the Communists were building the best of all possible worlds, the workers’ state, and how did they shatter this very myth? Mark Pittaway, a historian who staked out his place in Hungarian and international historiography as a legal scholar dealing first and foremost with the working class of the socialist era (and who died tragically young), seeks answers to these important questions.

The posthumously published monograph by Mark Pittaway (1971–2010)49 is the result of fifteen years of research. I first met Pittaway in 1995 in the Trade Union Archives in Rózsa Street, Budapest. He was sitting behind a wall of boxes containing documents and studying innumerable piles of dusty papers. After having completed his bachelor’s thesis on Venice at the time of the Renaissance, he entered the doctoral program at the University of Liverpool, where he pursued an interest in the history of the working class in Hungary. For many people working in or around the archives in the Hungarian countryside, this Englishman was something of an exotic rarity. He was one of the few non-Hungarian historians who learned Hungarian to a high degree of proficiency and, after having read the relevant Hungarian secondary literature, did original research in archives very far from the beaten track. His monograph is based on a remarkable wealth of sources and his pioneering manner of approaching the subject does a great deal to compensate for methodological lacunae in the secondary literature. But his contribution is valuable first and foremost because of the model he adopts, which rejects the totalitarian paradigm (which has become so prevalent in contemporary historiography), a model he was among the first to introduce with his narrative of the history of the Hungarian working class in 1944–1958.

The essence of this model lies in the fact that the totalitarian state, which in general is depicted as omnipresent and omnipotent, is merely one of the agents of history, and one the tools of which are in fact surprisingly limited. From the perspective of legitimacy, the attendants of the system (ranging from the secretary general to the average party member) influenced the prevailing attitudes towards the state (whether is wins acceptance or not) no more than the masses who, in the totalitarian paradigm, are depicted—misleadingly—as powerless and oppressed. In Pittaway’s narrative the process of the creation of the socialist state is one of the most important questions, and it is closely intertwined with the question of how the authorities prompted or persuaded Hungarian society to accept the new rules on which the system rested.

The question of the treatment of the working class became one of the most important elements of the legitimacy of the Communist Party after World War II, very much like the use of nationalist rhetoric.50 Pittaway considers it important to note that the socialist system itself never gained legitimacy (p.4). Yet many of the motifs of the creation of the socialist state were accepted, and they gave some legitimacy to a system that used force. Furthermore, the possibility of the use of force became a norm in many cases. In other words while the socialist regime was not necessarily seen as legitimate, neither was it seen as diabolically evil by many, however unpleasant this may be to admit in hindsight.

The monograph cautiously (sometimes overcautiously) guides the reader through the story of the creation by Communist politicians who enjoyed minimal support of a party of the masses that had palpable support among workers, to the detriment of the Social Democratic Party. And later, as a dramatic continuation of the story, the same politicians rapidly lost this support on the national and local levels when they began to create the “workers’ state” (to which Pittaway refers ironically in his title) by introducing “the building of the socialist system,” the “rationalization” of production, and the system of quotas. After 1956, in the new social climate, the regime under the leadership of János Kádár was again compelled to use tools to win legitimacy, since it was not possible to work and wield power in everyday life with minimal support in the shadow of tanks or at “gun point.”51 In contrast, according to the totalitarian paradigm, the state used, first and foremost, force to exert its power over workers in heavy industry. In 1956 Hungarian society (especially the workers) rose up against the regime, and this was met with new repressive measures.52 The totalitarian paradigm suggests, inaccurately, that no one in the large industrial cities voted for the Communists of his or her own volition in 1945 and 1947 and that no one was in fact a party member. It suggests that the Communist idiom was used by members of society only as a response to the orders of the regime and only by people who sought in ever larger numbers to promote their own individual interests.

Pittaway’s approach is refreshing not only because of its novelty in comparison with the totalitarian paradigm, but also because it sheds light (on the national and local level) on the process whereby the Communist Party managed, through the use of populist rhetoric, to gain credibility and then to lose it entirely. The new system after 1956 owed its relative stability not only to the Soviet tanks, but also the “subjects” who as agents of history themselves influenced the rules of the game in everyday life. It is particularly worthwhile to emphasize the interpretation of 1956 according to which, from the perspective of the politicians involved, the Revolution can be seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy, and not simply as an uprising. From this perspective the motives and the roles played by Communist politicians in 1956 are more comprehensible, as are the functions of the workers’ councils as negotiators in the course of the reprisals and the consolidation of the Kádár system. In this story, the workers’ councils were not bastions of a self-organized revolutionary force that was realizing self-government among workers,53 but rather the vehicles of an attempt to further the legitimacy of the Kádár regime, an attempt initiated both from above and below. Thus they offer a perspective from which to discern the consolidation of the Kádár system not simply from below, but also from the viewpoint of the negotiations and compromises that were made at the local level. In Pittaway’s narrative, they have a similar function to the trade union committees of 1945: their stories shed light on how the new system was able to win acceptance on the shop floor. In this interpretation, the trade union committees and the workers’ councils did not represent “union democracy” or “workers’ self-government.” Rather, the Communists used them to promote acceptance of their goals among workers in heavy industry in 1945 and the fall of 1956.

There is a long tradition of historical and sociological scholarship on workers in heavy industry in Hungary.54 Though the subject has not been given much attention among scholars since the change of regimes in 1989, over the course of the last decade more and more historians have begun to study it in part because of the influence of Pittaway’s contribution.55 His was not the first such study to examine the endeavors of the Communists to win legitimacy among workers in the region.56 Pittaway continuously reflects on the theses that can be found in the international secondary literature on the subject, and his monograph reinterprets and enlarges on the conclusions of E. P. Thompson’s fundamental work on the creation of the English working class.57 He is thoroughly familiar with the subject, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote a separate comparative volume on the social history of the socialist bloc that has become obligatory reading at universities throughout the world and one of the best summaries of the postwar history of the region.58 He boldly and confidently transgresses the borders established by political history. For instance, in his assessment in many of the social processes in Eastern Europe World War II did not constitute a caesura, and he traces with similar confidence the threads of continuity and discontinuity in the social history of the working class. According to Pittaway, 1945, 1948, and 1956 constituted pivotal moments only to the extent that they prompted changes in the political views of the workers of Újpest, Tatabánya, or Zala County. Thus, paradoxically his book also examines how the Kádár system came into being, the antecedents to it, and the processes whereby it was able to consolidate its power (and from this perspective 1945 and 1947 were as much antecedents as 1953).

Pittaway does not attempt to establish consensus in the debates regarding the debates on modernization,59 nor does he bother attempting to reconcile the oppositions of the “movements” of “political” and “social history”. He puts these debates in parentheses. He examines simply the fluctuating legitimacy of the Communists and the system and the ways in which actors at various levels of power and in various social spaces influenced one another. The subject at hand (political support, or lack thereof) can be understood as political history, but in the course of his study Pittaway uses all of the methods and sources that a social or cultural historian would use.

The task Pittaway sets for himself is not easy. Even the question of the precise meaning of the term legitimacy can be problematic, not to mention the issue of how one can use sources that for the most part were produced by the regime itself to assess the amount of support it actually had in the factories. For this reason, the study of the limits of power and the various forms of support requires new tools. Anyone who knew Pittaway may well be surprised by the methodological rigor with which he constructs his narrative. He read an enormous amount about the living conditions and everyday lives of the working class in Hungary, but the reader can glimpse this vast knowledge only through the very small, carefully selected stories he provides. A serious task demands a serious scholar. The monograph is not the work of Mark, who loved to recount captivating stories of the working class, but rather Pittaway, the highly disciplined scholar, who writes with none of the irony or humor so distinctive of Mark. It is a dramatic story without catharsis in which every anecdote has an important function.

The form of the narrative, which is told chronologically and is set in three different industrial(izing) settlements (Újpest, Tatabánya and Zala county), enables Pittaway to portray the reactions of the workers as rational. At the beginning of each chapter he describes the political context in Hungary, which presumably is largely unfamiliar to the average non-Hungarian reader, and then goes into the “depths,” the factories and the workshop floors. Újpest, which had a long history as an industrialized settlement, Tatabánya, which had grown administratively to absorb nearby mining colonies and had been elevated to the status of a city, and Zala county (and within Zala county the area around the city of Letenye), which had only begun to serve as a home to the oil industry but was otherwise largely dependent on agriculture, provide in and of themselves an opportunity for comparison. As the narrative progresses, it seems to have a diverse array of implications, and the theses are so logical that at times it is almost disquieting.

The differences between imagined industrial workers (the notion of the worker as used in the idiom crafted by the Communists) and real industrial workers are always present in Pittaway’s analyses. He cites a 1958 report of a party committee to make these differences palpable. At the dawn of the Kádár era, when, given the significant rise in wages and the arrests, hardly anyone in the factories in the city would have considered going on strike, Lajos Kelemen, a party secretary in Kőbánya,60 openly contended—no doubt to the astonishment of many—that the emperor had no clothes, for the workers, the workers’ state was alas not the best of all possible worlds. “Part of the working class simply doesn’t agree with us. They just do not accept this system.” (p.14) His words were recorded, and they were met with replies. But Kelemen was not punished, rather his statement was used to further the consolidation of the new system. For a time the king acknowledged that he had no clothes, which considerably increased his credibility. The legitimacy of the Kádár system rested to a great extent on its efforts to distance itself from the Rákosi regime, which from the perspective of the hardships faced by the industrial working class meant that after 1956 the origins of every problem were traced back to the early 1950s. Indeed it may well have seemed that Kádár himself had risen to power in order to break with the past and see that justice be done.

The first chapter of the book begins in March 1944 with the occupation of the country by the German army and narrates the case studies that took place in the three regions up until November 1945, examining what the workers themselves sought (primarily stability) and what they were given or at least hoped to be given by the Communists (and this differed in each of the three areas). Pittaway’s approach sheds light on methodological problems as well, since the historian is compelled to reply for the most part on the minutes of party meetings, official reports regarding the prevailing mood (hangulatjelentés), and newspaper articles when drawing conclusions —tentatively—on the expectations of workers. In any event Újpest seems to have been the only place—and not because of the Újpest partisans (p.31)—where communism was not perceived simply as an exotic import brought by the Soviet army. In the case of Tatabánya, in contrast, Pittaway traces the first successes of the Communists back to the power vacuum left after the fall of the Arrow Cross. In Zala, a county consisting largely of small villages that had been particularly hard hit by the pillaging of the Soviet soldiers, the Communist Party had little chance of any similar attainments. A picture begins to emerge of the workers as a class that was politically active during the war. Disinterest in politics was rare among workers who, some decades later, would sometimes have to explain to their descendants what the word “strike” meant (though it’s true that in the meantime workers had found other means of holding back production).61 The book offers illuminating comparisons of why the Communist rhetoric, which hammered in the notion that the Communists had arrived as liberators, was received differently in each of the three places in question and how the workers’ strikes in the summer and autumn of 1945, soon before the elections, influenced people’s assessments of the party.

According to Pittaway, the elections that were held in November 1945 shattered the Communists’ illusion that they would rise to power without any kind of transition and with the backing of the Soviets. After the elections, the Communist Party was compelled to make proposals to the working class that would help it win their support. However, whether or not a political party enjoyed support depended not on the promises it made, but rather on its credibility. The results of the 1947 elections were more favorable for the Communists specifically because they found themselves in the opposition in 1945. The voters of Tatabánya or Újpest did not have more faith in the Communists because the Communists had made enticing promises, but rather because the governing parties, which had a penchant for populist pledges, were not able to make good on their promises. On the local level, members of the social democratic party were seen as people who were close to the institutions of power (pp.67–8). This enabled the Communist Party to win considerable support in industrial districts in 1947. Pittaway does not explain this as a consequence of national political developments. He does not characterize the period between 1945 and 1948 as an attempt to create a state founded on the rule of law, but rather as years in which the Communists used populist tools to attempt to win support for their goals among a segment of society. In his assessment, the decisions of viewers were influenced by local experiences and circumstances on the shop floor (rises in wages, a strike, a local demonstration, for instance on May 1, 1946 in Újpest, when the Hungarian Communist Party and the Hungarian Socialist Democratic Party together managed to mobilize 25,000 people). At the same time, there is still room for further research. Pittaway analyzes the election data on smaller settlements, but he does not attempt to explain why the differences were so striking between individual villages (in the case of the county of Zala) and parts of the city (in the case of Tatabánya). As is the case with the results of the 1947 elections, these differences cannot be explained simply as a result of voter fraud.

The third chapter (which examines the period between 1947 and 1949) may well give rise to numerous differences of opinion among Hungarian historians who are debating the significance of 1949, a year often regarded as a turning point. The title of the chapter (Social Roots of Dictatorship) is in itself provocative, since it implies that the dictatorship was not simply an aberrance that was concocted in the witch’s kitchen of the Communist Party and imposed by the Soviets. Pittaway examines the measures that were taken in order to win some social support in the course of the creation of the dictatorship. Through the use of populist rhetoric, the party managed to gain acceptance for the appointment of workers’ directors and the nationalization of factories (which according to the Communists had been ruthless exploited by the capitalists and had finally found trustworthy caregivers in the state) without even having to rely on the State Security, effectively the secret police (pp.86–8). One could mention, for instance, the “potato crisis” in Tatabánya, which involved a strike that broke out in Tatabánya because of the shortage of potatoes (which in the 1950s were one of the primary foodstuffs). In the course of the strike the local organization of the Hungarian Communist Party blamed “speculators” (implicitly “Jewish speculators”) for the shortage. With nationalization and this anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Hungarian Communist Party managed to gain significant support in Tatabánya.

This political popularity disappeared rapidly, however, when the workers found themselves in the world not of visions and promises, but rather of economic measures adopted by a party, the Communist Party, that found itself compelled to increase economic efficiency. On the level of the factory floors, the greatest conflict was caused by the introduction of a system of wages based on the Soviet model, which on the local level meant the end of populist communism (though it did not prevent the reproduction of class hierarchy). A mining accident in Tatabánya on December 30, 1950 that was caused indirectly by measures taken to increase production had a permanent effect on attitudes towards the Rákosi system in the community (p.130). The most interesting and most valuable parts of the book are Pittaway’s analyses of the similarities and differences between the three areas, Újpest, Tatabánya and Zala. He reveals differences in micro-communities that for the most part would remain indistinct, homogenous masses in macro-analyses, for instance the industrial working class itself, the different layers of which have been ascribed with varying significances in the creation of the socialist system.

László Varga and Gyula Belényi have already studied the conflicts between the “new,” “transitional” workers62 (rural, young, often female) and the old, trained workers in Hungary.63 Pittaway’s monograph, however, is the first work of scholarship to examine how, after 1956, the Kádár government was compelled because of these conflicts to establish legitimacy for itself in an entirely new social milieu, as well as the tools it used in the service of this goal. Pittaway touches on sensitive questions. The workers of Újpest who on October 23, 1956 radicalized the demonstration by the youth (p.209) and later took active part in the organization of the workers’ councils were among the first to be given raises in 1957. In 1957 workers’ wages were increased by 18 percent (p.233), although this in and of itself was not adequate to ensure support for the Kádár system among a significant segment of the working class. According to Pittaway, the answer to the question of why the government was not compelled on May 1 to use the workers’ militia to get workers to participate in the parades and why János Kádár himself did not fear an attempt on his life during the celebrations lies in the shrewd mix of the official rhetoric and a politics focused on standards of living.

Mark Pittaway’s monograph occupies a place of distinction not only in the scholarship on the political engagement of the industrial workers in Hungary, but in the research on the history of the industrial workers in Europe. It situates the attempt to create Socialism in Hungary in an international context and thus provides a point of departure for further comparative study. Pittaway’s research, work that spanned a decade and a half, has revitalized scholarship on the subject, which had been increasingly marginalized in the historiography.64 In all likelihood his monograph will influence research on the lives and experiences of industrial workers, who represented the largest social bloc and whose living conditions should therefore be in the forefront of scholarship on the era, for decades.

 

Sándor Horváth

 

49 The book was already in preparation at the time of Pittaway’s death. The final revisions and editing, without which it could not have been published, were done by Nigel Swain.

50 Cf. Martin Mevius, Agents of Moscow: the Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism, 1941–1953 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

51 See Gyula Kozák and Adrienne Molnár, eds., “Szuronyok hegyén nem lehet dolgozni!”: válogatás 1956-os munkástanács-vezetők visszaemlékezéseiből [“You Can Not Work at Gun-Point!”: A Selection from the Memoires of Leaders of the 1956 Workers’ Councils] (Budapest: Századvég–1956-os Intézet, 1993).

52 Cf. Gyula Belényi, Az állam szorításában: az ipari munkásság társadalmi átalakulása Magyarországon, 1945–1965 [In the Vice of the State: The Social Transformation of the Industrial Working Class in Hungary, 1944–1965] (Szeged: Belvedere Meridionale, 2009).

53 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958); Bill Lomax, ed., Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956 (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1990); Bill Lomax, Hungary 1956 (London: Allen and Busby, 1976); Tamás Krausz, “Az 1956-os munkástanácsokról” [On the 1956 Workers’ Councils], Eszmélet 18, no. 72 (Winter 2006): 32–38.

54 Miklós Lackó, Ipari munkásságunk összetételének alakulása. 1867–1949 [The Transformation of the Composition of our Industrial Working Class] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1961); György Litván, ed., Magyar munkásszociográfiák [Hungarian Workers’ Sociographies] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 1974); István Kemény, Velük nevelkedett a gép [The Machine was Reared with Them] (Budapest: Művelődéskutató Intézet, 1990); Gábor Gyáni, Bérkaszárnya és nyomortelep: a budapesti munkáslakás múltja [Tenement Building and Slum: The History of Workers’ Lodgings in Budapest] (Budapest: Magvető, 1992); László Varga, Az elhagyott tömeg: tanulmányok 1950–1956-ról [The Abandoned Crowd: Studies on 1950–1956] (Budapest: Cserépfalvi–Budapest Főváros Levéltára, 1994).

55 Belényi, Az állam szorításában; Sándor Horváth, László Pethő and Eszter Zsófia Tóth, Munkástörténet, munkásantropológia [Labor History, Labor Anthropology] (Budapest: Napvilág, 2003); Eszter Zsófia Tóth, “Puszi Kádár Jánosnak”: munkásnők élete a Kádár-korszakban mikrotörténeti megközelítésben [“Kisses for János Kádár”: The Lives of Working Women in the Kádár Era, from the Perspective of a Micro-historical Analysis] (Budapest: Napvilág, 2007); the special issue “Labor of Postwar Central and Eastern Europe” of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History 68, Fall (2005); and among the most recent works: Eszter Bartha, Alienating Labour: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).

56 Two important works that influenced Pittaway in his choice of topics: Alf Lüdtke: Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitserfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. (Hamburg: Ergebnisse-Verlag, 1993); Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

57 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963).

58 Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London: Arnold, 2004).

59 Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism. On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54 (2006): 535–55.

60 Kőbánya was a traditionally industrial district of Budapest.

61 Cf. Lajos Héthy and Csaba Makó, Munkásmagatartások és gazdasági szervezet [Worker Behavior and Economic Organization] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1972).

62 On the “transitional types of workers” see László Pethő, “A vidéki munkásság antropológiája” [An Anthropology of the Rural Working Class], in Paraszti múlt és jelen az ezredfordulón [Peasant Past and Present at the Turn of the Millennium], ed. Miklós Cseri, László Kósa, and Ibolya T. Bereczki (Szentendre: Magyar Néprajzi Társaság–Szentendrei Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2000), 423–42.

63 Belényi, Az állam szorításában; Varga, Az elhagyott tömeg.

64 See the special issue of the International Review of Social History. Marcel van der Linden, ed., The End of Labour History? 38, no. 1 (1993).

 

2013_3_Book Reviews

pdfVolume 2 Issue 3 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe. By James Mark. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. xxviii + 312 pp.

 

James Mark’s interest focuses on the criminalization of the communist past and its representation from the position of victims, phenomena manifested in the interaction of public-institutional and individual memory practices.1 The seven chapters of the book are divided into two parts: the first reconstructs post-1989 memory culture and the second is concerned with personal histories. A total of the 118 interviews were carried out, two thirds in Hungary and one third in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. Although the chapters are written as case studies from several different previous research subjects, and some have already been published, the commonality of questions definitely gives the book the form of a monograph.

Memory politics have gradually risen to prominence in the region since the mid-1990s, and their purpose, according to Mark, is not to confirm or express power over the past, but to show that it lives on in the present and to confront it. Action is directed at putting a final closure on the past. What has emerged is a “powerful new discourse which asserted that difficult pasts were collective experiences that needed to be addressed and overcome in order for a society to be truly democratic” (p.xv). The result is a right-wing political current focusing on historical memory, whose rhetoric recreates the pre-1989 anti-Communist struggle. It claims that the presence of (former) Communists in political and economic life is evidence that the system has not been overthrown. It secondly reshapes the memory of resistance prior to the political transition so as to present itself as the sole true heir of the former anti-Communist opposition. This is accompanied by the exclusion from the pre-1989 opposition to Communism (or anti-Stalinism in the case of the successor parties) of left-wing groups, which it identifies with the enemy, the former repressors of opposition and their collaborators. The political program is clear: the revolution must be completed, which means finally excluding Communists from public life.

Mark examines the value-set of the new memory culture through the Romanian presidential history commission and the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which latter caused an international stir. He sees these institutions, which present the “transition” from the series of crimes constituting Communism to liberal democracy and the securing of human rights, as having the primary ideological role of declaring the break with the party-state system and strengthening identification with the new system. “Here finishing the revolution meant the establishment of official bodies that could assist the dismantling of Communist mentalities through the state-sponsored propagation of new, liberal interpretations of the past.” (p.31).

One chapter discusses museum sites concerned with the Communist past: the former political prison in Sighetu Marmaşiei in Romania, the House of Terror in Budapest, the Statue Park in Hungary, Grūtas Park in Lithuania, and the few national museum exhibitions (in Bucharest, Riga and Budapest) devoted to the representation of the Communist past. This chapter seems to have been structured according to museum typology, whereas the next chapter, also concerned with museums, is structured by geography. Here, Mark analyses institutions in the Baltic states, one in a former Soviet political prison, and the other two “occupation museums” which did not fit neatly into the typology of the previous chapter. Mark claims that the exhibitions, whose program proclaim the completion of the revolution, compensate the victims of Communism by criminalizing the past: if the “perpetrators” have not been judicially brought to account or excluded from public life, then they should at least be judged in the cultural sphere. Siting exhibitions presenting “Communism” in former places of political terror makes the political condemnation of Communism and both the individual and national construction of the “victim of Communism” more plausible.2 The author focuses his analyses on the “forgotten history” of the sites, in attempting to archaeologically uncover the truth about Communism, the institutions fail to find absolutely conclusive evidence. Mark does not consider how or to what extent the scene of victimization and the memory-site function guarantees historical credibility in museum representation.3

The strength of the chapter on Baltic-state institutions is the inclusion of international memory and the geopolitical environment in an analysis of local representation strategies. It examines how the institutions of the new anti-Communist discourse face up to the double international expectation by addressing the Fascist past. In the European integration process, Western organizations set proper commemoration of the Holocaust as an absolute condition of “becoming European”, and in this respect indicated that anti-Communists who supported the Fascists could not be lauded as heroes. Considerable international pressure has also come from Putin-era Russia, where commemoration of the Red Army’s heroic role in liberating Europe from Fascism is increasingly becoming a point of national-imperial pride. In the former Soviet republics, where (except Lithuania) a large Russian-speaking population which settled during the Communist era live, this looks like evidence of a present threat of Russian imperialist aspirations. Mark comes to the conclusion that the Holocaust is included in the Baltic memory culture in a way that does not challenge but rather supports the idea of the nation’s victimization during the era of Communist dictatorship.

The new, reconstructed memory culture, partly via the institutions analyzed in the book, encourages individuals to rewrite their personal past in the categories of “victim” and “resister” on one side and “perpetrator” and “collaborator” on the other. Mark’s interview subjects are from the generation born between 1918 and 1940, whose lives have been shaped by confrontation with the Communist, politicized autobiography, the requirement to weave the right ideological elements into their life story. At major stages of their lives, they have been required, in a public and proper way, to present their past as evidence of their loyalty. Since 1989, this generation has again been confronted with politicized autobiographical norms, and so autobiographical narratives have been rewritten according to the values and norms of the new, post-Communist memory culture.

The author does not stop here, but puts the question of how, as a subject of the hegemonic and homogenizing memory discourse, the individual is capable of rejecting stigmatizing identifications and developing an alternative position. The three chapters based on the interviews discuss conflict situations in which the autobiographical narrative cannot be delivered in the previous way. Only some of the interview respondents, however, react to the dictates of the new discourse.

The life accounts of former party members, for example, could clearly have been analyzed in terms of how they react to being identified as “perpetrators/accomplices in Communist crimes” as has become prevalent since 1989, and their strategies for demonstrating their democratic commitment. Instead, the analysis focuses on anti-Fascism, which party members up to 1956 had to make part of their public autobiographies as proof of loyalty. The author might have acquired a sharper picture of how criminalizing the Communist past has forced the rewriting of autobiographies if he had focused his analysis of how the subjects coped with their past, not specifically on the anti-Fascist element, which was subsequently compromised by the Communist regimes, but on bonding to the party state and previous ideological commitment (including anti-Fascism).

Mark presents what is at stake in adopting the “victim of Communism” position through analysis of interviews where the former system caused personal suffering for the respondents. One of his important claims is that heroic opposition is absent from the narrative elements of the “anti-Communist autobiography”: refusal of the system meant retreating into the private sphere and refusing all kinds of commitment. In this schema, what provides the political character of the autobiographical narrative is the pairing of retreat into the private sphere with a sense of historic mission through the preservation, in family history, of national values. Becoming a victim appears as the consequence of refusing to cooperate. Mark points out that despite the assertion of being non-political, this autobiographical narrative is formed by the kind of political self-presentation which was prescribed in the Communist system, raising the story of the family past into the century-old history of anti-Communist struggle. At the same time, autobiographical narratives that avoid self-presentation as victim are motivated by the rejection and uncovering of the prevailing anti-Communist discourse. Being a former victim of Communism may bring benefits, but the story of being a victim of Communism for subjects of the “anti-anti-Communist autobiography” is not a matter of relating true experiences so much as adopting a retrospective identity whose black-and-white features cover up complex and varying relationships with the Communist system. For the maneuver of refusing the victim position, there are no ready models, as is revealed by the interview subjects’ constant attention to the possible implications of their narrative and word use. They are concerned not with the justice of the past but with the injustice of the currently-prevailing perspective and the lack of a position permitting true speech. The struggle is no longer between rival experiences of the past.

The boundaries to speaking out are also addressed in the analysis of interviews with Hungarian victims and witnesses of rape by the Red Army. Mark’s conclusion is that the subjects could only speak up in terms of the prevailing anti-Communist discourse, presenting themselves as part of a nation that became a victim of Communism, and their story as an example of national victimization. Thus the repression suffered during several decades of taboo is put in parallel with the themes of repression of the nation by a foreign power, and the coming out in public about the trauma after 1989 is put in parallel with the liberation of the nation. The opportunities to speak out were of course basically for women, because according to the prevailing discourse, Hungarian women embodying the nation were raped by barbarian men, and thus the position of Hungarian men was also undermined. In this case, too, the author examines the options for opposing the demands of the prevailing narrative. Since the generation involved has no non-political narrative scheme at its disposal for verbalizing the atrocities of the Red Army, the only way of refusing the constraints of the prevailing discourse is to deny or marginalize the rape in the past.

Unfortunately, the interview analyses go no further than illustrating each statement with quotations. There are relatively few extracts from the interviews: in the final chapter, for example, based on 31 interviews, the author quotes one brief detail from each of 15 interviews, and only makes sporadic mentions of the structural specifics of the narrative. This would have been useful for determining the biographical significance of each theme and past event. Mark frequently links this significance to the interview subjects’ political or ideological affinities or their origins, which could be problematic in some cases. In extreme cases, it could lead to tautologies of the kind that somebody exercises the options of an anti-Communist discourse which is defined as right wing because he or she comes from an anti-Communist, right-wing/Catholic environment.

Mark’s premise is therefore that political dissatisfaction in post-Communism is concentrated on the lack of a revolutionary break between systems, the presence of former Communists in public life being identified as evidence of the survival of Communism. The only substantial criticism is the one-sidedness of the chosen conceptual framework, which defines the idea of completing the revolution as purely a right-wing discourse. The discussion might have accommodated, for example, the modernizing current citing Western examples, most of all the “German model”, which blames the surviving Communist mentality for the democratic deficit. In other words: is there another program for completion of the revolution? The “left-wing program” might have been considered, offsetting the impression that the struggle against the persistence of the Communist past is a right-wing privilege. A better procedure would be to first identify the discourses which set as their objective the termination of the persistence of the Communist past and only then examine whether they have become resources for one political side or the other.

Since the book did not set out to historically examine how post-Communist discourses have shaped relations with the past, it should not be taken to task for not doing so. Nonetheless, how the political current known as “new anti-Communism” rose to prevalence in the region, how completion of the revolution has become a right-wing program, and what political forces were competing in the post-1989 period are important questions. Although Mark does take into account the contest between the continental memory traditions of East and West, he does not deal with their interactions or with the complex effect by which the Holocaust memory has become the model for the representation of Communism. I think this may give us an answer to why historical catastrophes, cultural trauma,4 victim rivalry5 and personal witness6 have become the primary factors of European memory politics,7 or in other words, why the “post-Communist totalitarian language of ‘victim’, ‘collaborator’ and ‘resister’” (p.xxviii) have risen to prevalence.

Translated by Alan Campbell

Máté Zombory

 

The Politics of “National Character”: A Study in Interwar East European Thought. (Routledge Studies in Comparative Political Thought). By Balázs Trencsényi. London–New York: Routledge, 2012. 227 pp.

 

In his most recent study on the history of national characterology in Eastern Europe, Balázs Trencsényi provides the reader with an in-depth and comparative analysis of intellectual discourses on national specificity in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria respectively. This highly erudite study is published in Routledge’s series of “Studies in Comparative Political Thought,” which aims to “change the landscape of political theory by encouraging deeper comparative reflection on the structure and character of the discipline and to arrive at a richer understanding of the nature of the political” (p.II). It is in this ambitious spirit that the book is written, and it is the author’s background in philosophy that lends the study an impressive level of creative intellectual interdisciplinarity. Trencsényi, Associate Professor of history at the Central European University, has written extensively on the topic of modernity and identity discourses in East European political thought and belongs to a very exclusive category of scholars intellectually equipped to undertake a comparative study of three countries, modulating virtuously between the national case studies and covering an exhaustive range of intellectual activity in all of them.

The author’s main objective is to demonstrate the development of discourses of national specificity and national character in the interwar period, in relation to the advent of radical nationalism and transforming notions of historicity and temporality. Seemingly antagonistic concepts such as modernism and anti-modernism, autochthonism and Westernisation, constitute the conceptual framework for the analysis of the divergent discourses on national specificity in the three countries. In his approach to the complex subject of national characterology, Trencsényi is inspired by Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘political romanticism’ and Armin Mohler’s idea of ‘conservative revolution’, originally referring to the cultural and political currents in post-World War I Germany. Both of these concepts accommodate the portrayal of the long-term evolution of identity discourses, and connect them to intellectual developments preceding the interwar period. Taking into account the influence of older currents, like Romanticism´s role in the disconnection of national institutions and national identity, or Nietzschean justifications of collective egotism, the character of the interwar discourse is determined by the unprecedented association of national character with the problem of political modernity. Traditional linear conceptions of history were in many cases replaced with a new cyclicity, linking the realization of the primordial national to modernism as much as to anti-modernism, and complicating historicism’s traditional call to restore some glorious past. The dehistoricization of national character and changing attitudes towards time itself are recurring themes in the book and are discussed with considerable profundity.

After having introduced these general themes in the introductory chapter, Trencsényi points out that, even though they may all have played an important part in the countries under scrutiny, the three local discourses are not in the least identical. Initially, the author had planned to include only two case studies in his comparative analysis, but he decided to include Bulgaria as well in order to accentuate the differences and similarities between national discourses in Eastern Europe. Although the book focuses primarily on developments in the interwar period, the case studies are embedded in their historical contexts, and each chapter introduces the reader to the early modern and (especially) nineteenth-century debates on national characterology as well. This is important, since many of the interwar debates on the topic of national identity refer back to these earlier discourses.

The first case study is Romania, which consisted of the Old Kingdom of Romania and Transylvania prior to 1918. In his investigation of the historical roots of Romanian characterology, Trencsényi points out that the advent of political journalism, a lively pamphlet culture, and a new public sphere in the 1830s and 40s revolutionized the debate on Romanian identity, divided between revolutionary and evolutionary thinkers. Especially in the wake of the national-liberal revolutions of 1848, the question of whether the Romanians should follow foreign examples (as proposed by Mihail Kogălniceanu) or, instead, focus on their own autochthonous culture became a pressing one. A new phase in the debate occurred in 1860, when the Junimist movement, championed by Titu Maiorescu and inspired by German philosophy and Romanticism, challenged the dominant narrative of Romania´s undefiled Roman origins. The Junimists propagated an unprecedented new version of Romanian history, in which they accentuated the evolution and organicity of the people, while at the same time criticizing modernity and its detrimental effect on the national character. This organic conception of national identity radicalized towards the end of the nineteenth century and gave shape to A. D. Xenopol’s Romanian adaptation of Völkerpsychologie and the idea that a people without a history was necessarily a people without character (D. D. Drăghicescu). Through the authochtonists, who sought to reconcile political modernism with traditional and rural culture, the Romanian self-image had become a very ethnically orientated one by the early twentieth century. This trend radicalized in the interwar period, especially in the works of those considered part of the politically divergent young generation. Trencsényi traces the intellectual career of influential thinkers like Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade and highlights their contributions to what he refers to as the ‘a-historical turn’ in Romanian national thought. To Eliade, myth and symbol, not history, became the primary denominators of national identity. A nation had to transcend its own history and aspire to universality. It was this paradoxical blend of nationalism and universalism, characteristic of the interwar period, that contributed to the emergence of a Romanian brand of Fascism.

In the next chapter, Hungary is subjected to a similar discourse analysis. After having traced the concept of Hungary back to a multi-ethnic, pre-modern nobility, Trencsényi outlines the relationship between these earlier ideas and nineteenth-century debates on national character. The Hungarian intelligentsia, more influenced by Herderian philosophy than the Romanians, developed (especially from the 1860s onwards) a strongly ethno-cultural sense of identity, which is interesting in a country that eventually consisted of over fifty percent non-Hungarians. Attempts to Magyarize an ethnically mixed population and create a national school of philosophy based on national characteristics balanced between reason and sentiment (Gusztáv Szontagh) are scrutinized and presented in their relation to opposing intellectual camps. Many of the main themes resemble those from the previous chapter on Romania, e.g. the discussions on the importation of foreign culture (which those connected to the periodical Szép Szó applauded), and the ambivalent relationship between political progress and cultural specificity. Interestingly, the Hungarian discourse of the interwar period resembled the Romanian one in that the nation became a spiritual category (Bálint Hóman), rather than a character based on national history, and that the political ideas of the new generation were so amorphous and ambivalent that they formed the intellectual breeding ground for later generations of fascists and communists alike. A typically Hungarian feature is the Asian, nomadic component of the interwar debate. The Hungarians differed from the rest of Europe, since they regarded themselves as descendants of a wandering steppe people which embodied the ‘soul of Asia’, rather than that of the West. Consequently, Sándor Karácsony could argue that national characteristics typically considered vices in a European context were actually virtues from the oriental perspective and fundamental constituents of the Hungarian soul. Amidst this myriad of competing and overlapping models of identification and ‘alternative histories’, it is remarkable that the author hardly mentions the Habsburg legacy at all. Did the Austro-Hungarian past leave no traces in post-1918 Hungarian characterology? Furthermore, the Finno-Ugric connection, which at times was rather unpopular in Hungary but which had a major effect on ideas about the origins of the Hungarians, is entirely discarded.

The last case study, Bulgaria, is the only Slavic nation in Trencsényi’s comparative study. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the protochronistic idea that Slavs were the original progenitors of European civilisation played a significant part in the Bulgarian identity-discourse, arguably in part to compensate for the very narrow historical and institutional foundation of modern Bulgarian identity. One of the primary markers of this discourse was a sense of ‘inbetweenness’ and belatedness, of being caught between ‘not anymore’ and ‘not yet’. By tying the Bulgarian nation to the former greatness of the Slavs and even to that of the Indo-Europeans, the ancient cultures responsible for the cultural and political oppression of Bulgaria (Byzantine Greece and the Turks), as well as Western civilisation (e.g. ancient Gaul), could be presented as being indebted to and having originated from the Bulgarians’ mythical ancestors. These images of prehistoric greatness notwithstanding, many Bulgarian intellectuals came to the agonizing conclusion that modern Bulgarians were barbarians, and that the Turks, who functioned as the ‘significant others’ with which the Bulgarians contrasted themselves, were to blame for this. In order to achieve national emancipation, Bulgarians have looked to foreign examples like Germany and even Japan, and to a more authentic pagan past, before Byzantine Christianity had defiled the free and sensitive national spirit. Inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Bulgarian intellectuals like Pencho P. Slaveykov envisioned a pagan resurrection, a messianic return to primordial Bulgarianness. After 1918, in the wake of the traumatic Second Balkan War, the Bulgarian brand of national psychology, narodnopsihologia, became an important factor in the formulation of Bulgarian identity. Throughout the interwar period, the lack of historical continuity posed a serious problem for Bulgarian intellectuals, who sought their refuge in narodnopsihologia (Naydew Sheytanov) and glorifications of the medieval past (Peter Mutafchiev).

In the final chapter, the author offers an outline of the “common features and factors of divergence” in his comparative study, and concludes that, although the developments in all three countries are in many respects similar, the regional character of the three discourses should not be downplayed; they all had to “cook with local ingredients”. In all three cases, Trencsényi identifies nineteenth-century Romanticism as the starting point of the modern identity discourse, and crucial years like 1918, 1933 and 1940 as turning and breaking points in their intellectual development. In the conclusion he also provides the reader with a concise overview of the legacy of these interwar identity discourses after 1945, when some of their anti-Western tendencies found themselves strangely in line with Soviet ideology. The trauma of being considered peripheral and not fully Europeanized, at a time when Europe itself was entering a period of ideological crisis, has in many ways determined the ambivalent and antagonistic position of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria towards the West, and has left a mark on their national self-images. The herculean task of describing, analysing, and comparing these complicated developments in three equally complex case studies makes the work necessarily a densely argued intellectual tour de force in which little space remains for the proper introduction and contextualisation of its many protagonists. Arguably, the book may, with its 227 pages, simply be too thin to do justice to the immense complexity of Trencsényi’s endeavour. However, to those properly introduced to the intellectual history of all three countries and Eastern Europe in general, this study constitutes an innovative and fascinating contribution to the field.

 

Simon Halink

 

 

Horvátország a 7. századtól napjainkig [Croatia from the Seventh Century up to the Present Day]. By Dénes Sokcsevits. Budapest: Mundus, 2011. 846 pp.

 

Once upon a time there was an 800 year-old Hungaro–Croatian confederation. Croatia was the only single ’foreign’ state that permanently stood under the reign of the Holy Crown of Hungary. An occupation army from Hungary was never stationed on Croatian territory—it simply was not necessary. The coexistence of these states was based on a general agreement and was secured by several internal and external interests. This peaceful coexistence made this confederation unique in Eastern Europe. In general Croatia had had no secessionist ambitions, even when the existence of the Hungarian kingdom was thrown into question by the Mongol invasion of 1241 and the interregna of 1301–1308 and 1526. The first considerable differences appeared in the seventeenth century, when the Croatian ambitions for autonomy gained strength. An armed conflict between the two states broke out only once during the 800 year period of coexistence (in 1848–1849). But even that war was far from being a real obstacle in the later political negotiations between Hungary and Croatia. Despite these facts, both national historiographies turn a blind eye to the history of this coexistence.

The book by Dénes Sokcsevits is the first monograph about Croatia published in Hungary.8 The author based his work primarily on Hungarian and Croatian archival and secondary sources. The book is very informative with regard to historical events and it has a clear train of thought. The different periods are presented through political, economic, social and church history. The author sometimes focuses his investigation on a region like Dalmatia or Slavonia, sometimes on a town like Trogir/Trau and Dubrovnik/Ragusa, sometimes on a family like the Šubić family, or sometimes on a politician like Martinuzzi Fráter György/Juraj Martinušević. His main aim is to demonstrate that the history of country and nation cannot be regarded as a straight line of historical events. In contrast with traditional Croatian historiography, which constructs a simplified history of Croatia with the nation in its center, Sokcsevits intends to present the history of the state as a whole made up of several different mosaic tiles. It is a particular virtue of the author’s approach that he interprets and analyzes each and every disputed question and opinion with regard to Croatian history. One should also note that Sokcsevits does not fail to deal with problems to which Hungarian historiography has turned a blind eye (e.g. why the Croatian nobles refused to join the uprising led by Rákóczi).

From a structural point of view the book can be divided into three major parts. The first part deals with the history of Croatia until 1918, focusing on Hungarian–Croatian coexistence and later the process of succession. The differences of opinion and interests between the political elites of the two states appeared in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the Hungarian king proved unable to protect the Croatian counties from Ottoman attacks. That is the very beginning of the relationship between Croatia and the Habsburg dynasty. Two important phenomena of the seventeenth century influenced the Hungarian–Croatian relationship profoundly in the long run. On the one hand a difference in the interpretation of constitutional law emerged between the two states. While the Croatian estates began to emphasize that the state connections were based on equal rights, so Croatia had to be regarded as a joint and not as a subordinate state, the Hungarians insisted on their concept of Croatia as a conquered state (i.e. in their perception Croatia had been conquered by the Hungarian kingdom in the eleventh century). On the other hand, the aristocratic conspiracy against the Habsburg dynasty in 1671 proved an especially tragic turning-point in the relationship between the two states. The conspiracy was organized by families that were the main representatives of Hungarian–Croatian coexistence. After exposing the plans for an uprising, the Habsburgs practically ruined the families of Zrínyi/Zrinski and Frangepan.

The period of 1790–1848 can best be characterized by the fact that the national idea gained primacy both in Hungary and in Croatia. Due to the perception of Hungarian nationalism as a threat, Croatian politicians began to build up closer connections with Vienna, and the Habsburgs refused to take the Hungarian opinions into consideration in their Croatian policy. According to Sokcsevits, however, even in that period both nations shared a common feature: their nation-building process and language reforms were modeled on the same patterns. It was Lajos Kossuth who in 1848 questioned the autonomy of Croatia on the basis of constitutional law, and it was also Kossuth who adamantly rejected any proposal regarding the federative transformation of Hungary. Furthermore, he intended to make the Hungarian language compulsory south of the Sava. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Croats could be easily instrumentalized by Vienna during the 1848–1849 Hungarian War of Independence. It was the first time that these countries had gone to war with each other. It is worth noting, however, that the troops of Banus Jelačić were regarded as enemies by the Croats of the Transdanubian counties. And as a “reward” for having sided with the Habsburgs, Croatia lost its autonomy and sank to the level of a crown-land.

Both political elites turned a blind eye to the consequences of the 1848–1849 events. They proved unable to reach an acceptable compromise during the negotiations of 1866–1868. One the one hand, the Habsburg Empire was transformed into a Dual Monarchy, which was obviously unacceptable to the majority of the nations of the empire. On the other hand, the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement in 1868 was judged by the Croatian politicians as a bad compromise. It had the potential, however, to bring about positive change. It was Ferenc Deák who suggested a real union and broad autonomy for Croatia, but his suggestions were ignored by the other members of the Hungarian delegation (Gyula Andrássy and Menyhért Lónyay). It is also an unknown detail of the 1868 negotiations between Pest-Buda and Zagreb that Deák warned his Croatian colleagues against South-Slav unity. According to Deák, South-Slav unification would be led by Belgrad and not Zagreb. On the whole, Croatia could attained autonomy than it had set out to win, but it is important to mention that the autonomy it did obtain was unique in Europe at the time. The Home Rule Bill, elaborated by William E. Gladstone in 1880, was modeled on the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement. (The British parliament refused to accept the bill, because the members wanted to save imperial integrity.9)

After the Settlement of 1868 was accepted, the quality of the relationship between Pest-Buda and Zagreb went from bad to worse; trust was gradually lost. Both sides began to pursue a policy based on emotions. One illustrative example suffices to demonstrate the regrettable aftermath: Croatia had a bad economic structure and taxation moral in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was one of the most underdeveloped countries within Austria–Hungary (pp.400–1). The Hungarian authorities tried to transform the economic structure and develop a taxpayer culture on an administrative basis. (The construction of an effective bourgeois state can be characterized by authoritative methods in the whole of Eastern Europe – even in Hungary.) The structural reforms were regarded by the Croats, however, as new forms of oppression. At this point, citing the Czech example, Sokcsevits refutes the popular thesis of Croatian historiography according to which independence was the most important condition of economic development. By 1918 the dual system of Austria–Hungary had fallen. The political forces of Croatia anticipated the total defeat and the reorganization of the empire; but it remained an illusion.

The second part of the book deals with the position of Croatia within Yugoslavia. The creation of the new state was due first and foremost to the policies of Great Britain and France. The concept of the new federal state was laid on uncertain foundations from the outset. On the one hand, the idea of a united South-Slav nation was a simple utopia. On the other hand, the most crucial assurance of internal state cohesion was the violence practiced by the government on administrative and military grounds. The responsibility of the different Croatian political groups must also be emphasized. In the very moment of the collapse of Austria–Hungary it was only Stjepan Radić who consistently protested against giving up all Croatian national ambitions during the negotiations with Belgrad. In the end Croatia became part of a South-Slav state that was ruled by the Serbs. The Croats, who were accustomed to living in a constitutional state, found themselves in a Balkan country where democracy and state administration stood at a lower level than before 1918. The federal government adopted a violent policy towards Croatia and solved the main political problems with the use of security forces. The Serb politicians were simply unwilling to make any compromises until 1939. The sabor was not convoked for 20 years. The new situation provoked new social ruptures in the twentieth century. The transformed party structure of Croatia was characterized by more or less radical attitudes towards autonomy, federation and independence. The political ambitions restricted and hindered by violence and the disappointment in the federal states resulted in a complex set of armed conflicts in World War II. There was a war between Croats and Serbs on the one hand but also between Croats and Germans and Italians. The warriors of the Ustaša movement and civil organizations fought against the communist partisan divisions. The last scene of genocides can be regarded as particularly tragic, because it was supported by the British and Soviet armies. The allied forces handed thousands of Croat prisoners of war over to the partisan troops of Tito, who let them be butchered. The denial and memory of this event have remained one of the heaviest burdens in the relationships between the South Slav nations.

The second Yugoslav federal state was born in blood and could only have been governed by a dictator. Although the system of Tito brought some novelties, such as federalism and the intention of assuring equal rights to all nationalities, it was characterized by state violence, the inability of the political leadership to reach compromises, dictatorship, and collective amnesia forced upon the population. The Yugoslav states in the interwar and post-war periods shared another common feature: the most essential external cohesive force of the federal state was primarily the interests of the great powers. The fake propaganda image of Tito’s Yugoslavia, according to which the Croats could be regarded as fascists and the Serbs as victims of the war, also proved a grave burden. According to one of the extreme but tenacious assessments of Tito’s state, the 1960s and 1970s were a period of economic development and material growth. Since the archival materials are far from completely processed, Sokcsevits’ aim is to approach the history of the second Yugoslavia from many points of view. The conclusion of the second part of the book is that Yugoslavia was on the verge of collapse in the late 1980s from all points of view and its existence was maintained only by the Western great powers.

Although there are numerous monographs and articles dealing with the period between 1991 and 1995, because many of the archival sources remain closed, the history of the war of independence has to be interpreted extremely cautiously. Sokcsevits has done so. The interpretation of the events is laconic and analytical. He outlines the psychological path that led to the bloody showdowns, lists the acts of violence committed by both sides, and criticizes European policy, which was unable to handle the armed conflict. The very last chapter of the book summarizes the post-war history of Croatia.

The author often reflects on the assertions of Croatian historiography. According to Sokcsevits, the majority of historians more or less submit to the national discourse. They are inclined to neglect Hungarian–Croatian coexistence and search instead for separatist movements in the past. (Sokcsevits often compares and exemplifies the differences between the conclusions drawn by Hungarian historians and the conclusions reached by Croatian historians; see the maps on pp.270–71). The author criticizes the East European view of the British historiography as well. According to Sokcsevits, even today the majority of British historians approach the history of this region from the point of view of the (imperial) British state, and they are therefore unable to understand local problems and realities (see the assessment of fascism and communism).

As far as the weaknesses of the book are concerned, the presentation of the Hungarian–Croatian relationships is sometimes too dominant. In order to demonstrate the main problems of Croatian history better, Sokcsevits would have to provide a wider historical background and give more reference points (about the Orthodox commonwealth of the Balkans, the overseas empire of Venice, the imperial ambitions of the Habsburg dynasty and the nation building processes in Italy). It is not clear how the different territories (like Dalmatia or Slavonia) and social groups (like the Italian speaking Dalmatians) and strata became “Croatian” in the nineteenth century.10 The author often refers to how the Serbian Orthodox Church made “Serbs” out of the different Orthodox groups of Vlachs and Balkan Slavs. This statement, however, is also true in the case of the Croatian Catholic Church: it was not just the Orthodox population that had escaped from the Middle and South Balkans. Dalmatia, Szerémség/Srem and Határőrvidék/Vojna krajina (Military Frontier) were the last station for Catholic Albanians as well. E.g. Arbanas (in Hungarian Orbonás, ital. Borgo Erizzo) near Zara and the Catholic villages of the regiment of Pétervárad / Petrovaradin were established by Albanians, and it was the Croatian national church that made them Croatian in the nineteenth century. (Not to mention the origins of several villages in Slavonia that were established by Hungarians from Transdanubia.)

According to Sokcsevits, Croatian history only began to share close affinities with Serbian history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp.200–2). Considering that the abovementioned nations lived next to each other and spoke closely related languages, this claim needs to be challenged, too. The Christianization of the Serb territories was organized in Rome, and not until the thirteenth century was it decided that the Serb state would be Orthodox. The Serbs were part of the Catholic world for centuries.11 Furthermore, South Dalmatia had connections to the Serb zhupas that were similar to the connections between Croatia and Middle-Dalmatia.12

In the chapters dealing with the history and the collapse of the second Yugoslavia, Sokcsevits does not touch upon one essential factor: the Tito system tolerated and contributed to organized crime. Furthermore, Tito instrumentalized crime to promote his political aims: several intellectuals and politicians of the opposition were killed by criminals in the service of the Communist Party. Organized crime became an independent factor after 1989–1991 and played a significant role in the South-Slav wars. The clarification of this role calls for complex and refined research.

The writing of the history of a nation or a country can never be finished. As time passes, new sources and approaches emerge that raise new questions and offer new answers. Sokcsevits’s book, however, will remain a valuable part of this ongoing conversation in the long run.

 

Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics

A szlovák nemzet születése: Ľudovít Štúr és a szlovák társadalom a 19. századi Magyarországon [The Birth of the Slovak Nation: Ľudovít Štúr and Slovak Society in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century]. By József Demmel. Pozsony: Kalligram, 2011. 373 pp.

 

After publishing an innovative collection of papers under the title The Whole of Slovakia Fit on a Raft: Studies on the Slovak History of Nineteenth Century Hungary,13 the young historian József Demmel wrote an important monograph about Ľudovít Štúr (1815–1856), the most important figure of modern Slovak nationalism. Demmel, a research fellow at the Research Institute of the National Self-Government of Slovaks in Hungary in Békéscsaba, is held by many to be the emerging star of historical Slovak studies in Hungary. By writing on Štúr, Demmel chooses a hot topic, as the interpretation of the mid-nineteenth-century Slovak linguist-politician radically differs in Hungarian and Slovak historiographies. Hungarian historians generally neglected him; Demmel’s book, which is based on his PhD thesis at the University of Budapest, is the first monograph about Štúr in Hungarian ever. If Hungarian authors commented on his activities, they mostly treated him as a Russia-based traitor and troublemaker without any genuine popular support.14 At the same time, Štúr became the indisputable core hero of the national fight in the Slovak national canon.15 Since the 1880s thousands of works of academic and popular literature were devoted to Štúr, which anachronistically canonized his figure and thus prevented any critical approach. It goes without saying that these parallel running narratives were made for “inner use” (for the respective national communities), so they never met. The goal of Demmel was to undermine both interpretations in order to provide an understanding of Štúr that can be valid both in Slovakia and Hungary. Demmel’s ambition is without doubt challenging, as he could hardly rely on the secondary literature of the canon, but rather had to explore a vast number of primary sources and find an appropriate method to avoid falling in the trap of reproducing politically biased ideas.

To solve the problem of parallel national master narratives, Demmel distances himself from the classical, chronological and not thematically based style of biographies of “great men”. Instead, he suggests a thick description à la Geertz of the social contexts and individual choices as a method (pp.23–24). Only thus can the canonized, stable and anachronistic image of Štúr be deconstructed and replaced with a living and dynamic figure, who made his decisions in a complex social environment the members of which cannot simply be divided into good and bad individuals (pp.19–24). However, this method implies a certain fragmentation, as it does not permit the construction of a linear life story. Yet Demmel consciously undertakes this risk, which results in a book resembling more a loose collection of essays then a coherent monograph.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first part is dominated by the perspective of the individual. In the first chapter Demmel carefully analyzes the social strategy of the Štúr family, which led through several generations of weavers in the Northwestern Hungarian town of Trencsén (in Slovakian Trenčin) to Ľudovít’s father Samuel, who became a teacher in the Lutheran elementary school in Zayugróc (in Slovakian Uhrovec). The other main topic of the chapter is the Lutheran environment in which Štúr began his career. The second chapter examines a well-known topos of the Štúr hagiography regarding the origins of his national identity; here Demmel proves the deficiency of the Slovak national canon by combining a critical reading of the sources and some Hungarian secondary literature which has been largely neglected by the canon-making historians. Here the sources enable Demmel to discredit the Slovak national interpretation, but they do not permit him to offer an alternative understanding; the specific reason why Štúr subscribed to the Slovak national idea remains unclear, much as it remains unclear when he made this decision. The third and fourth chapters are devoted to an issue crucial in any individual life story but fitting into the hagiographic picture of the national hero only with some difficulty: the financial background of Štúr. Coming from a family with a modest income, Štúr had to face financial difficulties throughout his life. He worked as private tutor for several families, however, the wide range of his employers can be explained only by the fact that he was motivated by varying considerations at different times of his life, such as his Slovak national vision and his membership in the Lutheran Church. The latter was the case when he worked for the Prónay family, the head of which, János, was well-known for his support for Lajos Kossuth, Štúr’s greatest rival. From a Slovak nationalist angle, this job can hardly be understood, but a thick description of the Lutheran society of Upper Hungary provides a more plausible interpretation. The fifth and sixth chapters examine Štúr’s controversial relation to the nobility. The Slovak national canon is dominated by the view that Štúr’s main opponents were nationalist Magyar gentrymen, with the exception of one particular, pro-Slovak family, the Osztroluczkys. Replacing this black-and-white picture, Demmel positions Štúr’s relation to the nobility into the patron-client pattern, still an important motif in late feudal Hungary. The last chapter of this section investigates Štúr from a gender perspective and deals also with his alleged homosexuality.

While the first part of the book examines Štúr’s life story from his individual perspective, the second part is devoted to an analysis of the social environment and political conditions in which he worked. Demmel analyzes first Štúr’s unquestionably most relevant deed, the making of the Slovak literary language. Demmel seeks the motivations and possible options for the creation of the standard Slovak language. He points out the important yet incidental role of the Slovak speaking nobility of the Tatra region and then puts it into the Slovak speaking public space of contemporary Hungary. By investigating the subscription data of literary yearbooks and newspapers and the Tatrín association, Demmel is able to provide a detailed composition of the potential supporters of the Slovak national movement, mostly Lutheran provincial intellectuals, teachers, ministers and some members of the petty nobility of the Tatra Mountains. One of the most interesting parts of the book deals with Štúr’s activity as a member of the last feudal Diet of Hungary in 1847–1848. Traditionally, the Slovak national canon cast Štúr’s role in the parliament as that of an advocate of Slovak national ideology, indeed, as a friend of and spokesman for the people among the oligarchic Magyar gentrymen. First, Demmel examines the city of Zólyom (in Slovakian Zvolen), which delegated Štúr to the Diet, and finds that a mere two dozen local aldermen voted for him, indeed, to represent the interests of the city only; the sources make no mention of any Slovak national issue. While a member of the Diet, Štúr delivered a speech about a particular Slovak case only once. Instead he mostly dealt with questions of the cities and some general issues. The “urban question” was a key issue in the politics of the 1840s, as the reform-minded liberal gentry aimed to modernize the conservative political system of the cities and introduce democratic reforms in their administration. Therefore Štúr’s activity in the Diet can be understood far better as the work of a politician in the transition from feudal to liberal society than it can as the efforts of a Slovak nationalist. Another chapter of the book is devoted to a topic slightly different from the abovementioned. While the questions Demmel raised before were central to the Slovak national canon but rather marginal in Hungarian historiography, the chapter on the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 touches upon one of the most important points in both national narratives. Demmel points out some incoherent parts of the Slovak national canon, yet avoids passing judgment on Štúr and the civil war he provoked in North Hungary. The final chapters examine Štúr’s last years, in particular the position of Modor (in Slovakian Modra), the town to which he moved in 1851, and the legend of his suicide in 1856. Based on a close reading of the sources, Demmel refutes the view that Štúr lived in isolation in Modor, persecuted by the police, nor does he find any evidence of his suicide.

This relatively long description of the book’s content offers an understanding of the novelty Demmel brings to the discussion. Dissociating himself from the conceptual framework of national master narratives, Demmel provides a much more lively, colorful and plausible picture, not only of Štúr but of mid-nineteenth-century society in Hungary and thus the wider context of Slovak nationalism. Microhistory, the history of mentalities, thick description, and network analysis are Demmel’s keywords, and even though the application of these methods is not novel in the social history in the region, the investigation of a national hero using these approaches is definitely new.

The multiplicity of the applied methodology precludes the construction of a classic linear life story, yet this fragmentation opens the field for similar studies. Some important chapters of Štúr’s life did not fit into Demmel’s book, even though as subjects of study they would have been at least as challenging and probably would have yielded similarly exciting findings. For instance, Štúr’s studies in Germany completely fall out of the scope, and the evolution of his political ideas is touched upon only incidentally. Indeed Demmel was so preoccupied with the deconstruction of the Slovak and Hungarian master narratives that he did not reflect on the recent “Western” literature on the topic, so one is a bit surprised not to see references to the works on Slovak history by Josette Baer,16 Tomasz Kamuszella17 and Alexander Maxwell.18

Nonetheless, Demmel’s book is unquestionably a key reading for anyone interested in the Slovak and Hungarian history of the nineteenth century. The extent to which Demmel has reached his original goal, to provide an understanding of a Slovak national hero that will be considered valid both in Hungary and Slovakia, remains a question, as neither an English nor a Slovak edition has appeared. What is sure is that Hungarian historical scholarship has overwhelmingly praised Demmel’s contribution, so half of the goal has been completed. As the Kalligram publishing house plans to translate the book into Slovak, soon it will be evident the extent to which Slovak historical scholarship is open to a reinterpretation of a central hero constructed by earlier generations that is radical both in its methodology and its narrative content.

 

Bálint Varga

 

 

Maps of Remembrance. Space, Belonging and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe. By Máté Zombory. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2012. 311 pp.

 

Máté Zombory’s impressive monograph examines maps of remembrance. By using the metaphor of a map of remembrance in the title, Zombory indicates the conceptual and methodological framework of his post-1989 research on Hungarian national identity. The metaphor refers to Appadurai’s concept of ’scape’ or ’ethnoscape’ used for the study of complex cultures, their coexistence, and the characteristic differences of the respective societies.19 However, in identity research the further consideration of the concept of lieu de mémoire introduced by Pierre Nora, which is part of the discussion in this book, has become increasingly unavoidable.20 What does this mean exactly? In this regard, these are maps drawn by the memory, specifically emerging identity maps that are bound to people of Hungarian nationality and Hungarian mother tongue whose national belonging became problematic for some reason in the twentieth century.

The author structures the book around three key concepts: nationality, space and remembrance. The theoretical part of the monograph is an interpretation of these concepts. The topic indicated in the title is introduced by three theoretical and three empirical studies. The main purpose of the book is to focus on the relationship between the individual and the nation, as well as to study the national phenomenon and the role of particular states. The author examines and illustrates the spatial practices based on analyses of memory constructions.

The empirical part is mainly a representation of practices of the identity strategies used by the state and the individual. In the case of the first, the author analyzes political speeches, while in the case of the second he examines life stories using the method of oral history. The key question of the book can be summarized as follows: “The question is: what role does the representation of the space in memory play such that it produces national belonging as a natural factor?” (p.8).

The first chapter of the work, entitled Nationalism and Spatiality, concentrates on the spatial representation of nations in Eastern Europe. In this chapter Zombory observes that the world of nations is pervaded by a sort of spatial dynamism which contributes to the formation of national belonging. Zombory offers a reinterpretation of nationalism and revision of the nation’s raison d’etre. As he notes, “attachment to a place is not self-evident or naturally given, consequently the spatialization of (national) culture—including territorialization—is a historical, political and social process” (pp.29–30). The main aim of this chapter is to highlight, alongside the notion of the immobility of the nations, spatial movements whereby the differing problems of homeland and home arise.

In the second theoretical part of the book the author raises the issue of “spatial practices constructing belonging” connected to remembrance (p.50). At the beginning of the chapter, entitled Between Place and Memory: the Practices of Localization, Zombory claims that the spatial aspects rarely appear in the memory-discourses. In this section he tries to fill a lacuna. He redefines the problem of belonging. “Briefly, it is by reformulating the contexts of sites and memory according to the problematics of spatial practices” (p.52). Alongside the analyses of memory and space, Zombory presents theories related to the topic, theories that help determine the concept of spatial practices of remembrance. The author specifies this at the end of the chapter: “The spatializing practice of remembrance I examine is narration: I analyze national narratives of the past given as a reaction to spatial challenges” (p.84).21

This turn leads into the first empirical chapter of this work, The Return to Europe: State Politics of Memory and Hungarian Belonging. This case study offers an analysis of the Hungarian national localization procedures after 1989. The main issue of the chapter is “how the Hungarian state produced national-spatial belonging after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc” (p.9).

The author dissects the speeches at the commemorations of August 20 between the period of the political change and the accession to the European Union (the period from 1989 to 2004), narratives of the prime ministers and presidents of the Hungarian Republic related to the national history. The first part of the study provides information on the role of East-West differentiation, which is closely connected to the meaning and the significance of Hungary’s ’return to Europe’. In the introductory part of the analysis of the political speeches, Zombory plainly indicates that he is going to present ritual cartographic practices with which “Hungarian state leadership has redrawn the ideological world map that disintegrated with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc” (p.92).

The analysis of the political speeches is important for this reason: “The state localization tracing out the space for national belonging thus produces a map that creates the characteristics of the subject constructed by the commemoration, the nation – in other words, (narration) national identity” (p.93). The succeeding subchapters contain analyses of the speeches held by the official Hungarian state representatives, presidents and prime ministers on state commemorations. Zombory regards these commemorations as political rituals that are localizations, thus they reconstruct national belonging in the bodily-material dimension of past. He refers to these practices of remembrance as the national cartography, illustrating them with examples from the Hungarian state politics of memory after 1989.

The chapter The Nation as Imaginative Laboratory is part of the theoretical framework of the book. The author undertakes to investigate the politics of belonging. In this context, he examines the theoretical aspects of identity. Hereafter the question of the subject and the discursive relation of power comes to the fore. The author tries to explore this: “I deal with on one hand the way individual identity strategies can be examined in the context of state normalization [...]” (p.9). The discussion of the theoretical questions is followed by the remarks on the research methodology.

The next section of the work belongs to the empirical part consisting of the study The Museum of the Self: National-Ethnic Belonging and the Memory of Expulsion. This section analyzes the life story interviews of people who were directly involved in the forced migrations and expulsions in the twentieth century. In particular, Zombory examines the construction of national-ethnic belonging using the life stories of people of German origin who were resettled or deported to the Soviet Union. The identity strategies in this section are constructed in the context of forced relocation. Through a reconstruction of the relationship created with the past, the flashbacks create a certain ’self-musealization’.

As the author describes it: “The borders of homeland constructed by self-musealization are qualitatively equivalent to the borders of the homeland according to the territorial norm of the nation-state, but the strategic marking out of them invalidates the unquestionable unity of state and nation” (p.286).

The chapter entitled Hungarian Homelands: National Belonging “Beyond the Border” analyzes the life stories of Hungarians living in Slovakia. Zombory examines the interviewees’ relationships to the Hungarian state politics of memory with respect to the discourses of existence “beyond the border”. In addition, he raises the question, how is it possible for Hungarians to remain Hungarians outside the borders of Hungary? The author notes in connection with the examination of national belonging that in contrast to the previous chapter he analyzes spatial displacements regarding the Trianon Treaty (1920), which was predicated on the enforcement of the territorial norm of the nation-state and was implemented without any mass movement of the population. The author summarizes the main purpose of this chapter: “The field of my examination is delimited by the conflict between Hungarians living outside the borders and the political practices of the Hungarian state in the discourse addressing them” (p.211).

To lay down the basis of the theoretical part he uses Rogers Brubacker’s theoretical framework. The author concentrates on the spatial displacement that takes place in “Hungarian–Hungarian relations,” giving rise to alternative homes. The participants in these relationships are individuals living in the Hungarian state and outside the Hungarian borders. The context of the analyses is given by Hungary’s official diaspora politics between 1989 and 2010. In part of this chapter Zombory writes about the Hungarian state’s political practices regarding the Hungarians living outside the borders, as well as individual identity strategies and the localization of the national home.

The seventh chapter is a kind of summary of the work. The author writes about the objectives and conclusions of the book. The title of this part is State-free Nationalism, Natural National Resistance. The question of national belonging is joined with the spatial dynamics of nationalism. So the object of the investigation is the nation state’s reaction to the spatial displacements that presented a challenge to the concept of national belonging. By maintaining practices of national cartography, the official Hungarian nation-state representatives constructed a natural relationship attached to the inert homeland, portraying the homeland as a permanent, natural entity which must be protected from change.

As the author puts it: “The ’national body’ materializing in this discourse is apparently not a political quality, but a natural one” (p.284). This means, furthermore, that anyone who is fashioned by the nation as a foreigner becomes an outcast.

Another important question raised by Zombory is how the outcast finds voice in the national discourse. The author examines two cases in this respect. In the first case, the displacement caused by the territorial norm of the nation-state is linked to the movement of the individual, but in the second it is not: “The spatial dynamic makes possible the constant construction of national belonging. However the construction of non-nation-state homelands means a cultural form of the national relationship of individual and places that rejects the territorial ideal prescribed as a norm of nationalism, according to which the borders of nation and state must be congruent” (p.286). Thus, localization processes can create ’alternative national homes’. Zombory thus questions the doctrine of nation-state nationalism. However, he also draws attention to the fact that the territorializing localization processes under examination repeat the territorial norm of the nation-state.22

In connection with the natural functioning of national belonging, the examples indicate that national belonging becomes natural through the spatial-material identification of present and past. On the other hand, Zombory implies how the national discourse challenges natural belonging. The author also draws attention to the fact that alongside the “social strength” of the localization practices, one has to face its physical-material nature (pp.288–89).

The most important result of the work is to explore new nationalism, spatial belonging, and the questions of remembrance. Zombory highlights the relationship between these three concepts and presents them as inseparable. Next to the nation’s static nature, he points out its dynamic movement, thereby recasting it according to a new approach. Spatial practices must be made part of the scholarship on nationalism, and in order to further our understanding of these practices, Zombory uses the memory research. He points out that past is reconstructed not only in time, but also in space.

The language of the monograph is the language of the scholar, but the registers and style are exciting and diverse. The great advantage of the monograph is that it approaches the subject from different perspectives. However, Zombory arguably attempts to adopt too many approaches. In my opinion, the processes and examples should be described in more detail and the scope of the examination of national belonging should be also widened. At the same time, in the Hungarian secondary literature Zombory’s book constitutes one of the most nuanced contributions to the new approaches to nationalism and national issues.

 

Ildikó Bajcsi

What Made the Kádár Era? Two Books on Hungary’s Recent Past
Népuralom ötvenhatban [People’s Rule in ’56]. By Éva Standeisky. Pozsony–Budapest: Kalligram–1956-os Intézet, 2010. 597 pp.
Bevezetés a kádárizmusba [Introduction to Kádárism]. By János Rainer M. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet–L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2011. 352 pp.

 

Hungary has its own extensive literature on the era of state socialism, with a steady stream of monographs (re)assessing the whole of the period. Previously well-established ideas on the state and society of state socialism have come under review in recent years. The approaches of social and cultural history and the history of mentality are gradually making inroads into the study of recent history in this country. The assessment of the Kádár era has become a question of heightened interest in the last few years. The limits of power, the scope ordinary people had for action (including against the system) and how these shaped the world and everyday life of state socialism are among the fundamental questions of interest on the state socialist system and the Kádár era.

No assessment of the Kádár era can completely dissociate it from 1956 and the period that preceded it, the Stalinist Rákosi era. Books on the events of the 1956 Revolution have proliferated in Hungary since the political transition. Éva Standeisky’s Népuralom ötvenhatban stands out among these. The author examines the aims that motivated the everyday participants in 1956 and the individual and collective actions which shaped the historical events. She takes a history-of-mentality approach to the events of the Revolution, assembling and interpreting data that has already been published, and focusing on individual cases and local events. Although to a large extent building on previous political-history and local-history treatments, the book examines the mentalities in the background of the events from close up. The scale changes several times from chapter to chapter, progressing from the mass to the group and then to the individual, and giving an insight into the Revolution from a micro-history perspective. These changes in viewpoint in themselves set the book apart from the idealized accounts of the Revolution familiar in general history books and from the image of 1956 constructed in the West.

Foreign accounts of the Revolution were heavily influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt. In the second edition of her book on totalitarianism, Arendt wrote about the workers’ councils set up in the Hungarian Revolution. These have been widely interpreted in Western left-wing accounts as repositories of the revolutionary will (the aims of the “working class”). Several, following Arendt,23 described Hungary’s Revolution as a workers’ revolution against a totalitarian regime which called itself a workers’ state. Bill Lomax directly described the Hungarian revolutionary workers’ organizations as a self-administering state of workers’ councils.24

By contrast, Standeisky shows the diversity of organizations which sprang up (revolutionary committees, national committees, national councils, workers’ councils, etc.). She sees the collapse of the dictatorial regime as a state of grace that gave people the chance to produce truly democratic arrangements, setting up new organizations at a local level and at their own initiative. She argues that direct democracy (or more precisely various spontaneous forms of that) can truly work in extraordinary circumstances, because of the special ability of ordinary people to create a meaningful and workable order—at least temporarily. This, in the interpretation given in the book, is what happened in Hungary in 1956. At one point, she says of the achievements of ordinary people: “they put the world that had fallen apart during the Rákosi dictatorship back together: they created real people’s power, and order” (p.272).

Despite being based on a selection of individual events, the account of the Revolution is not overly idealized or one-sided, because it makes the diversity of these events very clear, and presents some less-known features of the Revolution, such as manifestations of anti-Semitism and lynchings. Hannah Arendt claimed in her classic work that there was almost no robbery or looting in 1956, i.e. mob rule did not take hold. Relying on published sources, Standeisky presents some of the more carnival-like moments of the Revolution. She shows that revolutionary and workers’ councils did not form immediately, and all kinds of things happened from day to day. It is not easy to confront or convey the dark side of 1956 in Hungary. As recently as 2006, a play written by András Papp and János Térey for the fiftieth anniversary raised a storm of controversy.25 Kazamaták is the stage “adaptation” of a notorious historical event, the siege of a Communist Party headquarters building in Köztársaság Square. It confronted informed public opinion with a different face of the 1956. The rebels besieged and occupied the building of the Budapest Party Committee on 30 October 1956 and killed 24 people. Among the dead was the Communist leader Imre Mező, a supporter of Imre Nagy. Standeisky distances herself from those who see that event as a “people’s judgement”, and describes such phenomena as “the inflamed mass brutally taking out its anger—a lynching” (p.53). Occasionally, even myth-busting stories turn out not to displace the myths so neatly. Éva Tulipán’s recent book, which treats the events of Köztársaság Square in great detail, tells us that one reason for the siege of the party building may have been that the Communist Party was actually trying to organize security there. The security forces inside had clashed with the rebels several times in the days leading up to the siege, and the defenders of the building used firearms for the first time on 30 October.26 Thus a variety of assessments and judgements are possible for every individual and collective action, not just the larger events.

Retrospective social awareness has conditioned us to see the Revolution as a fight between good and bad, and Papp and Térey’s play was the first since the political transition to confront a wide public with how complex the events of the Revolution actually were. The idea that “goodies” can sometimes behave badly is somewhat jarring. The closing line of the play, “The single story disintegrates/Into one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-six pieces” is a wry pun: the word for “piece” in Hungarian also means “stage play”. Returning to Standeisky’s book, we read that every individual and group action has its own special driving force, behind which we can recognize the general characteristics of human nature. These driving forces, from the evidence of this book, seem to be autonomy and love of freedom. This hardly differs from Hannah Arendt’s insight that the antidote to totalitarianism is spontaneity, the capability of autonomous action, which totalitarian systems try to eliminate, but exists in everybody. But here, individual and community autonomy takes its meaning in democracy, and not within the Marxist ideal of revolution.

Standeisky’s book seems to tell us that in the individual and group actions behind the events of 1956, the force which stood in opposition to dictatorship and everything associated with it was the freedom-seeking spirit inherent in modern society. (The Western treatments quoted assessed the totalitarian system against Marxist ideals, whereas here the moral gauge, or rather the counterpoint, is democracy, which the author claims showed up in 1956 as the alternative to dictatorship). This is definitely true if the research approaches the events of 1956 from the perspective of democratic values. In modern times, according to Hannah Arendt, we can give meaning to our own time by regaining the past. The pearl diver does not dive to the bottom of the sea to discover everything that is there; he is only interested in pearls and coral.27 This applies even if she sets out to present nearly every phenomenon, including those less important for her own interpretation.

According to Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, terror is a phenomenon that pervades every aspect of social life. In this interpretation, terror is actually the trigger of social resistance and revolution (true also for 1956). The question remains of how to explain how a totalitarian system can survive for a long time, i.e. why it does not prompt members of society to form groups for collective action.28 This, or how the totalitarian system built itself into the everyday world, is really the central question of the historiography of the Kádár era.

The nature and operation of Kádárism, the new order which was set up in Hungary to stifle the democratic initiatives of 1956, is the subject of the book by János Rainer M. The essays making up Bevezetés a kádárizmusba extend their scope to the preceding Rákosi era and the subsequent political transition. Rainer claims that Stalinism and the Rákosi era did not break down every social tradition in Hungary, and the Kádár era made fewer changes to the Stalinist system after 1956 than contemporary discourses might lead us to think. The center of the author’s interest, as implied by the title, is the assessment and interpretation of the Kádár era and Kádárism.

The book reflects on the best-known foreign interpretations of the state socialist system, theories of totalitarianism, various schools of revisionism, and interpretations of Stalinism as a civilization. Rainer notes that “the paradigm of ‘totalitarianism’ was to no small extent reborn in Eastern Europe before and after 1989” (p.125). It is difficult, however, to judge the validity of theory from what are often purely ideological applications of it; the oversimplifying interpretations are usually what the revisionists turn against (p.49). In Hungary, the totalitarianism paradigm is usually taken up together with right-wing, highly ideologized anti-Communist rhetoric. Nowadays, however, we see these systems as being as open to left-wing criticism (indeed in a democracy they can only be approached critically) as Western capitalism, and even some elements of totalitarianism theory fit into this criticism. The author, in the restrained tones of these essays, implies that he finds the best route to interpreting the Kádár era through methodological multiplicity and a combination of approaches, and that is what he tries to do in this book.

For a long time, the “Kádár system” appeared in both Western and Hungarian historiography as a version of state socialism with a special human face, approaching Western welfare states, a system which made Central and Eastern European totalitarianism liveable, and in fact fundamentally changed it (taming the system from arbitrary and totalitarian to merely authoritarian). Rainer claims that Kádárism was not a system in its own right, but only a shift within the system. These internal changes did, however, combine into some kind of organic whole which might be called Kádárism, a liveable system for a large proportion of ordinary people. The author argues that Kádárism was not as different from the previous era as the contemporary discourses legitimating the rule of János Kádár, and hence today’s discourses, would have it. It is striking, for example, that the word “reform”, regarded in both Hungary and abroad as a uniquely applicable to the system, was almost never used in a positive sense by Kádár himself (p.185–86).

In analyzing the essence of Kádárism, Rainer mentions a “Kádárist feeling” (p.146). He claims this derived not only from the sure knowledge that the country was “the best of existing worlds”, but also from the sense that everything could get worse (and only worse) at any time. He uses this as the general explanation for how the new regime managed to consolidate after the bloody reprisals. The author highlights the eponymous leader’s cynicism (p.27), which was perhaps not so much cynicism as the—not necessarily always conscious—recognition of public expectations, the day-to-day bounds of dictatorship and the limitations of rule. The author characterizes Kádár, who openly distanced himself from his predecessors, as not being associated with personal cult (p.200–14). He implies that the party leader’s behavior also contributed to the consolidation of the state system after its violent restoration. The question remains, however, as to how much this consolidation was directed from above and how much it derived from the will and deliberate action of a leader who seemed (and presented himself as) different from the other state-socialist leaders. In the revisionist approach, this could much better be interpreted as a jointly-developed social practice to which the First Secretary adapted than as a compromise between “regime” and “society”.

Individuals do not simply subordinate themselves to state power in a dictatorship, but by their actions they accept, transform and—in their own everyday worlds—even create it. State power to some extent depends on the character and actions of its citizens/subjects. It follows from the work of revisionist historians who adopt Foucault’s concepts of power that we can get close to understanding the system via the collective and individual actions which enable it to operate. Stephen Kotkin claims that “Stalinism was not just a political system, let alone the rule of an individual. It was a set of values, a social identity, a way of life. When it comes to Stalinism, what needs to be explained and subjected to detailed scrutiny are the mechanisms by which the dreams of ordinary people and those of the individuals directing the state found common ground in this Soviet version of the welfare state.”29 The same might be said of totalitarianism in general, and the approach does not actually contradict the essential claims of totalitarianism theories (which link the substance of dictatorship to modern forms of violence) but examines the everyday implementation of totalitarianism and seeks the explanation of the sustained existence of totalitarian systems in the world of everyday life.

What ordinary people actually got from Kádárism, and what compromises or everyday practices confirmed the system’s legitimacy in the Kádár era, are fundamental questions. The discourses of the period hold that the system, starting in the 1960s, created rising standards of living and relative welfare in Hungary (Rainer also mentions the complex relationship between these discourses and everyday realities). Recent research, however (books by Béla Tomka and Sándor Horváth) largely refute this.30 This work no longer looks to the other countries of the Soviet system for a basis of comparison but to Western democratic social policy, whose fundamental aims diverged from those the social system built up in Hungary after 1956. Hungarian social policy was aimed at legitimizing state institutions, the state, and even the social system itself. It was a system which gave no opening for real representation of interests, and especially not public collective representation.

According to Kotkin, what emerged under state socialist regimes was an “uncivil society”. The establishment was the only formation which was a real organized unit (set against unorganized groupings).31 The contemporary elite and bureaucracy, through their organization and their positions within society, thus arranged the systems of distribution to operate according to their interests. The uncivil logic, i.e. the lack of autonomy and solidarity and the imposition of narrow interests ran through not only the old establishment (i.e. top down) but society as a whole (nearly everybody had something to lose). The paternalist policy ultimately proved successful because—until the nineteen eighties—neither the social injustices nor any other cause triggered mass protests.32

Rainer’s book gives us a much more textured account of the Kádár era and the operation of the state socialist system in general than previous approaches, which confined themselves to political history. It challenges the assertions that the Kádár era can be sharply delineated from the Rákosi era and that the system’s internal changes during the period directly led to the political transition. This may encourage us to examine the state socialist system in Hungary as a separate civilization and its operation according to its own rules. If we give up the notion of all-embracing total power, we also have to reject the idea that dictatorship was driven initially purely by violence and later by compromises offered by the regime. Nonetheless, we are left with the question of why the society that was the champion of freedom in 1956 (in its own and the world’s eyes) uniformly accepted—or seemed to accept—the framework and existence of the state socialist system. Viewed from close up, how can we explain the phenomenon Rainer calls the “Kádárist feeling”?

Today, it seems that consolidating state socialism, after the feeling of permanent threat and vulnerability of the period of catastrophe and the Rákosi era, created a kind of peaceful opportunism in Hungary. After 1956, the unalterability of the system (and the need for collaboration/cooperation with the regime) did indeed seem to become a general awareness, or almost a shared attitude to life. A basic question in this regard is whether individual and collective anger against the system existed or could have existed in the Kádár era, and if so, in what form. Another question is how these behaviors relate to the individual and collective behaviors seen in 1956. In my view, two social science concepts could be adapted to interpret the formation and everyday working of Kádárism, and they cannot be understood solely by the theoretical models of totalitarianism.

German historians of everyday life developed a highly influential theory to describe the legitimacy of dictatorships and the effect and significance of individual actions in these regimes. This theory borrows from German literature and philosophy the concept of Eigensinn (“sense of one’s own interests”) to describe the behavior and motivations of the “majority”, i.e. people who were neither enthusiastic disciples nor active opponents of the Nazi or Soviet dictatorships but whose everyday work and passive behavior, by not presenting resistance, helped these systems to build up and endure. The word implies a kind of self-sufficiency and independence; not the free will of free persons, but the will of citizens who can (and do) adapt to various kinds of regime while keeping their own direct interests in view.33 Set against this is the concept of autonomy, the kind of everyday behavior which inhibits the emergence and persistence of totalitarianism and which should, in principle, be typical behavior in a democracy. Whether it is democracy which creates autonomous behavior, and dictatorship which creates Eigensinn and everyday forms of collaboration, or these things happen the other way round, is a complex question, and the perspective of study obviously has a bearing on the answer.

The social sciences, following Nietzsche,34 use the term ressentiment to denote the impotent vengeance and collective passions aroused in ordinary people by unjustly inflicted injuries and expressed in terms of justice or their own sense of “right”. This is violently suppressed resistance, the post-terror condition, the forced renunciation of resistance. At such times, ordinary people—having no defeatable opponent or space for real action—become incapable of resistance. The actions of individuals thus serve purely their own personal interests and act against, and restrict, each other. Today, we do not look back on these individual and collective authoritative behaviors as revealing aspects of the past or points of reference (going back to the pearl-diver metaphor: as pearls or coral), but they may nonetheless have been important driving forces behind the events.

In the Kádár era, the majority were not true disciples of the dictatorship, but neither were they its opponents. As simple citizens, they adapted to it because they were concerned with their own interests. These were the behaviors that may have created “Kádárism” in everyday life. It was in the basic interests of the new regime that the party leadership not be the target of suppressed or repressed resentments, and that people should seek the enemy in invisible forces or external, occupying powers. Nearly every symbolic act of the era’s eponym (who retained a long grip on power) was directed at having the truly suppressed groups of society see him as a man of ressentiment, someone who really was no different from them, the ordinary people, and who represented their interests.35 Totalitarian systems have given rise to innumerable forms of collaboration, and the concepts of terror and resistance in themselves are insufficient to explain them, in Hungary as elsewhere. What made the Kádár era? Very briefly, a social need for it in the prevailing conditions of dictatorship; this is one of the uncomfortable lessons of studying “Kádárism”.

 

Translated by Alan Campbell

György Majtényi

 

Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. By Anne Applebaum. New York: Doubleday, 2012. xxxvi + 566 pp.

 

In 1983, during the Cold War, Milan Kundera coined a new definition of Central Europe as Un occident kidnappé—“the kidnapped West.”36 To the present day, his essay has remained an important contribution to studies of the mental mapping of Europe. This is due to his partly very emotional appeal to regard his Czech homeland as well as Poland and Hungary as a part of a western cultural sphere that is “under the Russian yoke” but nonetheless still belongs to the West. His article, published in the western press, was meant to draw attention to the lands inside the Iron Curtain and to show that they are not a homogeneous and gray terra incognita, but rather have a rich and variegated history and culture of their own.

Thirty years later, a study has appeared that describes and analyzes the act of “kidnapping” or “crushing” of Eastern Europe: The Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum. The American historian and journalist, who is well known for her Pulitzer Prize winning study of the Gulag,37 spent six years collecting archival materials and personal memories of contemporary witnesses. The result is impressive. The author manages not only to tell in clear words the general history of the region after the war,38 but also to convey this history through the individual stories of ordinary people. Since the postwar generation is passing away, Applebaum’s efforts can hardly be overestimated. She conducted a series of interviews in Hungary, Germany, and Poland, and studied the archives of secret police and government organizations. The book is very well researched and I have been able to discover only one factual error: Ivan Maiskii was never a foreign minister of the Soviet Union (Applebaum claims he was, p.XXVIII).

The author begins with the story of how the new socialist regimes were established in Poland, East Germany and Hungary, where socialism à la Moscow was experienced as foreign, if not downright hostile rule. According to Applebaum, one of the main reasons why the new rule of liberators could be established in these countries was because the postwar suffering and distress of the people there caused them to yearn for “normality.”

The imposition of Soviet priorities and Soviet thinking on all three countries (which had gone through a rather nationalistic period in the 1930’s) presented a considerable challenge to the Soviet rulers.39 The difficulty of this task was in turn responsible for the rather undemocratic, violent methods of its imposition, such as making the “Moscow Communists” Mátyás Rákosi, Bolesław Bierut, and Walter Ulbricht top leaders and carrying out acts of political repression in preparation for “elections.” Although Soviet influence was carefully camouflaged, Applebaum manages to reconstruct the mechanisms of how the Soviet Union went about ruling and exerting political and social control in the satellite countries of Eastern Europe.

Applebaum chose the geographic frame of the study not so much to make comparisons between three countries, but to show the common mechanisms involved in how Soviet power was introduced and how interactions between Moscow and the politicians of Warsaw, Budapest and East Berlin took place. She makes clear, too, that there were other institutions throughout Eastern Europe that followed similar patterns: she describes the “class work” of Soviet-taught secret agents (p.68), the Soviet-style organization of loyal youth from kindergartens (p.151–73), and the total control exerted over mass media, where “soviet equipment, soviet transmitters, soviet advisers, [and the] soviet worldview” (p.181) were employed, as well as the construction of socialist cities such as Sztálinvaros, Stalinstadt and Nowa Huta, which were built in Soviet fashion like the Russian Magnitogorsk had been built in the 1930s. However, Applebaum also describes the differences peculiar to each of the regions. There were opponent players as well, such as the Catholic Church in Poland or the Petőfi Circle in Hungary. In the case of Poland, the ruling party officially tolerated regime opponents. The most moving example is that of Boleslaw Piasecki, who turned from the extreme right to the extreme left. As a former member of the Home Army, he wasn’t punished by the regime, as were most of his comrades, and he was even able to found Pax in 1952 as a paradoxically loyal opposition Catholic Party (p.408). These kinds of “deviations” would have been impossible to imagine in Soviet Russia during the Stalinist era. It is therefore legitimate to ask if we can speak of political and social life in Eastern Europe in terms of totalitarianism, the conceptual approach that Applebaum uses in telling her story.

Applebaum claims to “gain an understanding of real totalitarianism—not totalitarianism in theory, but totalitarianism in practice, and how it shaped lives of millions of Europeans.” (p.XXXVI). This is a crucial feature of Applebaum’s study: for her, the conception of totalitarianism is a “useful and necessary empirical description” (p.XXIV) of postwar Eastern Europe. In her study, the understanding of the totalitarian state is that of a regime that aspires to total control: due to this, she uses the term totalitarian to analyze methods and techniques of total control that were exported from the Soviet Union after the war (p.XXIII–XXIV). According to the classic totalitarian school of the 1950s,40 the totalitarianism model means excluding society and people from the analysis. The main topic of Applebaum’s book is—quite the contrary—precisely the role personality played in the postwar socialist systems: she describes her book as being about “how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes, how they collaborated, how and why they joined a party, how they resisted, actively or passively […]” (p.XXXVI). The use of a totalitarian model is problematic even in the case of Soviet Russia,41 and even more so in Central Europe—it should more properly be used to describe ideology. Regarding this period of history in Central Europe, it would be more precise to speak of authoritarian dictatorships rather than totalitarian societies. Apart from this theoretical problem, Anne Applebaum’s study nonetheless remains an intelligently conceived work containing an encyclopedic wealth of details, and it is written with considerable empathy for those who lived through the period in question.

Applebaum levies a harsh verdict regarding the attitude of “ordinary people” towards the Soviet mentality: “human beings don’t acquire ‘totalitarian personalities’ with such ease.” (p.461). Her explanation of why “ordinary people coped with the new regime” is that they depended on the state and their “circumstances were not dramatic.” (p.393). In this way, Applebaum raises a core question for historians and social-anthropologists, but also for those who lived through the period: did ordinary people really live “double lives” and become adjusted to a double way of thinking? Or did they adopt the rules of thinking and speaking, the rules of Foucauldian discourse? The answer is left to the reader.

The author gives us examples of people who consciously adopted the discourse of socialist reality. One women says of the Party Song, “that song, ‘the party, the party,’—we thought it was really the truth, and we behaved that way.” (p.387). Here Applebaum departs from totalitarianism as a theory and seems to share some of the views of revisionists regarding the “rapid social mobility” (p.392) that brought the possibility of social promotion for many young workers.42

One of the recurring themes in Applebaum’s study is the way violence was used to establish loyal societies. Despite the large-scale expulsion of local populations from almost all regions of Eastern Europe (multiple migrations) and politically motivated purges, governments went about establishing Soviet-style camps, often at the sites of former Nazi concentration camps. According to the author, the aim of the Soviet camps was to frighten people and to prevent dissent, and not to punish (p.108). This point must be regarded critically. First, conditions in the Soviet Gulag were much more inhumane than they were in the German postwar camps. Applebaum’s source, Wolfgang Lehman, maintains that the opposite was true (p.105), but as we know, human memory is not reliable. Second, the people in the Speziallager were not necessarily innocent: some of them had taken part in the mass murder programs of the Third Reich as lawyers or doctors, and many of them returned to their civilian professions after imprisonment, which lasted a number of years.43 Denazification is of course not the topic of Applebaum’s study, but this should have been mentioned in order to make her discussion more nuanced.

In the book one rarely finds the stories of convinced Communists, apart from the top leaders of the Communist Party, such as Bierut, Rákosi and Ulbricht. For some of them love and loyalty to Stalin was fatal: Bierut died of a stroke or a heart attack after he heard Khrushchev’s destalinization-speech, while Rákosi was “rescued” by Moscow in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising and banned to Kyrgyzstan, from where he never returned to his homeland.

However, Applebaum describes a very striking phenomenon in the circles of the intellectual elite: some of them tried to “transform” themselves into “New Men.” One such example was Max Lingner, the artist and painter of the mural Aufbau der Republik, the man who “wanted to conform [...] and went through a kind of psychological transformation.” (p.342). His story seems to be typical of those who had sympathies for communism but despaired at the permanent feeling that the state had total control over the artist’s work (while working on the mural Lingner was publically criticized by Otto Grotewohl, the prime minister of East Germany).44 Nonetheless, Lingner tried to “transform” himself into the New Man who is a “thinking and acting Bolshevik” by engaging in the practices of self-criticism and self-discipline.45 This point is remarkable because it demonstrates how people outside the borders of Soviet Russia, using the same practices of “soviet subjectivization” as the Russians, learned to “speak Bolshevik.”46

All over Eastern Europe there were well-known, talented artists who praised Stalin: Wisława Szymborska in Poland, Salomea Neris in Lithuania, Konstantin Simonow in Russia and many others. Some of them were later ashamed of this and deleted these poems from their anthologies, some remained proud of it. Just what motivated them to do so remains a fascinating question.

Applebaum’s study also touches on the important topic of the memory of the socialist period. Applebaum’s sources not only demonstrate that people were often uncritical regarding the past, as indicated by the fact that they reproduced the official rules in their recollections, but that they even cherished feelings of nostalgia:

Julia Kollár remembers her stint at the construction site of Sztálinváros as “a happy time.” In addition, the author describes a phenomenon that almost all researchers of communicative memory encounter: that the people who experience injustice and pain at the hands of a system avoid talking about these topics because they were taboo not only in public, but also in the private, family sphere. One such case is that of Elisabeth Brüning, who insisted at first that she didn’t know about the violence perpetrated by Red Army soldiers, but after some time told the author what she had really experienced. This demonstrates clearly how traumatized people attempted to erase traumatic memories by forgetting, a strategy that has been described well by Aleida Assmann and Paul Ricoeur.47

Applebaum’s book is structured around contrasts highlighting the discrepancy between propaganda and reality: the erection of “ideal socialist cities” at the industrial sites of Stalinstadt, Sztálinváros, Nowa Huta and the realities of alcohol abuse, venereal disease, political apathy and catastrophic housing; the drive to exceed quotas by using shock workers and the low quality of the production and the economic harm that ensues (p.319); the propagation of literacy and the massive emigration of many specialists to the West because of their unwillingness to take responsibility for teaching false ideals to their children (p.308).

Applebaum tells the story of socialist rule in Eastern Europe as a story of failure. The resistance to the system, the unwillingness to “live within a lie” (Václav Havel) resulted not only in such more or less harmless forms of opposition as wearing “jampi” [dandy]- shoes48 or telling political jokes, but also in tragic ones, as for example exile for the East Germans or suicide (see, for example, the moving story of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Lili Hajdú Gimesné (Lily Haidu-Gimes in Applebaum’s book) (p.394–96).

The socialist “brave new world” did not collapse until 1989, but the seeds for this collapse had already been planted in the crushing of Eastern Europe—a process that was violent, inhuman and full of failures. Applebaum’s study documents the extent of this failure in a clear and compelling way.

 

Ekaterina Makhotina

The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958. By Mark Pittaway. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. ix + 386 pp.

 

Who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes, and if you do, what consequences can you expect? How does a system craft legitimacy, and where are the limits of power? How did the Communist Party in Hungary manage to win, in addition to the support of Soviet tanks, the support of a significant proportion of the Hungarian population, without actually having to use force in every case? How did they manage to convince people of the myth that the Communists were building the best of all possible worlds, the workers’ state, and how did they shatter this very myth? Mark Pittaway, a historian who staked out his place in Hungarian and international historiography as a legal scholar dealing first and foremost with the working class of the socialist era (and who died tragically young), seeks answers to these important questions.

The posthumously published monograph by Mark Pittaway (1971–2010)49 is the result of fifteen years of research. I first met Pittaway in 1995 in the Trade Union Archives in Rózsa Street, Budapest. He was sitting behind a wall of boxes containing documents and studying innumerable piles of dusty papers. After having completed his bachelor’s thesis on Venice at the time of the Renaissance, he entered the doctoral program at the University of Liverpool, where he pursued an interest in the history of the working class in Hungary. For many people working in or around the archives in the Hungarian countryside, this Englishman was something of an exotic rarity. He was one of the few non-Hungarian historians who learned Hungarian to a high degree of proficiency and, after having read the relevant Hungarian secondary literature, did original research in archives very far from the beaten track. His monograph is based on a remarkable wealth of sources and his pioneering manner of approaching the subject does a great deal to compensate for methodological lacunae in the secondary literature. But his contribution is valuable first and foremost because of the model he adopts, which rejects the totalitarian paradigm (which has become so prevalent in contemporary historiography), a model he was among the first to introduce with his narrative of the history of the Hungarian working class in 1944–1958.

The essence of this model lies in the fact that the totalitarian state, which in general is depicted as omnipresent and omnipotent, is merely one of the agents of history, and one the tools of which are in fact surprisingly limited. From the perspective of legitimacy, the attendants of the system (ranging from the secretary general to the average party member) influenced the prevailing attitudes towards the state (whether is wins acceptance or not) no more than the masses who, in the totalitarian paradigm, are depicted—misleadingly—as powerless and oppressed. In Pittaway’s narrative the process of the creation of the socialist state is one of the most important questions, and it is closely intertwined with the question of how the authorities prompted or persuaded Hungarian society to accept the new rules on which the system rested.

The question of the treatment of the working class became one of the most important elements of the legitimacy of the Communist Party after World War II, very much like the use of nationalist rhetoric.50 Pittaway considers it important to note that the socialist system itself never gained legitimacy (p.4). Yet many of the motifs of the creation of the socialist state were accepted, and they gave some legitimacy to a system that used force. Furthermore, the possibility of the use of force became a norm in many cases. In other words while the socialist regime was not necessarily seen as legitimate, neither was it seen as diabolically evil by many, however unpleasant this may be to admit in hindsight.

The monograph cautiously (sometimes overcautiously) guides the reader through the story of the creation by Communist politicians who enjoyed minimal support of a party of the masses that had palpable support among workers, to the detriment of the Social Democratic Party. And later, as a dramatic continuation of the story, the same politicians rapidly lost this support on the national and local levels when they began to create the “workers’ state” (to which Pittaway refers ironically in his title) by introducing “the building of the socialist system,” the “rationalization” of production, and the system of quotas. After 1956, in the new social climate, the regime under the leadership of János Kádár was again compelled to use tools to win legitimacy, since it was not possible to work and wield power in everyday life with minimal support in the shadow of tanks or at “gun point.”51 In contrast, according to the totalitarian paradigm, the state used, first and foremost, force to exert its power over workers in heavy industry. In 1956 Hungarian society (especially the workers) rose up against the regime, and this was met with new repressive measures.52 The totalitarian paradigm suggests, inaccurately, that no one in the large industrial cities voted for the Communists of his or her own volition in 1945 and 1947 and that no one was in fact a party member. It suggests that the Communist idiom was used by members of society only as a response to the orders of the regime and only by people who sought in ever larger numbers to promote their own individual interests.

Pittaway’s approach is refreshing not only because of its novelty in comparison with the totalitarian paradigm, but also because it sheds light (on the national and local level) on the process whereby the Communist Party managed, through the use of populist rhetoric, to gain credibility and then to lose it entirely. The new system after 1956 owed its relative stability not only to the Soviet tanks, but also the “subjects” who as agents of history themselves influenced the rules of the game in everyday life. It is particularly worthwhile to emphasize the interpretation of 1956 according to which, from the perspective of the politicians involved, the Revolution can be seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy, and not simply as an uprising. From this perspective the motives and the roles played by Communist politicians in 1956 are more comprehensible, as are the functions of the workers’ councils as negotiators in the course of the reprisals and the consolidation of the Kádár system. In this story, the workers’ councils were not bastions of a self-organized revolutionary force that was realizing self-government among workers,53 but rather the vehicles of an attempt to further the legitimacy of the Kádár regime, an attempt initiated both from above and below. Thus they offer a perspective from which to discern the consolidation of the Kádár system not simply from below, but also from the viewpoint of the negotiations and compromises that were made at the local level. In Pittaway’s narrative, they have a similar function to the trade union committees of 1945: their stories shed light on how the new system was able to win acceptance on the shop floor. In this interpretation, the trade union committees and the workers’ councils did not represent “union democracy” or “workers’ self-government.” Rather, the Communists used them to promote acceptance of their goals among workers in heavy industry in 1945 and the fall of 1956.

There is a long tradition of historical and sociological scholarship on workers in heavy industry in Hungary.54 Though the subject has not been given much attention among scholars since the change of regimes in 1989, over the course of the last decade more and more historians have begun to study it in part because of the influence of Pittaway’s contribution.55 His was not the first such study to examine the endeavors of the Communists to win legitimacy among workers in the region.56 Pittaway continuously reflects on the theses that can be found in the international secondary literature on the subject, and his monograph reinterprets and enlarges on the conclusions of E. P. Thompson’s fundamental work on the creation of the English working class.57 He is thoroughly familiar with the subject, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote a separate comparative volume on the social history of the socialist bloc that has become obligatory reading at universities throughout the world and one of the best summaries of the postwar history of the region.58 He boldly and confidently transgresses the borders established by political history. For instance, in his assessment in many of the social processes in Eastern Europe World War II did not constitute a caesura, and he traces with similar confidence the threads of continuity and discontinuity in the social history of the working class. According to Pittaway, 1945, 1948, and 1956 constituted pivotal moments only to the extent that they prompted changes in the political views of the workers of Újpest, Tatabánya, or Zala County. Thus, paradoxically his book also examines how the Kádár system came into being, the antecedents to it, and the processes whereby it was able to consolidate its power (and from this perspective 1945 and 1947 were as much antecedents as 1953).

Pittaway does not attempt to establish consensus in the debates regarding the debates on modernization,59 nor does he bother attempting to reconcile the oppositions of the “movements” of “political” and “social history”. He puts these debates in parentheses. He examines simply the fluctuating legitimacy of the Communists and the system and the ways in which actors at various levels of power and in various social spaces influenced one another. The subject at hand (political support, or lack thereof) can be understood as political history, but in the course of his study Pittaway uses all of the methods and sources that a social or cultural historian would use.

The task Pittaway sets for himself is not easy. Even the question of the precise meaning of the term legitimacy can be problematic, not to mention the issue of how one can use sources that for the most part were produced by the regime itself to assess the amount of support it actually had in the factories. For this reason, the study of the limits of power and the various forms of support requires new tools. Anyone who knew Pittaway may well be surprised by the methodological rigor with which he constructs his narrative. He read an enormous amount about the living conditions and everyday lives of the working class in Hungary, but the reader can glimpse this vast knowledge only through the very small, carefully selected stories he provides. A serious task demands a serious scholar. The monograph is not the work of Mark, who loved to recount captivating stories of the working class, but rather Pittaway, the highly disciplined scholar, who writes with none of the irony or humor so distinctive of Mark. It is a dramatic story without catharsis in which every anecdote has an important function.

The form of the narrative, which is told chronologically and is set in three different industrial(izing) settlements (Újpest, Tatabánya and Zala county), enables Pittaway to portray the reactions of the workers as rational. At the beginning of each chapter he describes the political context in Hungary, which presumably is largely unfamiliar to the average non-Hungarian reader, and then goes into the “depths,” the factories and the workshop floors. Újpest, which had a long history as an industrialized settlement, Tatabánya, which had grown administratively to absorb nearby mining colonies and had been elevated to the status of a city, and Zala county (and within Zala county the area around the city of Letenye), which had only begun to serve as a home to the oil industry but was otherwise largely dependent on agriculture, provide in and of themselves an opportunity for comparison. As the narrative progresses, it seems to have a diverse array of implications, and the theses are so logical that at times it is almost disquieting.

The differences between imagined industrial workers (the notion of the worker as used in the idiom crafted by the Communists) and real industrial workers are always present in Pittaway’s analyses. He cites a 1958 report of a party committee to make these differences palpable. At the dawn of the Kádár era, when, given the significant rise in wages and the arrests, hardly anyone in the factories in the city would have considered going on strike, Lajos Kelemen, a party secretary in Kőbánya,60 openly contended—no doubt to the astonishment of many—that the emperor had no clothes, for the workers, the workers’ state was alas not the best of all possible worlds. “Part of the working class simply doesn’t agree with us. They just do not accept this system.” (p.14) His words were recorded, and they were met with replies. But Kelemen was not punished, rather his statement was used to further the consolidation of the new system. For a time the king acknowledged that he had no clothes, which considerably increased his credibility. The legitimacy of the Kádár system rested to a great extent on its efforts to distance itself from the Rákosi regime, which from the perspective of the hardships faced by the industrial working class meant that after 1956 the origins of every problem were traced back to the early 1950s. Indeed it may well have seemed that Kádár himself had risen to power in order to break with the past and see that justice be done.

The first chapter of the book begins in March 1944 with the occupation of the country by the German army and narrates the case studies that took place in the three regions up until November 1945, examining what the workers themselves sought (primarily stability) and what they were given or at least hoped to be given by the Communists (and this differed in each of the three areas). Pittaway’s approach sheds light on methodological problems as well, since the historian is compelled to reply for the most part on the minutes of party meetings, official reports regarding the prevailing mood (hangulatjelentés), and newspaper articles when drawing conclusions —tentatively—on the expectations of workers. In any event Újpest seems to have been the only place—and not because of the Újpest partisans (p.31)—where communism was not perceived simply as an exotic import brought by the Soviet army. In the case of Tatabánya, in contrast, Pittaway traces the first successes of the Communists back to the power vacuum left after the fall of the Arrow Cross. In Zala, a county consisting largely of small villages that had been particularly hard hit by the pillaging of the Soviet soldiers, the Communist Party had little chance of any similar attainments. A picture begins to emerge of the workers as a class that was politically active during the war. Disinterest in politics was rare among workers who, some decades later, would sometimes have to explain to their descendants what the word “strike” meant (though it’s true that in the meantime workers had found other means of holding back production).61 The book offers illuminating comparisons of why the Communist rhetoric, which hammered in the notion that the Communists had arrived as liberators, was received differently in each of the three places in question and how the workers’ strikes in the summer and autumn of 1945, soon before the elections, influenced people’s assessments of the party.

According to Pittaway, the elections that were held in November 1945 shattered the Communists’ illusion that they would rise to power without any kind of transition and with the backing of the Soviets. After the elections, the Communist Party was compelled to make proposals to the working class that would help it win their support. However, whether or not a political party enjoyed support depended not on the promises it made, but rather on its credibility. The results of the 1947 elections were more favorable for the Communists specifically because they found themselves in the opposition in 1945. The voters of Tatabánya or Újpest did not have more faith in the Communists because the Communists had made enticing promises, but rather because the governing parties, which had a penchant for populist pledges, were not able to make good on their promises. On the local level, members of the social democratic party were seen as people who were close to the institutions of power (pp.67–8). This enabled the Communist Party to win considerable support in industrial districts in 1947. Pittaway does not explain this as a consequence of national political developments. He does not characterize the period between 1945 and 1948 as an attempt to create a state founded on the rule of law, but rather as years in which the Communists used populist tools to attempt to win support for their goals among a segment of society. In his assessment, the decisions of viewers were influenced by local experiences and circumstances on the shop floor (rises in wages, a strike, a local demonstration, for instance on May 1, 1946 in Újpest, when the Hungarian Communist Party and the Hungarian Socialist Democratic Party together managed to mobilize 25,000 people). At the same time, there is still room for further research. Pittaway analyzes the election data on smaller settlements, but he does not attempt to explain why the differences were so striking between individual villages (in the case of the county of Zala) and parts of the city (in the case of Tatabánya). As is the case with the results of the 1947 elections, these differences cannot be explained simply as a result of voter fraud.

The third chapter (which examines the period between 1947 and 1949) may well give rise to numerous differences of opinion among Hungarian historians who are debating the significance of 1949, a year often regarded as a turning point. The title of the chapter (Social Roots of Dictatorship) is in itself provocative, since it implies that the dictatorship was not simply an aberrance that was concocted in the witch’s kitchen of the Communist Party and imposed by the Soviets. Pittaway examines the measures that were taken in order to win some social support in the course of the creation of the dictatorship. Through the use of populist rhetoric, the party managed to gain acceptance for the appointment of workers’ directors and the nationalization of factories (which according to the Communists had been ruthless exploited by the capitalists and had finally found trustworthy caregivers in the state) without even having to rely on the State Security, effectively the secret police (pp.86–8). One could mention, for instance, the “potato crisis” in Tatabánya, which involved a strike that broke out in Tatabánya because of the shortage of potatoes (which in the 1950s were one of the primary foodstuffs). In the course of the strike the local organization of the Hungarian Communist Party blamed “speculators” (implicitly “Jewish speculators”) for the shortage. With nationalization and this anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Hungarian Communist Party managed to gain significant support in Tatabánya.

This political popularity disappeared rapidly, however, when the workers found themselves in the world not of visions and promises, but rather of economic measures adopted by a party, the Communist Party, that found itself compelled to increase economic efficiency. On the level of the factory floors, the greatest conflict was caused by the introduction of a system of wages based on the Soviet model, which on the local level meant the end of populist communism (though it did not prevent the reproduction of class hierarchy). A mining accident in Tatabánya on December 30, 1950 that was caused indirectly by measures taken to increase production had a permanent effect on attitudes towards the Rákosi system in the community (p.130). The most interesting and most valuable parts of the book are Pittaway’s analyses of the similarities and differences between the three areas, Újpest, Tatabánya and Zala. He reveals differences in micro-communities that for the most part would remain indistinct, homogenous masses in macro-analyses, for instance the industrial working class itself, the different layers of which have been ascribed with varying significances in the creation of the socialist system.

László Varga and Gyula Belényi have already studied the conflicts between the “new,” “transitional” workers62 (rural, young, often female) and the old, trained workers in Hungary.63 Pittaway’s monograph, however, is the first work of scholarship to examine how, after 1956, the Kádár government was compelled because of these conflicts to establish legitimacy for itself in an entirely new social milieu, as well as the tools it used in the service of this goal. Pittaway touches on sensitive questions. The workers of Újpest who on October 23, 1956 radicalized the demonstration by the youth (p.209) and later took active part in the organization of the workers’ councils were among the first to be given raises in 1957. In 1957 workers’ wages were increased by 18 percent (p.233), although this in and of itself was not adequate to ensure support for the Kádár system among a significant segment of the working class. According to Pittaway, the answer to the question of why the government was not compelled on May 1 to use the workers’ militia to get workers to participate in the parades and why János Kádár himself did not fear an attempt on his life during the celebrations lies in the shrewd mix of the official rhetoric and a politics focused on standards of living.

Mark Pittaway’s monograph occupies a place of distinction not only in the scholarship on the political engagement of the industrial workers in Hungary, but in the research on the history of the industrial workers in Europe. It situates the attempt to create Socialism in Hungary in an international context and thus provides a point of departure for further comparative study. Pittaway’s research, work that spanned a decade and a half, has revitalized scholarship on the subject, which had been increasingly marginalized in the historiography.64 In all likelihood his monograph will influence research on the lives and experiences of industrial workers, who represented the largest social bloc and whose living conditions should therefore be in the forefront of scholarship on the era, for decades.

 

Sándor Horváth

 

Notes on Contributors

Apor, Péter (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Bajcsi, Ildikó (Eszterházy Károly College, Eger), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Bottoni, Stefano (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Csaplár-Degovics, Krisztián (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences),
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Egry, Gábor (Institute of Political History, Budapest), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Halink, Simon (University of Groningen), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hermanik, Klaus-Jürgen (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Graz),
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Horváth, Sándor (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Laczó, Ferenc (Imre Kertész College, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena),
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Majtényi, György (Eszterházy Károly College, Eger), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Makhotina, Ekaterina (Department of Eastern European History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich),
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Szarka, László (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Varga, Bálint (Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Waters, Leslie M. (College of William and Mary, European Studies),
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Zombory, Máté (Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

1 A more detailed review in Hungarian is Máté Zombory, “A bűnös és az áldozat, avagy a posztkommunizmus totalitárius nyelve” [The Perpetrator and the Victim, or the Totalitarian Language of Post-Communism], James Mark: The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe,” Budapesti Könyvszemle 24, no. 2. (2012): 112–18.

2 See Péter Apor, “Eurocommunism: Commemorating Communism in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. Bo Strath and Gosia Pakier (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).

3 On this see e.g. the January 2012 edition, no. 29 of Theory, Culture & Society.

4 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).

5 Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

6 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2006).

7 See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Jeffrey C. Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 5–85.

8 The most crucial Hungarian historians dealt with the Croatian history: Endre Arató, Kelet-Európa története a 19. században [The History of East-Europe in the Nineteenth Century] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1971); László Bíró, A jugoszláv állam 1918–1939 [The Jugoslavian State 1918–1939] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2010); László Katus, “A nemzetiségi kérdés és Horvátország története a 20. század elején” [The Nationality Question and the History of Croatia in the Early Twentieth Century], in Magyarország története, vol. 2 of 7, ed. Péter Hanák (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1978); Gyula Miskolczy, A horvát kérdés története és irományai a rendi állam korában. [The History of the Croatian Question and Its Writing in the Period of the Estate State], vols. 1–2. (Budapest: MTT, 1927); Emil Niederhauser, A nemzeti megújulási mozgalmak Kelet-Európában [National Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1977); Imre Ress, Kapcsolatok és keresztutak [Connections and Crossroads] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2004).

9 Imre Ress, Kapcsolatok és keresztutak, 120–21.

10 Cf. Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung: Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution (Munich: Oldenbourg,,2001).

11 Cf. Viktor Novak, “The Slavonic-Latin Symbiosis in Dalmatia during the Middle Ages,” The Slavonic and East European Review 32, no. 78 (1953): 1–28.

12 It follows from the foregoing that according to the writer of this review the pope of Duklja is neither part of Croatian nor Serbian history, he belongs to the history of Duklja.

13 József Demmel, “Egész Szlovákia elfért egy tutajon…” Tanulmányok a 19. századi Magyarország szlovák történelméről [The Whole of Slovakia Fit on a Raft: Studies on the Slovak History of Nineteenth-Century Hungary] (Pozsony: Kalligram, 2009).

14 See László Csorba, A tizenkilencedik század története [The History of the Nineteenth Century] (Budapest: Pannonica, 2000): Štúr is mentioned as the organizer of Slovak cultural life in the 1840s, but his activities during and after the 1848 revolution are not addressed (p.111). In a standard book in Hungarian university education, András Gergely, ed., Magyarország története a 19. században [The History of Hungary in the Nineteenth Century] (Budapest: Osiris, 2003), Gergely interprets Štúr’s activities as unrealistic, lacking popular support, and in fact contributing to Viennese neo-absolutism (p.248).

15 The heyday of the Štúr-hagiography was the 1950s and 1960s, marked by the publication of Štúr’s correspondence, books and pamphlets (the most important: Jozef Ambruš, ed., L’udovít Štúr: Dielo v piatich zväzkoch [The Works of L’udovít Štúr in Five Volumes] (Bratislava: Slovenské vydavateľstvo krásnej literatúry, 1955–57). The Marxist canon was fixed in 1956, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Štúr with a representative conference: L’udovít Štúr: život a dielo 1815–1856: sbornik materiálov z konferencie Historického ústavu Slovenskej akadémie vied [L’udovít Štúr: Life and Works, 1815–1856: Proceedings of a Conference of the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences] (Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied, 1956). An uncritical and hagiographic attitude was present in the Western emigration, too (Jozef Kirschbaum, L’udovít Štúr: and His Place in the Slavic World (Winnipeg: Slovak Institute, 1958). The first critical attempts were published as late as the 2000s (a thematic issue of the journal OS, no. 1 (2007).

16 Josette Baer, Revolution, Modus Vivendi or Sovereignty? The Political Thought of the Slovak National Movement from 1861 to 1914 (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2010).

17 Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

18 Alexander Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and Accidental Nationalism (London: Tauris Academic Series, 2009).

19 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

20 Pierre Nora, “Entre Mémoire et Histoire. La problématique des lieux,” in La République, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 1 of Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), XVI–XLII.

21 The author defines the concept of narration as follows: “Narration is a discursive practice which is not identical to text: the utterance has a bodily-material dimension, and the narration localizes not only in time, but also in space” (p.84).

22 After all, these practices construct ethnic homelands within the nation-state territory and national homelands outside the nation-state, which however, in a manner equivalent to the nation-state ideal, are externally delimited in space, homogenized internally, and rooted in the soil (p.287).

23 Hannah Arendt, “Epilogue: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution” in idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 480–510.

24 Bill Lomax, Hungary 1956 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); Bill Lomax, ed., Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956 (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1990). For the latest criticism of this view, see Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 230–56.

25 András Papp and János Térey, “Kazamaták,” Holmi 18, no. 3 (2006): 292–383.

26 Éva Tulipán, Szigorúan ellenőrzött emlékezet. A Köztársaság téri ostrom 1956-ban [Closely Observed Memory. The Köztársaság Square Siege in 1956] (Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 2012).

27 “Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages.” Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., Illuminations, essays by Walter Benjamin (New York: Schocken, 1969), 50–51.

28 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 498.

29 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23.

30 Béla Tomka, Welfare in East and West: The Hungarian Welfare State in an International Comparison, 1918–1990 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003). Béla Tomka: Szociálpolitika a 20. századi Magyarországon európai perspektívában [Social Policy in Twentieth-Century Hungary in a European Perspective] (Budapest: Századvég, 2003); Sándor Horváth, Két emelet boldogság. Mindennapi szociálpolitika Budapesten a Kádár-korban [Happiness on Two Storeys. Everyday Social Policy in Budapest in the Kádár Era] (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2012).

31 Stephen Kotkin (with a contribution by Jan T. Gross), Uncivil Society. 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009).

32 Horváth, Két emelet boldogság, 242.

33 On the Eigensinn concept, see Alf Lüdtke, “Geschichte und ‘Eigensinn’” in Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Münster: Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, 1994), 139–53.

34 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969). The historical adaptations of the concept: Robert C. Solomon explains the English expression resentment as always being directed to people of higher rank, anger to those of the same rank, and contempt to those of lower rank. Robert Solomon, “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 95–126. In one of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s essays, following Arno Mayers’ study of revolutionary violence—Arno Mayers, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)—she analyzes the role of vengeance and ressentiment in the Russian Revolution, by which she means the four decades of Soviet history following 1917. This ascribes the main driving force of the series of events labelled “the revolution to the resentment of everyday people. The collective anger of the mass was directed at the bourgeois elites at the beginning of the revolution, the Russian intellectuals in the late 1920s, the Communist administrative elite (or bureaucracy) by the late 1930s, and the Jews by the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution,” French Historical Studies 24 (2001): 579–88.

35 An adaptation of the concept of ressentiment to the Kádár era: György Majtényi, Vezércsel. Kádár János mindennapjai [Queen’s Gambit. The Everyday Life of János Kádár] (Budapest: Libri Kiadó–Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár, 2012).

36 Kundera Milan,  “’Un occident kidnappé’ ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale,” Le Débat 27, no. 5 (1983): 3–23.

37 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: a History (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

38 There have been many studies devoted to the particular regions, but no study that takes up the challenge of providing a broader, more general perspective (p.XXXIV).

39 The mental dispositions of the societies had been affected by the nationalist or even fascist values of the postwar societies of Eastern Europe. Applebaum mentions this example by referring to anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland and Hungary (p.138–39).

40 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958); Zbygniew Brzezinski and Carl Joachim Friedrich, “Die allgemeinen Merkmale der totalitären Diktatur,” in Wege der Totalitarismus-Forschung, ed. Bruno Seidel and Siegfried Jenker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 600–17.

41 See the discussion by Stefan Plaggenborg, “Die wichtigsten Herangehensweisen an Stalinismus in der westlichen Forschung,” in Stalinismus. Neue Forschungen und Konzepte, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Spitz, 1998), 13–33.

42 Cf. in particular, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); idem, “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” Russian Review 45 (1986): 357–83; as well as Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: a study of collectivization (New York: Norton, 1975 [1968]).

43 Cf. Bettina Greiner, “Der Preis der Anerkennung. Zur Debatte über den Erinnerungsort der Speziallager,” in Instrumentalisierung, Verdrängung, Aufarbeitung. Die sowjetischen Speziallager in der gesellschaftlichen Wahrnehmung 1945 bis heute, ed. Petra Hausstein, Annette Kaminski, Volkharg Knigge, and Bodo Ritscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 114–32; Petra Haustein, “Geschichte im Dissens. Die Auseinandersetzungen um die Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen nach dem Ende der DDR,” in Instrumentalisierung, Verdrängung, Aufarbeitung, ed. Hausstein et. al., 133–48.

44 “The painter had not understood the importance of industry to the development of socialism […]” (p.341).

45 As has been described by researchers of Soviet subjectivity, see Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The diary of Stefan Podlubny (1931–1939),” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 344–73; Idem, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

46 Cf. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Oleg Kharkhordin, Obličat’ I licemerit’. Genealogija rossijskoj ličnosti [Expose and Hypocrisy. Genealogy of Russian Identity] (Saint Petersburg: Evropejskij universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2002).

47 Cf. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 218; Paul Ricoeur, La memoire, l’historie, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

48 This form of protest through fashion was used to demonstrate unwillingness to conform to totalitarian reality. In Hungary this meant wearing shoes that resembled American sneakers (jampec shoes), in Poland there were bikiniarze, and the juvenile subculture in East Germany had so-called Halbstarke.

49 The book was already in preparation at the time of Pittaway’s death. The final revisions and editing, without which it could not have been published, were done by Nigel Swain.

50 Cf. Martin Mevius, Agents of Moscow: the Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism, 1941–1953 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

51 See Gyula Kozák and Adrienne Molnár, eds., “Szuronyok hegyén nem lehet dolgozni!”: válogatás 1956-os munkástanács-vezetők visszaemlékezéseiből [“You Can Not Work at Gun-Point!”: A Selection from the Memoires of Leaders of the 1956 Workers’ Councils] (Budapest: Századvég–1956-os Intézet, 1993).

52 Cf. Gyula Belényi, Az állam szorításában: az ipari munkásság társadalmi átalakulása Magyarországon, 1945–1965 [In the Vice of the State: The Social Transformation of the Industrial Working Class in Hungary, 1944–1965] (Szeged: Belvedere Meridionale, 2009).

53 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958); Bill Lomax, ed., Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956 (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1990); Bill Lomax, Hungary 1956 (London: Allen and Busby, 1976); Tamás Krausz, “Az 1956-os munkástanácsokról” [On the 1956 Workers’ Councils], Eszmélet 18, no. 72 (Winter 2006): 32–38.

54 Miklós Lackó, Ipari munkásságunk összetételének alakulása. 1867–1949 [The Transformation of the Composition of our Industrial Working Class] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1961); György Litván, ed., Magyar munkásszociográfiák [Hungarian Workers’ Sociographies] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 1974); István Kemény, Velük nevelkedett a gép [The Machine was Reared with Them] (Budapest: Művelődéskutató Intézet, 1990); Gábor Gyáni, Bérkaszárnya és nyomortelep: a budapesti munkáslakás múltja [Tenement Building and Slum: The History of Workers’ Lodgings in Budapest] (Budapest: Magvető, 1992); László Varga, Az elhagyott tömeg: tanulmányok 1950–1956-ról [The Abandoned Crowd: Studies on 1950–1956] (Budapest: Cserépfalvi–Budapest Főváros Levéltára, 1994).

55 Belényi, Az állam szorításában; Sándor Horváth, László Pethő and Eszter Zsófia Tóth, Munkástörténet, munkásantropológia [Labor History, Labor Anthropology] (Budapest: Napvilág, 2003); Eszter Zsófia Tóth, “Puszi Kádár Jánosnak”: munkásnők élete a Kádár-korszakban mikrotörténeti megközelítésben [“Kisses for János Kádár”: The Lives of Working Women in the Kádár Era, from the Perspective of a Micro-historical Analysis] (Budapest: Napvilág, 2007); the special issue “Labor of Postwar Central and Eastern Europe” of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History 68, Fall (2005); and among the most recent works: Eszter Bartha, Alienating Labour: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).

56 Two important works that influenced Pittaway in his choice of topics: Alf Lüdtke: Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitserfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. (Hamburg: Ergebnisse-Verlag, 1993); Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

57 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963).

58 Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London: Arnold, 2004).

59 Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism. On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54 (2006): 535–55.

60 Kőbánya was a traditionally industrial district of Budapest.

61 Cf. Lajos Héthy and Csaba Makó, Munkásmagatartások és gazdasági szervezet [Worker Behavior and Economic Organization] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1972).

62 On the “transitional types of workers” see László Pethő, “A vidéki munkásság antropológiája” [An Anthropology of the Rural Working Class], in Paraszti múlt és jelen az ezredfordulón [Peasant Past and Present at the Turn of the Millennium], ed. Miklós Cseri, László Kósa, and Ibolya T. Bereczki (Szentendre: Magyar Néprajzi Társaság–Szentendrei Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2000), 423–42.

63 Belényi, Az állam szorításában; Varga, Az elhagyott tömeg.

64 See the special issue of the International Review of Social History. Marcel van der Linden, ed., The End of Labour History? 38, no. 1 (1993).

 

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