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

2020_3_Book reviews

Volume 9 Issue 3 CONTENTS

BpdfOOK REVIEWS

Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas. By Tatjana N. Jackson. Amsterdam: ARC Humanities Press–Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 228 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.556

The series, Beyond Medieval Europe (published by ARC Humanities Press), targets topics previously neglected in Anglophone scholarship which are related to the history of the peripheries of medieval Europe. In this regard, Tatjana Jackson’s new book, her first in English, is a big success, as it presents what people on one edge of the continent, medieval Iceland, knew about the other fringe, Eastern Europe. Jackson is one of the leading Russian experts on medieval Scandinavia and its relations to the Early (or Old) Rus’, and she offers now a reworked and updated version of her findings previously published for the most part in Russian. The title of the book, Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas, is a little misleading, as it mostly discusses information pertaining to ninth-eleventh-century Rus’, whilst one would expect to find details in the book about other territories too, such as Poland or Hungary, even if these territories feature less frequently in the Old Norse Icelandic corpus.

Jackson begins with an introductory chapter on her aims, sources, and methodology (pp.1–17). The book is then divided into two major parts, the first and longer of which presents the place of Eastern Europe (actually modern-day European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in geographical terms) in the Old Norse worldview (pp.19–114), while the second focuses on the stay of four Norwegian kings in Old Rus’ (pp.115–70). The research questions in both parts are clearly formulated: what do the Old Norse sources reveal concerning knowledge of Eastern Europe, and how much of this information is historically reliable? Given the nature of the source material, namely that the Icelandic sagas usually describe events from the Viking Age (or earlier) but were committed to parchment only beginning in the twelfth century (and most were written down in later centuries), the methodology section is indispensable for an understanding of the whole argument.

Jackson introduces the three main types of sources of which she makes use: skaldic poetry, sagas, and runic inscriptions. Of these, the first two receive the most attention. Skaldic poetry was usually produced by eyewitnesses or first-hand informants, and due to its metrical complexity, it hardly changed until it was written down in later centuries and thus is usually regarded as authentic. Sagas, on the other hand, are viewed today with much criticism as historical sources due to their literary nature, the fact that they were recorded significantly later, and the fact that their authors included narrative interventions (or least to the consensus in the secondary literature). According to Jackson, the early kings’ sagas, written down before the great compendium of 1220–1230, preserved authentic knowledge of the ninth-tenth-century Scandinavians about the geography of the “east” in the form of place names and navigable river routes. The later sagas, however, continued to rely on the ninth-century and early tenth-century conditions when describing events in Eastern Europe (simply copying the earlier compendium) and did not follow up on the southward advancement of the Scandinavians. In Jackson’s view, this explains why places names such as Kiev (Kænugarðr in the sagas) do not receive prominence in the sagas and Novgorod (Hólmgarðr) is displayed as a capital of the Rus’.

The first part of the book vividly illustrates with a sound handling of the source material how information was transmitted and could change shape (media) during its formation from orality to literacy. More importantly, it shows that the Icelandic sagas reveal details about Eastern Europe left unmentioned in other documents. We learn that Ladoga’s presentation in the sagas as a possible toll and control station where foreigners were checked and safe conduct was issued was a remnant of historical memory, as was Polotsk’s strong fortress and defense system.

In the second part, the logic of applying the methodology twists a little. The Russian sources make no mention of the four Norwegian kings who visited Rus’ (Olaf Tryggvason, Olaf Haraldsson, Magnus Olafsson, Harald Sigurdarson). Jackson, however, feels that their presence in Rus’ cannot be cast into question, since it was confirmed by the skaldic poets. It would thus be inconceivable that they did not travel to Rus’. However, any other information in the sagas which is not confirmed by skaldic poets (Jackson suggests) is either falsification or the projection of later medieval conditions on the Viking Age. Thus, the goal is not really to squeeze out every useful bit of information from the sagas (as in the first part), but to call into question anything from the prose narrative which is unconfirmed by contemporary reports. Jackson questions saga accounts with rigorous source criticism and demonstrates how the great influence and deeds of a “later-Norwegian king abroad” are exaggerated by saga authors.

Jackson notes that in a few cases not all information found in the sagas is unreliable (e.g. Harald Sigurdarson’s stay and activity in Rus’, such as his use of Jaroslav the Wise to bank his amassed Byzantine wealth). I would suggest that by less strict with her methodology, Jackson would have had even more positive results. First of all, skaldic poetry was usually produced precisely to meet the demands made by the kings (and always with the intention of praising the ruler) and thus should not be taken at face value. The magical healing skill of Saint Olaf’s body as recorded in skaldic poetry (p.137) is just one example of overstatement. Second, skaldic poetry was not produced about every event in a saga. This does not mean that every detail of a political history in a saga is de facto a fabrication. The details may not always be accurate, but sagas often present what we call “potentially believable stories,” i.e. situations which probably occurred Even if it is not possible to link them, on the basis of other sources, to a precise person or situation . In this regard, I would not immediately dismiss the possibility that a Scandinavian warlord was exacting tributes (or mustering forces) among the Chuds for a tenth-century prince in Rus’, nor would I see Olaf Tryggvason’s imprisonment as a reflection of fear from thirteenth-century Estonian pirates (pp.121–23), especially since the slave childhood of a future Norwegian king hardly adds anything to the “building-up” of a glorious character and thus could easily have been omitted by a saga author had it not been a well-known fact to other contemporaries.

These critical remarks notwithstanding, the book is a welcome contribution both to the wave of studies which aim to illuminate the Eastern sphere of the continent and to the branch of sagas studies that turns back to the historical reality behind this literature. Although its specialist nature possibly makes it a hard read for scholars untrained in Old Norse philology, Jackson’s work reminds us of the value of consulting Russian scholarship when dealing with Icelandic sagas and the Vikings.

Csete Katona
University of Debrecen

Účtovné registre Bratislavskej kapituly 1417–1529 [Account registers of the chapter of Bratislava, 1417–1529]. By Rastislav Luz. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 2018. 288 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.559

Historians usually approach the history of the medieval ecclesiastic chapters by using the prosopography, focusing on the personnel of the chapter, and drawing on the methods used in archontology. These methods and the findings they yield are no doubt valuable. However, to understand the ecclesiastic chapters entirely, historians should also study their economic and administrative systems. In this sense, the sourcebook edited by Rastislav Luz constitutes a significant contribution to the secondary literature. A young Slovak archivist and a doctoral student at the Comenius University of Bratislava, Luz has published the transcribed account registers of the medieval chapter of Bratislava. It was published as a first book in the framework of the series Documenta Posoniensia. As Luz explains in one of the chapters of the book, the transcription of these sources is not a simple task. Since the registers were subsidiary documents which were usually disposed of immediately after they had fulfilled their purpose, this directly reflected on the way in which the canons fashioned them. They were thus written in the Gothic cursive script, which is difficult to read, and many abbreviations were used, though not uniformly. Even the way in which the registers were bound and folded makes them difficult to read. The book itself consists of two main parts. In the first part (pp.15–51), Luz deals with the chapter of Bratislava and its personnel. He also describes the fond of the chapter of Bratislava in the Slovak National Archive, where the sources he transcribed are kept. Furthermore, he gives a short paleographic and diplomatic analysis of the registers. To make the study of the accounts easier, he has included a chapter on the monetary system which appears in the registers. In the second part (pp.53–242), he presents the transcription of the thirty-three account registers. In the end, the edition includes an index of the names (pp.245–58), places (pp.259–68), items (pp.269–83), and items that appear in German (p.284). The chapter of Bratislava was a collegiate chapter. Its personnel ranged from 10 to 15 canons in the late Middle Ages (the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century). The specificity of the chapter’s personnel was that two canons of the chapter were the rectors of the parish churches in Bratislava. Though the chapter was small, it owned large estates and had the right to collect different incomes, from census and tithes to tolls and parish fees. This led to the development of an elaborate administrative system which relied on written account registers for more efficient administration. The chapter divided the incomes into communal, individual, and those belonging to the provost. The mention of the oldest register, which is not preserved, is from 1400. However, Luz presumes that the account registers had begun to be written earlier, around the second half of the fourteenth century, when the whole institution became more bureaucratized. The canon who supervised the incomes and expenses and wrote the registers was the dean. He had to present the accounts two times a year, on St. George’s Day (April 24) and St. Michael’s Day (September 29), after which the canons distributed the incomes among themselves. The thirty-three account registers which Luz has transcribed in this edition cover the period from 1417 to 1529. Luz put the registers chronologically, but they are not continuous, since not all of them were preserved. Luz endeavored to keep the original distribution of the text as much as possible. He also kept the Roman letters for the numbers and abbreviations for the currencies. The canons originally wrote all the registers on paper, and Luz was able to identify 24 different handwritings, indicating that they were written by 24 different people. The account registers list the incomes and expenses in the span of one or two years and the distribution of the incomes among the canons. The expenses could be both communal and individual. Those could be money for travel, transportation, collectors of the tithe, gifts, lunch, shows of hospitality, new clothes, etc. Since the registers are not uniform, some list all the elements and some only list the expenses. The most significant change noticeable in the inventory management is that from the second half of the fifteenth century, the dues were also paid in kind, not just in money. Accordingly, some of the inventories also list the inhabitants who gave the dues, while the earlier registers note only the amount of the due given for the whole settlement. All in all, historians can use the account registers transcribed by Luz with confidence in further historical analysis. To list just several possibilities: the everyday life of the canons, the social history of the chapter, the administrative and economic system of the chapter, the trends in economic production, environmental history, e.g. the system of dams and fishing on the estates of the chapter. Finally, this edition also makes possible comparative analyses of similar material from different European ecclesiastic chapters.

Petra Vručina
University of Zadar

Media and Literature in Multilingual Hungary (1770–1820). Edited by Ágnes Dóbék, Gábor Mészáros, and Gábor Vaderna. Budapest: Reciti, 2019. 285 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.561

Media and Literature in Multilingual Hungary (1770–1820) presents the proceedings of a conference held under the same name in April 2018, organized by the Momentum Research Group Literary Culture in Western Hungary, 1770–1820 (Institute for Literary Studies of the Research Centre for Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). The volume is bilingual, with the contributions written either in English or German. The eighteen studies comprising the book reflect the various research interests and goals of the Research Group, making it clear to the reader the study of the culture of historical western Hungary at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitutes an academically relevant if challenging scholarly endeavor.

After the Holy League defeated the Turks in 1687 and thus brought the more than 150-year-long dominance of the Ottoman Empire in Hungary to an end, the Habsburg Monarchy (which had ruled the western third of the country since 1526 as a result of a marital contract with the Jagiellonian dynasty) felt entitled to claim the liberated Hungarian territories. The end of the seventeenth century thus marked another turning point for Hungary, with Austria extending its political power over the country and adding another layer to its already immensely rich culture. It was during the reign of Maria Theresa that the Age of Enlightenment (ca. 1750–1820) came, and new ideas swept through Hungary. As Gábor Vaderna explains in the introductory study of the volume (“Language, Media and Politics in the Hungarian Kingdom between 1770 and 1820”), this era was characterized by remarkable cultural innovation, which brought about the strengthening of Habsburg Hungary both as a political and as an economic power in the region. Development naturally triggers institutional changes, one of which was the expansion of the press and its synergy with other literary media. The period witnessed the emergence of new journalistic genres and the specialization of the press: alongside the conventional economic and political newspapers, readers now had access to scientific periodicals covering specific disciplines. As the press enabled greater accessibility to information, new types of readers and reader behaviors appeared, as did novel forms of editorial attitudes and strategies. Interestingly though, these changes were fueled by the interests of the aristocracy, in part simply because the bourgeoisie was virtually nonexistent in Hungary at the time. In other words, as the smallest yet most privileged and dominant social class of the country, the aristocracy made it possible for the literate population to access information.

One can see from this brief overview that the political and cultural atmosphere in Enlightenment Hungary was peculiar by European standards and, at the same time, unique in that it represented great diversity. The principal aim of the volume is to investigate how media developed and functioned in multilingual and multicultural western Hungary in the approximately fifty years of this period. Such complex research calls for the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. It is therefore natural, if not necessary, that the contributions to this volume focus on the different aspects of life on which the revolutionization of journalism left its mark. The major themes covered in the volume include cultural development (generalization of information, periodicals, and dictionaries), regional outlooks (Croatia, southern Slovakia), language planning, political journalism, literary criticism and publishing, and, last but not least, religion.

Cultural development and the foregrounding of Hungarian identity were tightly connected to the promotion of Hungarian dictionaries and Hungarian-language periodicals. The question of language choice was particularly important in a country in which the official language of administration and education was Latin and German was starting to take over this role. There was an increasing need to write and publish in Hungarian and to balance out the dominance of Latin and German in the media. István Fried’s study, entitled “Mehrsprachigkeit in den ersten Jahrzehnten der ungarischen Zeitschriftenliteratur” examines multilingualism in the press in western Hungary in relation to nationalist movements and language planning endeavors in the 1810s. He concludes that multilingual publishing promoted the use of Hungarian and the spread of knowledge in the regions which were parts of historical Hungary. In a similar vein, Réka Lengyel (“The Newspaper as a Medium for Developing National Language, Literature, and Science”), Margit Kiss (“Magyar Hírmondó and Dictionary Proposals”), and Eva Kowalská (“Die erste slowakische Zeitung Presspurské nowiny zwischen Journalismus und Patriotismus”) all highlight the importance of disseminating information in the vernacular in the strengthening of national identity. The rise of nationalism in the non-Hungarian speaking regions of the kingdom is further discussed in Suzana Coha’s discussion of journalism in the Croatian territories (“History of Journalism in the Croatian Lands from the Beginnings until the Croatian National Revival”).

Language planning went hand in hand with a desire for cultural revival. It is thus no surprise that Hungarian intellectuals were striving to enable the broader diffusion of Hungarian cultural and scientific products. Gábor Vaderna emphasizes József Péczeli’s (1750–1792) merits in organizing intellectual life in Komárom (today Komárno, Slovakia) and publishing Mindenes Gyűjtemény, which is considered by many as the first Hungarian scientific journal (“Möglichkeiten der Urbanität in der ungarischen Zeitschrift Mindenes Gyűjtemény”). Further contributions made by, among others, Rumen István Csörsz (“The Literary Program of István Sándor and the Periodical Sokféle [1791–1808]”), Olga Granasztói (“The Paper Hazai Tudósítások and the Beginnings of the Cult of Monuments Through the Lens of Ferenc Kazincy’s Articles [1806–1808]”), and Béla Hegedűs (“Literary History as an Argument for the Existence of Literature. Miklós Révai’s Call in Magyar Hírmondó and Költeményes Magyar Gyűjtemény”) all provide evidence of the fervent and productive cultural work that was taking place among the Hungarian upper circles at the time. Speaking from a more literary perspective, Piroska Balogh gives an account of the emergence of critical journalism at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Katalin Czibula reflects on German-language and Hungarian-language theater criticism in western Hungarian newspapers. Norbert Béres presents the most frequent distribution strategies of novels (“‘Roman, und was besser ist, als Roman.’ Über die Vertriebsstrategien des Romans”), providing insights into advertising and selling literature as a form of cultural product. Ágnes Dóbék takes a glance at how the western Hungarian press viewed European journalistic practices, and András Döbör analyses political articles by pro-Enlightenment publicist Sándor Szacsvay in “Magyar Kurír” (Sán­dor Szacsvay’s Un­der­world Dia­lo­gues as Po­li­ti­cal Pub­lic­isms in the 1789 Year of the Enlightenment-Era News­pa­per Ma­gyar Ku­rír”). From a more Austria-focused perspective, Andrea Seidler investigates the presence of the imperial couple in the Preßburger Zeitung, a German-language newspaper in Bratislava (Pressburg, the capital city of today’s Slovakia), published twice a week from 1764 (until 1929). The final contribution to the volume, Zsófia Bárány’s “Catholic and Protestant Union-Plans in the Kingdom of Hungary between 1817 and 1841,” provides insights into the emergence of what we today call “public opinion” in relation to religious tolerance and freedom in the region.

The versatility of the papers published in Media and Literature in Multilingual Hungary (1770–1820) bears testimony to the complexity and richness of the subject. Through close and detailed examination of how the press evolved and functioned in western Hungary in the fifty years that were crucial to the unfolding of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the region, one can understand the role the press played in the wide distribution of knowledge and the promotion of national identity. With its illuminating contributions, the volume serves as a helpful source of information for any scholar or student venturing into this vast territory of Hungarian cultural studies.

Csenge Aradi
University of Szeged

The Secular Enlightenment. By Margaret C. Jacob. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. xi+339 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.565

The concept of secularization is without doubt one of the most paradoxical notions within eighteenth-century and Enlightenment studies. Although the notion of secularity and the Enlightenment seem to make strange bedfellows, secular tendencies, such as profanation and laicization, have been widely disputed phenomena in early modern scholarship. As far as the history of the concept is concerned, it should be noted that, alongside the predominant ecclesiastical interpretation (canon law), the eighteenth century witnessed a significant expansion in the semantics of the notion. Therefore, secularization and the notion of secularity became counter-concepts of religious life and tended to describe both the distance from monastic life and those persons who were freed from vows and lived at liberty in the world (Cyclopædia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 1728, vol. 2, 45). In this respect, this semantic extension per se covers two approaches with regard to the Enlightenment. First, it stands for a religious movement which, in the course of the eighteenth century, became more and more profane by putting religious sentiment in the background. Second, it is identified with the stance of the so-called “High Enlightenment,” which by no later than the mid-eighteenth century had irrevocably distanced itself from the religious and spiritual Weltanschauung. From among the two diffuse interpretations, The Secular Enlightenment seems to choose the second path. The position of the author on this matter is clear. Jacob, however, tends to see enlightened secularism as also having had religious sources, and her book only aims to register the shift when this religious agenda gave place to a secular setting.

Margaret C. Jacob (University of California) is one of the few prominent scholars who has made significant contributions to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment in the past half century. Jacob’s view expressed in this book seems to synthesize her results in the volumes on Newtonianism (1995, with Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs) and Enlightenment Radicalism (1981). In her book published in 2019, she attempts to provide a panoramic account of the secular tendencies of the Enlightenment. From a historiographical point of view, Jacob’s perspective, on which she reflects in the Prologue (p.5), can be taken as a fresh addition to the ongoing debates (David Sorkin, John Robertson) on Enlightenment modernity. The Secular Enlightenment is in multiple ways connected to this traditional historiography forged by leading historians, such as Peter Gay, Franco Venturi, Daniel Roche, and John Marshall.

First, it upholds the “radical thesis,” which proclaimed that the Enlightenment project fundamentally impacted the cultural, social, and political basis on which modernity was built. However, Jacob seeks to find the balance between the religious initiations and the social and political circumstances. Second, in the Epilogue (pp.263–65), Jacob attributes to the notion of the “secular Enlightenment” a long-lasting impact on the twentieth-century European and American liberal project of democracy when she claims that, “[w]here enlightened principles survived the repression of the 1790s and beyond, democracy had a greater chance of emerging.”

As for the roots of these intellectual initiatives, Jacob’s central question is concerned with the redefinition of the narrative of secularization by displaying the transition from the religious antecedents to the secular period: “The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones” (p.1).

In addition to the historiographical implications, Jacob lists other arguments central to the thesis throughout the eight chapters. The first three chapters explore how human life changed in the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 (“The Setting: Space Expanded and Filled Anew”) focuses on the question of how, beginning in the seventeenth century, colonial experience reshaped the existing narratives on the role of God’s providence and “celestial and terrestrial” reality. In the new intellectual setting, space tended to lose its Cartesian conceptualization and became neutral, parallel to the expansion of the new language of Newtonian physics. Chapter 2 (“Time Reinvented”), using the well-known cultural historical thesis and personal examples (such as the example of the Huygens family), aims to renegotiate how the expansion of material culture and technological improvements laid the groundwork for everyday materialism by profoundly altering the perception of biblical and religious time. As a consequence, the perception of time multiplied and secular punctuality became predominant, while “[t]he Christian meaning of time remained, but like predestination, millennial time seemed less and less relevant” (p.52). Following this logic, Chapter 3 (“Secular Lives”) pays attention to the scope of ordinary people. It offers glimpses into the cacophony of small and unheard voices of the literate, represented by freethinkers, industrialists, travelling booksellers, scholars, religious and sexual heretics, and unnamed producers of erotic poetry, pornography, and other genres of forbidden literature. By using personal and unpublished sources, in this chapter Jacob aims to provide a comprehensive account of the wider social foundations of secularity.

In the remaining five chapters, the Enlightenment is portrayed as a collective project which had its own entangled geographical and cultural characteristics. Concentrating on these geographical and cultural differences, each part discusses one of the most virulent European centers (Paris, Edinburgh, Berlin, Vienna, Naples, and Milan) between the 1700s and the caesura of the 1790s. As far as the themes are concerned, the scope of the chapters is very broad; they cover a wide variety of topics, including economic, moral, theological, political, and scientific quarrels. The leading principle behind these chapters is that the emergence of enlightened ideas was confused everywhere in Europe, though at the same time it was inseparable from secular(ized) sentiment. Although Jacob’s goal is to retell the “well-known” topoi in a subversive way by adding pieces of information that go beyond the narrow thematical frame, the orientation towards the great names and the philosophical and theological debates remains a persistent feature of her analyses. The thematical blocks, however, appear to stand on their own and to resist comparison. Thus, the case studies, even though they represent the depth of the author’s knowledge impressively, seem to lose sight of the latest findings in the scholarship on the Enlightenment.

Chapter 4 (“Paris and the Materialist Alternative: The Widow Stockdorff”) places the Francophone Enlightenment in the contexts of anti-royalism, Anglophone political literature, and natural scientific discourses shaped by materialist ideas. According to Jacob, secularism in the French Enlightenment was preoccupied by a set of vibrant political and social visions which were debated extensively in unofficial literature. Therefore, the radical ideas could find expression “more commonly in cities rather than in the countryside” (p.89). Chapter 5 (“The Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh”) depicts a more balanced and sophisticated image of the Scottish tendencies. As Jacob argues, the beginning of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1690s was rather hesitant. In contrast to French radical sentiment, the lack of forbidden literature and the alliance between the moderate Presbyterian clergy and the university elite proved to be constitutive throughout the century. Here, the secular framework was equivalent to discussing a set of issues (such as literary works, agriculture, manufacturing, politeness, social progression, Newtonian science, and the participation of women in society) in front of a wider audience.

Chapter 7 (“Berlin and Vienna”) with its almost fifty pages aims to extend the scope of the investigation to the German-speaking lands by outlining the developments from the post-Westphalian intellectual climate to German idealism. Here, the two most substantial assets advancing secularization were the advanced university culture and the widespread anti-scholastic sentiment. Thus, as Jacob argues, in the early Enlightenment, more attention was paid to theology and religion than in France or Scotland (p.159). The search for “secular freedom” had a significant impact on the later philosophies represented by the prominent thinkers of the High Enlightenment, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant, and Herder (p.166).

Chapter 7 (“Naples and Milan”) brings further arguments into negotiating the Italian experience, where secular tendencies appeared to have met the need for pragmatic reform. As the cases of eighteenth-century Naples and Milan exemplify, the enlightened vision could be channeled via the cultural transfers of experimental physics, political economy, and anti-tyrannical literature, into the Catholic scholastic mindset in various forms. As for the reform of agriculture and the penalty system, they were unquestionably connected to social and political needs.

As the title indicates, chapter 8 (“The 1790s”) provides an outlook on how the French Revolution impacted the Enlightenment. By accepting the conventional explanation that the Enlightenment came to an end with the French Revolution, Jacob offers glimpses into the variety of reactions to the French tendencies, such as the Irish rebels, the distant supporters of the Revolution, the members of secret societies and masonic lodges, and the rejection of the Low Countries and German-speaking lands. Although the chapter begins with an evocation of the Romantic vision when, for the vast majority of people, it seemed like “everything could be questioned, rethought, reimagined, and even lived in new and unprecedented ways” (p. 237), it portrays an incomplete victory over enlightened secularism. This dramatization of the revolutionary sentiment has its purpose, as the earlier reviews have already pointed out, but many notable developments which would have merited more attention have been left out of the book.

While Jacob’s scholarly experience, which draws on American, Scottish, English, Dutch-Belgian, German, French, and Italian narrative and archival sources, is impressive, the book focuses mainly on a conventionally Western-centered canon, and it fails to reflect on the experiences of the enlightened peripheries, such as Northern Europe (the Swedish and Danish Kingdoms), the Iberian peninsula, and East Central Europe (Austria, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Russia). The disproportion is the most visible in chapter 6, in which the assessment of Habsburg absolutism is restricted to the culture of the masonic lodges and Mozart’s Zauberflöte (p.172–78). Apart from these, Jacob’s book takes the secular experience as evidently accessible in the context of the eighteenth century but pays no attention to the conceptual and contextual concerns that may make the notion of “secularity” less apt for historical analysis. Jacob’s distinctly secular view implies that the progress of secularism as a Western-born phenomenon which became closely related to enlightened sentiment proceeded from the late sixteenth century onwards, contributing to the development of a set of seemingly “modern” questions, the effect of which on nineteenth-century modernization is hardly deniable.

All in all, The Secular Enlightenment is a thought-provoking collection of ideas, which provides an impressive account of the secular tendencies of the eighteenth century which were most substantial to the intellectual movement. Jacob guides her readers with considerable confidence and compassion over a set of topics which demand serious attention even from experts. Thanks to her elegant and fluent prose, the book reads easily. Merely with its choice of subject, the book merits scholarly attention, and Jacob approaches the topic in a way which will lead to constructive debates on the field.

Tibor Bodnár-Király
Eötvös Loránd University

“Kedves Hazámfiai, mozdulni kell...” Georgikoni peregrinatio oeconomica a 19. század elején [“Dear fellow countrymen, we must move...” The technological journeys of Hungary’s first college of farming in the early nineteenth century]. By György Kurucz. Budapest: Corvina–Ráday Gyűjtemény, 2020. 303 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.570

The practice of international travel went through exponential growth from the early to mid-sixteenth century, but it was perceived as dangerous and frivolous by many intellectual authorities. In order to provide a framework for a possible practice of useful travel, a specific genre emerged in the second half of the century: ars apodemica, normative texts aiming to shape the “art of being abroad.” Young men were to be exposed to the dangers and temptations of foreign travel and to invest both time and extensive resources (their own, their family’s or their sponsors’) only if a clear benefit was in sight. A beneficial travel experience had a dual goal: service to the state and development of the self. Personal development itself was only an intermediary step towards service to the state: thanks to individual’s experience abroad, the state would gain a trained and experienced specialist able to fill crucial roles. Within the development of traveling practices over the following centuries, a key novelty was the emergence of new entities which completed and modified this schema. Service to the supranational Republic of Letters, learned societies, and particular institutions could complement or, indeed, replace the idea of traveling in the service of the nation.

György Kurucz’s monograph tackles one such case, drawing on a corpus of international significance. The Georgikon school of agricultural studies of Keszthely, founded and directed by members of the Festetics family, was an institution of European importance. In order to keep up with innovations abroad and to maintain essential interpersonal and scholarly networks, the school regularly sent students and also staff on European trips. The book tackles the most extensive of these expeditions, the 1820–1825 peregrinatio oeconomica of two teachers, physician Pál Gerics and horticulturist József Lehrmann, using the large amount of materials in diverse genres (instructions, journals, reports, correspondence) resulting from these trips. One of the strongest features of the book is the careful distinction between these various writings: Kurucz is careful to consider which text targeted which audience.

Finding a format that does justice to the practice discussed and acknowledges the work that remains to be done must have been a difficult task. The structure of the book is one possible solution. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sketches the immediate local and national intellectual context, followed by a chapter (which offers a welcome range of international parallels) on the genre and practice of instructions for travel. A central chapter describes the journey step by step, helpfully complemented by maps of the itinerary of the two scholars (who sometimes traveled together and sometimes parted ways) on the inner cover at the beginning and end of the book. The last two chapters shed light in particular on two types of interactions and experiences at various stages of the journey: Chapter 5 provides an excellent summary of all things related to innovation in agriculture and related fields; Chapter 6 tackles what relates to the human experience of such a journey. The book comes to an end with a quick conclusion which mostly highlights the extensive work yet to be completed.

While this structure is logical, I was left uncertain about some of the editorial decisions regarding the length of the various chapters. The central chapter, which presents the trip itself, stands out. It is a 96-page behemoth, without any subchapters, giving a quick summary of every stop the travelers made. The subsequent chapters provide a more detailed analysis of the main centers of interest at various stages of the trip (agrarian innovations and the human aspects of travel). Since these survey chapters are present, would it not have been possible to shorten (or even do away with) the central chapter and to extend the chapters which contain analyses? Particularly the last chapter on the human element (described here as “sentimental journey,” a term I do not necessarily find appropriate) flits a little too quickly through multiple topics, including meetings and networks, infrastructure, and curiosity concerning politics and religion, etc. Breaking up chapters into subchapters would have increased the book’s readability, as would have a more extensive index featuring key subjects at the end of the book. The volume is richly illustrated with relatively contemporary illustrations of the places visited and some key persons. These illustrations provide some sense of “getting closer,” but ultimately, they remain only decorative; at times the link between the illustration and the text is tenuous.

While the surviving material is of exceptional depth, the trip taken by Gerics and Lehrmann has some parallels. Chapter 3 explores comparisons of a range of instructions for and practices of travel. To complement this, I would suggest two additional paths to be explored for further research. One of these paths revolves around schools, and especially schools of technical education, to which both teachers and advanced pupils regularly traveled: by the late eighteenth century, this had become regular practice in the cases of two major French schools of engineering, the École des Ponts et Chaussées and the École des Mines. Another possible comparison would be the tradition of instructions for “patriotic” travel, or in other words journeys which were expected to serve the improvement of the nation (and, ultimately, humankind) through the scientific knowledge gained by the travelers. This corpus grew out of two traditions discussed in the book, that of travel instructions issued by learned societies and the Göttingen tradition of traveling methodology; however, it went even further in developing a meticulous methodology of observation, often using tables of observation. The best-known example is Moravian aristocrat Leopold Berchtold’s influential An Essay to Direct and Extend the Enquiries of Patriotic Travellers (London, 1789), considered a “total” methodology of travel.

The work on the Georgikon traveling practices clearly merits further exploration. Some aspects of these practices would be of interest to historians of agriculture, while others would be of interest to historians of education, intellectual historians, and specialists on travel. Kurucz’s monograph attempts to cater to all these audiences at once, and even to the general public, as shown by its use of illustrations. This ambition comes with some challenges. Nevertheless, the volume is a fitting tribute to the major endeavor it presents, and its findings should be shared with an international audience.

Gábor Gelléri
Aberystwyth University

Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multicultural Space. By Surman, Jan. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2019. 460 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.573

A revised and updated version of his doctoral dissertation Habsburg Universities 1848–1918: Biography of a Space (University of Vienna, 2012), Jan Surman’s new book is an ambitious study of universities as spaces of knowledge, multilingualism in the Habsburg Empire, and changing landscapes and networks of academic mobility in Cisleithania in the long nineteenth century. The book follows a chronological structure while engaging with a multi-layered thematic framework which draws on historiographical traditions and debates in the history of science and knowledge, the spatial turn, and imperial history, making an important contribution to understandings of the history of the Habsburg Empire. Surman’s work will surely be of interest to scholars in these fields, as well as to readers interested in the history of education, migration, and nationalism.

While the title indicates that the narrative will focus primarily on the period between 1848 and 1918, Surman takes a broader view, exploring the transformations of what he calls “imperial academic space” (p.3) from the late eighteenth century to the afterlife of the empire in the late 1930s. He starts with an introduction of the Habsburg academic landscape of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, when universities were seen as institutions which made civil servants rather than scholarship, and the production of “real” scientific knowledge in the empire took place in other spaces, such as museums, botanical and zoological gardens, clubs and associations, libraries and other (state) collections. 1848 is identified as a turning point for Habsburg universities in Chapter 2, when new agendas emerged and universities were reorganized under Minister of Education Leo Thun-Hohenstein. Surman argues that Thun saw science as a panacea for the various problems, national and social, of the Habsburg composite state: universities were part of an agenda of imperialism, and the new policies aimed to create universities which were positive towards the monarchy and furthered the idea of German linguistic and cultural superiority. At the same time, Surman calls for a more nuanced view of the 1850s and the changes it brought forth, pointing out that the matter of university autonomy remained a central point of debate. He also argues against the forced Germanisation discourse in earlier historiography. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 consider the transformation of the intellectual geography of Cisleithania from the 1860s as a consequence of the implementation of university autonomy, with a particular focus on changes to the language of instruction at universities across the empire. These chapters focus on changes to imperial, regional, and local academic landscapes, academic hierarchies, academic mobility and migration, and scholarly identities across three main language spaces: Czech, German, and Polish. Surman maps a network of tensions around issues of language, education, scholarship, and identity, pointing to parallels and differences in, for instance, Bohemia and Galicia, and he shows that there were definite similarities, for example, in Czech and Ruthenian language activism from the perspective of political stability. At the same time, these spaces developed very differently, as shown through examples of disciplinary diversification, patterns of academic mobility and exchange, and the stabilization of the institutional hierarchy, with Vienna at the top. The question of identity is explored further in Chapter 6, which considers the experience of being an “Other” at Habsburg universities, with a focus on the role of religious denomination in academic advancement in a context of increasing anti-Semitism, Catholic anti-modernism, and nationalism. Finally, the last chapter moves beyond 1918 and explores the pervasiveness of the Habsburg system in the successor states, not only through the survival of personal connections and scholarly entanglements, but as a consequence of the fact that prominent universities (Cracow, Prague, Vienna) had already been acting according to national geographies before the war.

Surman defines the Habsburg Empire as a “linguistically divided but still culturally entangled scientific space” (p.279). The engagement with the concept of entanglement (or multiple entanglements, in fact) is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Surman focuses on the productive nature of multiculturalism, which, he argues, outweighed monoculturalism and nationally oriented intellectual retreat. In this sense, when he argues that language change and linguistic plurality did not lead to the dissolution of the empire, he is very much in conversation with recent revisionist histories of the Habsburg imperial space and imperial Austria in particular. The originality of Surman’s book is in that it depicts the Habsburg Austrian university sphere as a moveable, dynamic environment, in which universities were part of an agenda of imperialism, even if, at the same time, they also pursued their own, autonomous agendas. This is illustrated, for instance, through the question of language equality: the book shows that these agendas could be very different in Bohemia and Galicia, two of the book’s most important case studies, but as Surman argues, one cannot understand processes in one without looking at the other.

Space and its limits/limitations is one of the central themes that runs through the narrative as Surman maps the parallel transformations of the academic and imperial landscape. There are multiple, overlapping spaces under the lens here, both vertically and horizontally: Surman quotes Theodor Mommsen as saying that “Habsburg scholars are sentenced to Chernivtsi, pardoned to Graz, promoted to Vienna” (p.154), showing that the institutional and academic hierarchy in the Habsburg Empire was inseparable from imperial symbolic geography. The limitations of the academic space are also demonstrated through the analysis of academic appointments and scholars’ careers outside universities, with Surman crafting a nuanced picture of career insecurity and the role of untenured and unpaid university instructors. Privatdozenten (unsalaried university lecturers) are identified as key victims and, at the same time, important pillars of the Habsburg imperial academic landscape. They constituted a precarious teaching force which, for the most part, worked for no pay and which, through the work the members of this teaching force did outside universities, made an important contribution to local and urban developments. Another instance where the significance of multidirectional spatiality is made clear is when in Chapter 6 Surman writes about the anti-Semitism of academic participation and appointments, delineating the “invisible ghetto walls” and glass ceilings that affected Jewish scholars horizontally and vertically.

Language is another key theme used by Surman to argue that Habsburg universities were both spatial and imperial projects. The book uses the question of language use in university education and research to address various tensions in the empire, not only in terms of how nationalism affected academia at a more universal level, but also down to the more particular questions of local sciences or disciplines, such as the development of regional historiographies. Surman identifies changes to the language of instruction as a particular turning point, and he shows that it affected not only demands for language equality, but also the intellectual geography of the empire, its regions, and cities. Chapter 5 examines these processes through comparative analysis of the appointment processes in Galicia and Bohemia, looking at linguistic and geopolitical aspects of how the universities in Cracow and L’viv sought Polish-speaking professors, while Prague looked to appoint Czechs from the 1860s in a different fashion. Ultimately, the book convincingly argues that while science was, and remained, an overall universal enterprise for Habsburg scholars, pursuing it in the national language was seen as essential for national development, as the use of the national language in the sciences was seen as serving and securing loyalty to the national cause.

A meticulously researched work based on extensive archival research in an impressive number of languages and countries, the book offers detailed and nuanced analysis of the source material. In addition to several tables offering statistical evidence about academic salaries, appointments, and other social patterns of university life (including the percentage of professors’ offspring who entered the professoriat), the narrative is also interspersed with some well-placed anecdotes. As Surman states himself in the introduction, the book would have benefitted from more attention to women (or rather, the virtual absence of women) in the Habsburg academic system, and, as evident from the title, Hungary is largely missing from this history of a Habsburg multilingual university space. This criticism notwithstanding, the book shows remarkable range in its coverage and analysis, and it is a significant achievement for the history of science in Central Europe.

Katalin Stráner
University of Manchester

Slovutný pán prezident. Listy Jozefovi Tisovi [Your Honor, Mr. President: Letters to Jozef Tiso]. By Madeline Vadkerty. Žilina: Absynt, 2020. 228 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.577

Since the struggles and debates over the memory of World War II and the Holocaust have not come to an end in most of the countries concerned, including Slovakia, the German position concerning its allegedly exclusive responsibility for the Holocaust has become an obstacle not only to independent scholars, but also to the society which needs to confront its own troubled history and its own responsibility. While the Holocaust was exclusively a German plan, as Jan Grabowski correctly claims, the Germans found many willing allies and enablers. Thus, the Slovaks too should take responsibility for the acts of the Slovak authorities, the Hlinka Guards, and collaborators who helped facilitate the deportation of tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to their deaths. The Holocaust in Slovakia happened smoothly in large part because the local representatives and populations participated. And among those who represented the whole regime responsible for the destruction of the Slovak Jewry was Jozef Tiso.

There are not many Slovak personalities who are more controversial than Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest and president of the wartime Slovak Republic. While every serious academic research has proven his role and participation in the Holocaust in Slovakia, nationalistic sentiment tends either to rehabilitate him and point out his role in saving Slovaks (including some Jews) or bluntly admire him for his alliance with Nazi Germany and his participation in the persecution and massacre of Jews, Roma, and political opponents. American author Madeline Vadkerty decided not to write a major biography of Tiso or an academic analysis of existing debates on the role of Tiso in the Holocaust. In her book Your Honor, Mr. President: Letters to Jozef Tiso, she used archival sources to demask the Catholic compassion of this man, who was a politician and a clergyman, and shed light on the helplessness of the persecuted Slovak Jewry. In her book, Tiso stands in the background, yet his persona is omnipresent. The central figures of her book are people whose lives had been brutally affected by the anti-Semitic policies of the Slovak Republic, i.e. the Jews of Slovakia. The ongoing adoption of anti-Jewish measures gradually had a devastating effect on the lives of about 89,000 people. And when the economic destruction of Slovak Jewry was completed, the Slovak authorities led by President Tiso decided to “solve” the “Jewish question” by stripping the Slovak Jews of their citizenship and deporting them in collaboration with Nazi Germany to the “East.”

Vadkerty examines the prelude to the deportation, and she sheds light on the time of permanent persecution, which included the loss of jobs and thus livelihoods, the loss of property, and relationships broken up due to the racial laws regulating sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. Vadkerty’s book brings the reader to the moment when thousands of people decided to write to the president of the republic of which they were citizens with the hope that they could trust in the compassion and moral commitment of the head of the state, who was also a Catholic priest. Thousands wrote to Tiso hoping that their letters would prompt him to recognize their fundamental human rights, for instance by helping them keep their jobs, shops, or property or by granting them the “famous” presidential exception, awarded to the “economically important” Jews. These exceptions protected approximately 1,000 people (the exceptions also included family members, and thus they involved an estimated 5,000 people) from deportation in 1942.

Through these letters, which can be read as testimonies to the destruction of the Slovak Jewry, readers can learn about the Holocaust through the fates of individuals. These 13 real stories, which Vadkerty had chosen, are presented in the form of short novels, based on actual historical events. Vadkerty recreates (fictionalizes) possible monologues, dialogues, and backstories while she writes about little-known chapters of the Holocaust in Slovakia. Using the format of a short novel, she introduces readers to real Jewish and non-Jewish women and men of all ages from numerous Slovak villages and towns as they reacted to the regime’s anti-Jewish measures. Each of 13 stories is based on deportation records, archival documents, and interviews with family members, and they are all accompanied by pictures of the original letters. Vadkerty switches back and forth from fictional dialogues and recreated stories inspired by historical sources and historical narrative based on references to historical sources, so she keeps reminding the reader of historical facts and documents which are the base of these stories. The book shows how the anti-Jewish policy of the wartime Slovak republic destroyed the lives of ordinary people simply because these people were regarded as Jews. Vadkerty describes how these people not only asked for mercy, but also proclaimed their own integrity, diligence, love of country, and other civic virtues in their letters. However, the President’s Office did not respond to many of the letters. In some cases, the President’s Office simply declined the requests or called on other local authorities to investigate the situation. Often, replies arrived after the people who had written the letters had been deported.

Thanks to archival research and her focus on story-telling, in collaboration with Ján Púček, Vadkerty manages to shed light on the unhealed wounds of recent Slovak history. While the introduction of the book by Ivan Kamenec, one of the most important Holocaust scholars from Slovakia, gives an academic frame to a book which is intended for a general audience, it points out this problem in Slovak historiography. In Slovakia, the gap between best-selling memoirs of Slovak Jews who survived the Holocaust and the highly exclusive academic works on the Holocaust, which are almost inaccessible in their vocabulary and approach to a reader who is not a specialist in the field of history, calls attention to the need for more approachable historical narratives on the Holocaust in Slovakia. Yet more and more scholars in Slovakia, such as Hana Kubátová, Monika Vrzgulová, Marína Zavacká, Ján Hlavika, Anton Hruboň, and Jakub Drábik, have begun to recognize the potential roles for scholars of this area and the need not only for extensive research but also for comprehensive and accessible publications which meet high scholarly standards while also appealing to wider audiences.

Vadkerty’s book follows a trend of semi-fictional writing in the international Holocaust literature. Yet, unlike many other similar books based on real stories, such as Heather Morris’s best-selling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Vadkerty does not blur the authenticity of the history. Vadkerty’s book uses primary historical sources, including photographs and testimonies, and thus it can be recommended not only to readers looking for interesting literature about tragic stories of Jewish fates in Slovakia during the Holocaust, but also for scholars who search for new formats to share their research findings. Nevertheless, Your Honor, Mr. President: Letters to Jozef Tiso does not fulfil the function of a standard work of historical scholarship. Hopefully, Vadkerty will add to her book an additional publication which will allow her to combine archival research with a more academic approach. Her research would thus be an important addition to Holocaust historiography, and her style of writing could hopefully be an inspiration for professional scholars and an example of how to write more accessible academic texts, which are still rare in the historiography of the Holocaust in Slovakia.

Denisa Nešťáková
Comenius University, Bratislava / Herder Institute, Marburg

Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Svájc: A Kasztner-vonat fővárosi utasai [Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Switzerland: The Budapest passengers of the Kasztner train]. Edited by Anikó Lukács. Budapest: Budapest City Archives, 2020.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.580

The story of the so-called Kasztner train and Rezső Kasztner’s activities were parts of one of the controversial episodes of the Hungarian Holocaust. Kasztner worked as the deputy chairman of the Vaada, the Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee. In 1944, as a result of his negotiations with the SS, he was able to organize the escape of several hundred Hungarian Jews to Switzerland. For each of the 1,684 passengers, thousand dollars had to be paid to the Nazis, and the train, which departed from Budapest on June 30, first took the refugees to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Many of them managed to reach the safety of Switzerland only half a year later. Kasztner was criticized then and is still criticized today for having “sold his soul to the devil,” (a phrase used by the judge in his trial) in part because some people assume that only rich, prominent Jews were able to get on the list of passengers. As a consequence, Kasztner became involved in a trial in 1953, where he was accused of collaborating ­with the Nazis, and the trial drew attention to him which may have caused his death: three members of Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary underground group assassinated him.

Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Switzerland: The Budapest passengers of the Kasztner train, a book published by the Budapest City Archives, contains the material from the exhibition of the same name, which was opened in June 2019. The material for this exhibition was compiled in the course of an exciting international cooperative endeavor connected to the discovery of approximately 7,000 data sheets with information concerning the owners and tenants of Budapest apartments from 1944 (the digitalized documents are available at https://archives.hungaricana.hu/en/lear/Lakasiv/). In this volume, documents concerning the life of Kasztner train passengers are combined from two collections: the Budapest City Archives and the Verband Schweizerischer Jüdischer Fürsorgen (VSJF), the Swiss association which aided Jewish refugees.

The book applies a previously neglected approach: the story of the Kasztner train is introduced through the fates of ten rescued persons or families on the basis of a variety of archival sources, photographs, documents, letters collected from private individuals, recollections, and diaries. The book is attractive, with photographs and documents arranged in a “scrapbook style.” Both the main text and captions have been translated into English, making it accessible and engaging to the English readership too.

In Holocaust research, the perspectives of victims and microhistory are becoming increasingly prominent; this book is an example of this trend, as the core consists of the stories of survivors. Editor Anikó Lukács also mentions this in her foreword, where she emphasizes that the main focus was not on Kasztner’s activity and its political aspects but on the refugees themselves.

A short writing by Annie Szamosi, in which she gives an account of how she learned of her family’s past, fits into this concept. Szamosi’s story is typical: her parents were reluctant to tell her and her brother what had happened to them during World War II; however, during a trip she took to Budapest, a relative disclosed the entire story. Thus, her interest was raised in how Kasztner had saved her grandparents from certain death, and the story of Zebulon Jonatán Sternberg and Margit Dach became part of the volume.

The family stories are contextualized by a short historical introduction. The reader learns of the actions of Kasztner and the Zionists and the story of the train. The recollections of the refugees themselves and the suggestive postcards by graphic designer István Irsai, in which he depicts the characteristic objects and scenes of the camp behind barbed wire, provide an expressive picture of their experiences during the time spent in Bergen-Belsen. Nonetheless, the lack of information about the camp’s history and structure may be bothering. Finally, photographs, documents, and a short account describe the circumstances of the refugees after their arrival in Switzerland.

Then come the stories of the ten families, among whom we may find a contractor, an industrialist, a lawyer, a goldsmith, a scientist, and a merchant. The family stories are based on a rich collection of sources, and the main text is complemented with quotes from ego-documents and letters. Since the fugitives are in focus, they could have been given more space to tell their stories in their own words; but alongside the historical text, an abundance of photographs, forms, letters, and other documents also speak for them, providing further details about the families’ lives.

The volume offers the reader a picture of the passengers’ prewar situation, how their careers and lives were broken by the Holocaust, what it meant for them to get a chance to escape, and how they lived in Switzerland and after the war. From the point of view of the latter, the families whose stories were chosen for inclusion in the volume may be representative. Most of them never returned to Hungary. Instead, they settled in various countries throughout the world, from countries in South America to Israel.

Though according to the historical introduction “almost every class of Hungarian Jewry was represented” on the Kasztner train, most of the ten families whose narratives were chosen for inclusion here were prominent members of the Budapest community: for instance, György Bamberger and his wife, Rózsa Stern, who was the daughter of Samu Stern, leader of the Pest Israelite Congregation; Nison Kahan, one of the leaders of Zionism in Hungary and Gábor Munk, a member of the board of the Pest Israelite Congregation, whose daughter married Nison Kahan. Others were given places on the train due to their outstanding artistic or scientific achievements, such as the abovementioned graphic designer, István Irsai, contractor József Apor, and world-famous physician and psychiatrist Lipót Szondi. This asymmetry is probably a result of the disproportionately larger number of sources documenting the lives of well-known personalities or those who were in leading positions. Given this abundance of sources, it is easier to write about their lives. However, the material compiled for the book seems to underpin the assumption that only rich or famous people were given places on the train. This is contradicted only by the fact that the young Gádor–Donáth couple and Zebulon Jonatán Sternberg and his wife, Margit Dach, were also included on Kasztner’s list, together with numerous other less wealthy persons whose stories are not well-documented and are not mentioned in the book.

The moral implications of the Kasztner train cannot be avoided, even if the lives of the refugees remain the focus and the process according to which passengers were selected is touched upon only indirectly. A final conclusion would be hard to draw, but one factor must be underlined, which can be demonstrated through the life of the Gádor–Donáth couple. László Gádor was 32 years old in 1944, and Blanka Donáth was 23. After they returned to Hungary in 1945, Gádor worked for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Donáth had a long and successful career as a doctor of educational psychology. Had they stayed in Hungary in 1944, probably they would not have survived until the end of the war. Kasztner’s train made it possible for some 1,700 persons to survive the Holocaust. The life stories of the passengers effectively illuminate this simple but important truth.

Borbála Klacsmann
University of Szeged

Hóman Bálint és népbírósági pere [Bálint Hóman and his trial at the People’s Court]. Edited by Gábor Ujváry. Budapest: Ráció Kiadó; Székesfehérvár: Városi Levéltár és Kutatóintézet, 2019. 668 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.583

Bálint Hóman (1885–1951) a long-serving Minister of Culture of the Horthy regime, became a recent symbol of “historical revisionism.” By revisionism, I am referring not only to the revisions of indictments made by the people’s court after 1945 but also to the history of the period between 1945 and 1989 and thus, indirectly, to the attempt to revalue the whole period before 1945, which is a constitutive part of the memory politics of illiberal regimes. A thick volume entitled Historical Revisionism was also published in 2011. It was edited by Gábor Ujváry, a founding member of the controversial government-sponsored Veritas Historical Institute and Archive, in which the most outstanding contemporary Hungarian historians presented Hóman as a historian, a public collection specialist (as he was the director of the National Museum), and a politician while also examining his networks of valuable contacts (without which his upward career would have been unthinkable) and his connection to Székesfehérvár. However, this edited volume did not bring any closure on the subject. Rather, it was followed in 2015 by the ultimately failed plan to erect a statue of Hóman and, in 2016, the also failed lawsuit against the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia – MTA), which demanded the restoration of Hóman’s MTA membership.

The volume under review, which offers the text of the documents in Bálint Hóman’s people’s court files and analyses of these documents surprisingly begins with a detailed, almost hundred-page, extremely thoroughly compiled chronology (pp.11–108). Although there are usually chronologies at the end of publications of historical sources, this chronology at the beginning of the volume provides a primary framework for interpreting the publication: the volume sticks to sources and facts and seeks to give the impression of a scholarly endeavor that is objective, clearly substantiated, and apolitical. The chronology and bibliography of Hóman’s works are followed by Tibor Zinner’s 40-page study on the history of the people’s courts. The basic tenet of illiberal “revisionist historiography” is the emphasis on the need for a fresh start on the grounds that, until the work we have in our hands now was written, no one had dealt with the topic being analyzed. Zinner, who published his first work on the history of people’s courts already in 1983, also uses this topos. Another reflection on the history of the people’s court by Zsolt Horváth (which for some reason is at the end of the volume) mentions only the book by Tibor Lukács published in 1979 as the only summarizing work on the topic.

The volume contains two introductions concerning the people’s courts and one about the 2015 retrial. This is followed by material from the people’s court case in 1946. The real starting point of the volume is the thorough research work carried out by Gábor Ujváry as an expert for the case in 2015 (pp.537–610) and his analysis of the public debate (pp.162–99). This is followed by the documents of a court case in 1946 and then the 2015 trial.

The larger, more substantial part of the volume (about 300 pages) is the thoroughly annotated publication of the documents of the People’s Court. The rules concerning the publication of these documents are explained in a preface to the collection (as is fitting). In this volume, the studies about the court case exceed in length the documents of the court case themselves, so the reader gets two loosely connected books. The largest theoretical problem of the volume is the authors’ ambiguous attitude towards the empirical source of the volume, i.e. the minutes of the people’s court proceedings.

Anyone who has ever worked with people’s court documents knows this is a very challenging genre. The materials from a single case are sometimes held in different archives, and it can be extremely difficult to determine what documents the people’s court used and often how it used them. The version of the Hóman court case published in the book was also created by merging two archival files (one from the Budapest City Archives, the other from the Historical Archives of the State Security Services). It is therefore strange that the documents’ archival references are completely missing and, furthermore, that there is no reference to the missing materials that have been removed from the files in the meantime.

There are other methodological and theoretical problems which the authors fail to raise concerning the genre of people’s court protocols as a source. The first problem concerns the transitional nature of the institution of the people’s court itself. In an ever-changing legal environment, the authorities ran and used an institution which gained its legitimacy precisely from its ignorance of this constant change.

The second problem concerns the fact that, as is true in all court sources, since these kinds of written sources are available, they can be analyzed in two ways. The first approach is to consider these lawsuits as theatrical productions in which the actors performed the events of their past for the audience and the community according to the rules they thought were known. This, of course, had political consequences. In the case of the Hungarian people’s courts, for example, if the defendants were female, they referred to themselves as “weak women” and were usually given lighter sentences for crimes for which a male defendant would have been given a more seriously punishment.1 Hóman tried to use this tactic. According to the interrogating investigators’ summary report he behaved “womanly”: “[He] describes his role as insignificant, denies his influence, and omits from his role the moments that show his unbroken German friendship, fascist attitude, and anti-Semitic attitude throughout.” (p.210) He was not successful, given the court’s politics and context. In other cases, defendants try to arouse emotions. Female defendants, for instance, may try crying. In the case of Hóman, however, the “old woman’s complaint” (p.210), his strategy to portray himself as a victim, which is also mentioned in the report, did not help and may have hurt him. In this interpretive framework, the emphasis is on the fact that the trial, regardless of whether it happened incidentally in the transitional justice system of the extraordinary transitional period, never returns “the truth.”

The other methodological approach typical of this volume is to consider what was happening in the court as “objective.” The courts as institutions of post–World War II political justice did not function in this manner. The publication insists on factual accountability of the people’s courts with great commitment and a huge footnote apparatus. This interpretation, even if consistent in its own methodological approach, would still be questionable. First of all, it is not clear that the lawyers, police officers, and investigators working in Budapest (a city largely in ruins) in 1945 and 1946 can be expected to have the same insights, knowledge, and source knowledge that today’s researchers have. Second, this approach is inconsistent in the volume. For example, the investigative report of November 29, 1945 mentions 147 pieces of attached evidence in support of the allegations against Hóman, on which the volume does not reflect here. It is incumbent on the historian who is editing the text not simply to check and (quite legitimately) criticize the professionalism of the people’s courts but also to explain why and how this kind of legal institution and procedure developed. Analyses of large, highly symbolic court cases like the Hóman hearing, however, are not suitable for this purpose.2

In this review, I would not go into the controversial points of judging Hóman’s professional life, which was extensively analyzed in the 2011 volume. The volume under review is interesting in part because it returns to the pre-2011 framework without meaningfully reflecting on the failure to erect a statue of Hóman and the failure to rehabilitate him as a historian and scholar. The book seems to have been intended as a monument of sorts, like a book to create a memory of the trial.

The volume concludes with a history of attempts to rehabilitate Hóman, analyzing the process that resulted in neither the erection of a statue of Hóman nor the restoration of his membership in Hungarian Academy of Sciences. István Varga (FIDESZ MP), who has been the political engine behind the rehabilitation of Hóman in recent decades, gained significant space in this part of the volume. In his writing, Varga puts himself at the center of these attempts, saying “without the two-thirds parliamentary majority, I would have found it much harder to take up the obstacles” (p.505). Thus, the legal process of rehabilitation became just as much a political process as the verdict against Hóman in 1946. When the volume mercilessly and meticulously footnotes the court case, it fights a battle that it had already lost when it was launched.

Andrea Pető
Central European University

New Perspectives in Transnational History of Communism in East Central Europe. Edited by Krzysztof Brzechczyn. Dia-Logos 26. Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 2019. pp. 384.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.587

New Perspectives in Transnational History of Communism in East Central Europe, edited by Krzysztof Brzechczyn, is the result of a renaissance in the research on the twentieth-century totalitarian systems in Central and Eastern Europe and an attempt to evaluate new theoretical proposals from various fields of study. It was published in 2019 as the twenty-sixth book in the Peter Lang series Dia-Logos. Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences.

First, I should say that the very title promises to introduce new perspectives on the historiography of European communism. That promise is not easy to keep, especially with respect to such a well-established sphere of research. Although the subject matter has been examined in depth, it is obvious to me that there are still too few studies that go beyond the national perspective. An examination of a phenomenon like communism should not, by definition, be restricted to one historiography. It should be global and comparative.

Brzechczyn outlines precisely this perspective in his introductory remarks. He draws a clear distinction between transnational and comparative studies, and he argues convincingly that they are based on different premises. From the comparative approach, the existing national historiographies are assumed to be ready-made, independent beings, and they are compared by means of a derivative determination of the criteria for their evaluation. Such a concept can be developed with the use of the available material, and in that sense, it does not constitute an entirely new perspective, but it does make it possible, as it were, to put the existing descriptions in order and contextualize them (p.15).

Brzechczyn suggests that the transnational perspective is methodologically more challenging, as it requires one to forget the existence of borders and national differences in order to allow the consideration of communism as a global movement, and only then is the implementation of the discovered model analyzed in the particular context. The national aspect is not the original context here. On the contrary, it is the global perspective that makes it possible to define and understand the local situation. This intriguing assumption could rightly be termed a “new perspective.”

It is worth noting that that term was also used during the Third Annual Conference of the OSI–CEU Comparative History Project. Comparative Studies of Communism: New Perspectives (Budapest, May 27–29, 2010). It was also used in a 2009 book edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka entitled Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives. It seems clear that Brzechczyn would like to enter this discussion.

Although making paths for new perspectives is theoretically fascinating, it is also practically complicated. It is not easy to “set aside” the context in which the researchers have been raised and educated and in which they have been working all their lives. Can they free themselves from their particularistic histories? When we look through the biographical notes about the authors, we see that many of them lived and worked in more than one national context. That is an interesting Central and Eastern European phenomenon, which explains the possibility of a sensible implementation of the project. We are just entering a time in which the generation which was not shaped or, at least, was not solely shaped by the experience of communism is undertaking the theoretical reinterpretation of this experience.

In the introduction, Brzechczyn rightly notes that in the nineteenth-century scientific European historiography, the nation state was a widely accepted foundation for research. The paradigm of the “national historiography” survived, in a more or less covert form, the whole twentieth century, and it turned out to be one of the most durable assumptions of narratives about the past. Brzechczyn considers this to be both a natural consequence of the emergence of nation states and a construct of the cultural politics of those states. There is no doubt that the book ties in with the trend in transnational studies, discernible since the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, Brzechczyn correctly points out that the greater popularity of such research has yet not led to a clear theoretical position on the phenomena under study.

Consequently, Brzechczyn draws the logical conclusion that the very definition of transnational history has become a research problem. In his view, some doubts can be dispelled by separating transnational history from comparative history (p.16). This perspective is then rationally explained in a convincing manner. Brzechczyn explains why transnational historiography has recently become so popular and why it was not possible before. He focuses, on the one hand, on the new generations of researchers and, on the other, on the technical possibilities created by the Internet. Brzechczyn points out three areas of transnational research: (1) totalitarization and de-totalitarization; (2) modernist theories; and (3) the history of everyday life. In his opinion, modernist concepts were the first metanarratives of the process of transnational interpretation of communism in Eastern Europe, and the differences between the natures of communism in Eastern and Western Europe were first noted in those narratives.

The research on totalitarianism and the history of everyday life is also a traditional element of the scholarship on communism in Eastern Europe. Brzechczyn openly agrees with Peter Apor’s and Constantin Iordachi’s views on the topic. However, these authors do not see the need to draw a clear distinction between the comparative and transnational approaches, and they appear to wish to enrich the former with the latter. Indeed, for many scholars, it seems as if transnational studies are to expand and continue the main assumptions of comparative history, despite some tension between the two approaches.

Brzechczyn points to the fundamental differences between the methodological assumptions of the transnational and comparative approaches. The latter has enjoyed an established position since Marc Bloch, but it is especially popular in contemporary research on communism. One reason for this boost in popularity is the inclusion of new strategies of transnational research to that methodology. At the same time, Brzechczyn argues for the actual existence of two separate approaches here (p.17). On the other hand, Brzechczyn’s examples do not contradict directly the assumptions of comparative history.

The articles in the book are based on the papers from the 2014 conference (Poznań, October 16–17). They are essentially 16 independent texts written by various authors from different countries. This diversity makes it possible to preserve the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, however, this comes at the cost of consistency, despite the editor’s evident efforts to maintain it. One advantage is doubtless the very broad representation of most national historiographies of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Also, various topics are covered, and many postulated “new perspectives” are shown.

Brzechczyn indicates three ways in which the transnationality of the authors’ approaches finds expression: (1) in the analysis of the usefulness of the theories and models characteristic of transnational studies; (2) in the research on the use of these methods; and (3) in the research carried out with the use of universal categories which may be effectively applied to many societies. It is easy to notice that point three belongs to the comparative perspective. This very perspective appears to dictate the tone of many fragments of the book, and it indicates how difficult it is to maintain the postulated sharp distinction between comparative and transnational research in practice.

The book consists of five parts. In the first three parts, the general subject matter (communism) is divided into three aspects: political (i), ideological (ii), and economic/social (iii), while the two last parts are called, respectively, the states and societies of Central and Eastern Europe (iv) and the memory and narratives about the communism in Central and Eastern Europe (v). The texts are consistently impressive, but it seems that not all the authors share the editor’s vision of the transnational perspective. Most of them focus on traditional descriptions which emphasize the historical specificity of the given country and nation, with references to comparative methods. In the remaining texts, the comparative method is assumed from the start and effectively applied. The transnationality of the methods and subject matter of research remains in the background, but we see that it is still more of an interesting idea with perspectives for the future than a specific, independent research program. Especially interesting are articles from Chapter Three offering new spheres for study from the transnational perspective: consumerism and emotion studies; and from Chapter Five that shows problems of transnationalism when challenged by official memory politics in Belarus and Ukraine.

To sum up, in most texts in the book, including Brzechczyn’s article, transnational studies are not clearly separated from comparative studies. The book does not exhaust the topic of this mutual relation, but that is not the objective of researchers who propose new points of view. It shows, in theory and practice, that there is still much work to be done before we could consider the transnational perspective to be fully conceptualized and standardized. It is difficult to separate the comparative and transnational histories, which gives rise to the question as to whether the endeavor is even justified.

In this respect, the third chapter, which is devoted to consumerism, instills optimism, as it proves that such research is not only possible but, in some areas, necessary. In the fifth chapter, ambitious plans are made for further work on the transnational perspective in historiography, and the last two texts indicate the urgency of that work, which, after all, does not take place in a political vacuum. The historiography of Central and Eastern Europe remains as complicated as its history. This is another reason why we should appreciate this publication, which presents a very broad spectrum of the theoretical and practical problems awaiting new generations of researchers. There is still no unequivocal answer to the question about the relationship between transnational and comparative perspectives in that research. The discussion continues, and Brzechczyn and his coauthors have made an important contribution to that conversation. Altogether, they have provided a good introductory book for everyone interested in transnational perspective, especially from the methodological standpoint, and for the wide range of researchers who focus on the comparative history of European communism.

Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi
University of Silesia

Magyar-zsidó identitásminták [Hungarian-Jewish identity patterns]. Edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes. Budapest: Ráció, 2019. 267 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2020.3.591

An interesting volume entitled Hungarian-Jewish Identity Patterns was published by the Budapest-based Ráció Kiadó in Hungary. The volume aims to trace the spiritual path of Hungarian (Neolog) Jewry through the fates of two Hungarian Jewish scholars, Henrik Marczali (1856–1940) and Bernát Alexander (1850–1927). The editor, Iván Zoltán Dénes, is the leader of the Henrik Marczali Research Group at the Jewish Theological Seminary at the University of Jewish Studies. Dénes analyzes how a 2018 conference which was held at the Institute of Philosophy of the Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences led to this volume. The spiritual foundation of the book is also provided by Károly Kecskeméti in his introduction, which focuses on the activities and identities of Neolog scholars or, as he writes in connection with the two scholars, “Jewish scholar[s] who at the same time identif[y] with the Hungarian nation” (p.9). Dénes also doubts the apologetics of assimilation, orthodoxy, and Zionism, as well as their idealization as an eternal explanation for every event, thus giving the ars poetica of the book, at least to be assumed.

We can read Mihály Huszár’s thorough study on Henrik Marczali’s father, Mihály Marczali, in the “Chapter of Identity Samples,” who was the first rabbi of the village of Marcali. Huszár writes about the role Mihály Marczali he played in the formation of the identity of the family. Dénes analyzes the Hungarian-Jewish identity of Henrik Marczali, and then Szilvia Peremiczky describes the appearance of three Hungarian Jewish authors (Bertalan Ormódi, József Kiss, and Emil Makai) in Hungarian literary life.

The next chapter is entitled “Situation Assessments, Strategies, Pathways I.” Here, Miklós Konrád deals with the problems of depictions of the Dualist era as the Hungarian Jewish golden age. András Zima writes about modern Jewish integration strategies at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Gábor Schweitzer examines the search for the Neolog rabbi identity in Hungary by analyzing the events between the rabbinical meeting in Győr and the foundation of the National Rabbinical Association.

In the next section, entitled “Location Assessments, Strategies, Findings 2,” Péter Zóka analyzes the role of Alexander Bernát at the Hungarian National Congress of Free Teaching. Péter Turbucz describes the views of Bernát Alexander and Henrik Marczali in a long study on World War I, and Péter András Varga writes about Alexander Bernát and his circle of students as a “problem of philosophical history writing.”

The volume strives to situate a defining part of Hungarian Jewry within the framework marked by the oeuvre of the two great Neolog scholars. In this respect, this book can be said to have been successful, because not many professionals have tried to trace the process of the historical formation of the Neolog Jewish identity. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that we are not talking about all of the Hungarian Jews at that time, but only about a community within this larger group, which means that we are only talking about a kind of intellectual history.

However, if we assume that historian Henrik Marczali and philosopher Bernát Alexander were role models for Hungarian Neolog Jewry, their unbroken enthusiasm for Hungarian national goals, for instance, which made them apologists for the “Great War” (as Péter Turbucz makes clear in his study), seems a bit odd today. Of course, it would be anachronistic to question the degree of enthusiasm at the time, yet at the same time, this unconditional loyalty and enthusiasm proved to be an illusion from a historical perspective.

I would like to highlight a few studies from the book which I feel are essential to an understanding of the message this collection of essays seems to endeavor to convey to the general readership. The essay by Miklós Konrád, which analyzes the attitude of the Hungarian Neolog public and intellectuals about dualism, is extremely interesting. Konrád convincingly demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the Neolog Jewry was dissatisfied with the conditions and was increasingly frustrated, and in the end, many of them took a left-wing turn, which in this case meant supporting the revolution of 1918.

The book offers insightful articles about Alexander Bernát and Henrik Marczali, which examine certain stages of their lives and their relationships to decisive historical events. Péter Zóka analyzes Alexander’s speech in Pécs (October 1907), which was delivered at the Hungarian National Congress of Free Teaching, where many people were present, from Oszkár Jászi to Ottokár Prohászka. Alexander, in whose view nurturing the desire for knowledge and raising the level of general education were the fundamental goals, condemned all uses of education for partisan political purposes and denied the accusation brought against him that he sought to relativize the truth.

At the end of the volume, Péter András Varga analyzes the circle of students of Alexander Bernát. Bernát’s disciples were extremely important people in the history of Hungarian fiction. Béla Zalai, who died in a Russian prisoner of war camp, Jenő Varga, head of the Moscow Institute of World Economy, Vilmos Szilasi, who had a “European career,” and Béla Fogarasi, an important personality of Hungarian Marxist-Leninist philosophy, were all talents whose early interests were significantly influenced by Alexander. Varga sees in the phenomenological philosophical connection the point where these personalities were also connected to one another.

My main criticism of the book would be that it is a somewhat haphazard compilation of very high-quality studies. It sheds light on the careers of the two prominent Hungarian Jewish scholars in many respects, and it offers clear explanations of the relevance of their activities to the Hungarian Jewish intelligentsia in general. We are talking about people who were Jews but who considered themselves Jewish on the basis of religion only and who were otherwise essentially assimilated. They identified themselves as Hungarian, and in this respect, they also stressed the importance of being more than a member of a given nation. However, their unflinching Hungarian nationalism proved to be a failure in all respects, and this caused them great frustration and, paradoxically, prompted them to identify more passionately with the idea of the integral Hungarian state. This was paradoxical given the events of the subsequent decades, when the notion of the Hungarian state as defined by the borders of the medieval Hungarian kingdom proved a mirage, as did the notion that Hungarian society accepted Jews as Hungarians.

This volume is a significant contribution to the secondary literature in part because it brings identity disputes off the emotional plane and places them between the cornerstones of the historical facts and science.

Attila Novák
Thomas Molnár Institute for Advanced Studies /
National University for Public Service

1 See more on this: Andrea Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2020).

2 See more Ildikó Barna, and Andrea Pető, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2015).

 
 

2021_1_Book reviews

Volume 10 Issue 1 CONTENTS

BpdfOOK REVIEWS

Történetírás és történetírók az Árpád-kori Magyarországon (XI–XIII. század közepe) [The writing and writers of history in Árpád-era Hungary, from the eleventh century to the middle of the thirteenth century]. By László Veszprémy. Budapest: Line Design, 2019. 464 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.155 

The centuries following the foundation of the Christian kingdom of Hungary by Saint Stephen did not leave later generations with an unmanageable plethora of written works. However, the diversity of the genres and the philological and historical riddles which lie hidden in these works arguably provide ample compensation for the curious reader. There are numerous textual interrelationships among the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla known as Anonymus, the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum by Simon of Kéza and the forteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle consisting of various earlier texts, not to mention the hagiographical material on the canonized rulers. For the historian, the relationships among these early historical texts and the times at which they were composed (their relative and absolute chronology) are clearly a matter of interest, since the judgment of these links affects the credibility of the historical information preserved in them. In an attempt to establish the relative chronology, philological analysis is the primary tool, while in our efforts to determine the precise times at which the texts were composed, literary and legal history may offer the most reliable guides. László Veszprémy has very clearly made circumspect use of these methods in his essays, thus it is hardly surprising that many of his colleagues, myself included, have been eagerly waiting for his dissertation, which he defended in 2009 for the title of Doctor of Sciences, to appear in the form of a book in which the articles he has written on the subject since are also included.

Veszprémy aims to shed light on “the most critical questions of medieval Hungarian chronicle research.” However, the focus of his discussion is the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla III and the early chapters of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which narrates events from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Later developments in the Hungarian chronicle tradition after the middle of the thirteenth century, such as the aforementioned Gesta by Simon of Kéza, fall beyond the scope of his analysis, though the author very clearly would have a great deal to say on the subject.

The first section of the volume offers ample testimony to one of the greatest virtues of Veszprémy’s method. It provides an overview of the beginnings of and later developments in Hungarian historical literature against the backdrop of medieval European historiography. The rich tradition of history writing in Europe was available only to a limited extent to the first Hungarian readers, as indeed the analysis of the Pannonhalma library catalog demonstrates. However, demand for and interest in historical works date back to the eleventh century, even if the desire to revive the heroic pagan past (or rather, to construct it) was only fulfilled by the work of Anonymus around 1200. One could mention, as evidence of this early interest, the Pozsonyi Évkönyv (‘Annals of Pozsony’) and the annals of the Somogyvár Formulary, the latter of which Veszprémy discusses only briefly. Based on the layout of the pages of the codex of the Pozsonyi Évkönyv, Veszprémy came to the possible but not entirely compelling conclusion that the earlier material of the annals was edited and clarified in 1114, which unquestionably would fit into our understanding of the impetus given to writing practices in Hungary and the surge in interest in history under the reign of King Coloman the Learned.

It is common knowledge that the earliest foreign sources on which Hungarian historiography drew were the Annals of Altaich and Regino’s Chronicon. We do not know, however, when the two narrative works came to the attention of Hungarian chroniclers. While news of the Annals of Altaich (which show a pro-German bias) may have reached Hungarian historiography already in the eleventh century (at least by 1108), during the long armed confrontation between the Holy Roman emperors and the Hungarian kings, the first Hungarian author to make use of Regino could hardly have been active before Cosmas of Prague (†1125), who was the first historian in the Central European region to have access to the Chronicon.

These questions lead us to one of the most important assertions made in the book. The Hungarian chronicles contain a great deal of unquestionably authentic information concerning the eleventh century, though critical analyses of style have suggested time and time again that the narrative was composed or written down in the twelfth century, particularly in the case of the Gesta regis Ladislai, which offers an almost epic account of the struggles for the throne between King Solomon and his cousins, the dukes Géza and Ladislaus (the future Saint Ladislaus I). This is also the section which bears the most affinities with the court romances of Western Europe. Veszprémy seeks to resolve this riddle with the suggestion that in the eleventh century only historical notes were taken, the trace of which may have been preserved in the entries of the Annals of Pozsony. As the brief annalistic entries could hardly have grown into the vibrant narratives found in the chronicles, Veszprémy argues that these historical notes may have been more ambitious writings which covered longer periods of history, while they did not aspire to offer a unified account of Hungarian history. This hypothesis unquestionably offers an explanation for one of the fundamental questions of early Hungarian history writing, though it is perhaps made slightly less persuasive by the fact that Veszprémy, who has a thorough knowledge of the larger European context, makes no mention of any generic parallels which might explain why the individual historical notes were even created or what the intentions of the authors may have been.

After his discussion of the admittedly complex beginnings of Hungarian historical literature, Veszprémy turns his attention to the text of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which preserved many earlier works, including the abovementioned Gesta Ladislai regis and the Gesta by Simon of Kéza. The next few chapters examine the problems concerning the sections of the text which deal with the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Central to his discussion is the issue of authenticity, or in other words, the exact time at which the parts in question were composed. Veszprémy offers an informative analysis of the influence of Gregorian Reform on Hungarian literature. Saint Ladislaus embodies the vision of the ideal ruler at the time, who becomes king thanks to his Christian idoneitas, though quite against his will. Of particular interest are the chapters of the chronicle which, as we can conclude on the basis of a comparison with the Gesta of Anonymus, had undoubtedly been written before the anonymous notary was active (ca. 1200), i.e., the chapters concerning the Battle of Mogyoród and the Battle of Kerlés. Instead of using the vague expression ancient gesta (“ősgeszta”), which one often stumbles across in the modern historiography, Veszprémy consistently writes about a pre-1200 chronicle redaction. This conscientiousness about terminological precision constitutes an example worth following.

The next section focuses on Anonymus’ Gesta Hungarorum, the study of which has certainly been one of the motivating forces for the rise of medieval studies in Hungary over the course of the past 250 years. Veszprémy’s interest was captured by the rhetorical models of the work, which was composed in the decades following the death of King Béla III, and other elements which offer indications as to when it was written. Earlier, Veszprémy identified several citations which are from a Latin novel about the fall of Troy entitled Excidium Troiae. The work was not extremely popular, but it was definitely used in schools. Now, Veszprémy has managed to determine that the version used by the anonymous notary resembled the text preserved in the Brussels manuscript of Guido Pisanus. This constitutes one more clue in the relatively long list on the basis of which Veszprémy concludes that Anonymus probably studied in Italy (though he does not rule out the possibility that he stayed in France, a notion which is often found in the secondary literature). Elements which indicate the period of the writing include the mention of the Black Sea, formerly known in the West only as Pontus, which appears in Anonymus as Nigrum Mare. As the expression was first used in western sources only in 1265, the occurrence of the term here used to be considered as one of the few reasons for a later dating of the relevant chapter of the Gesta (to the late thirteenth century). Veszprémy and Orsolya Csákváry, his coauthor, now point out that this name already appears in the Scandinavian saga literature in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, though the term may well have made its way to Hungary considerably earlier, during the golden era of ties between Scandinavia and Byzantium in the eleventh century. Veszprémy arrives, after a similarly exciting investigation, at the conclusion that the fate of the only surviving codex of the Gesta Hungarorum may be intertwined with the fate of the Turkish-language manuscript Tarih-i Ungurus, or History of the Hungarians, which has a considerable textual link to the Hungarian chronicle tradition.

The third major section of the book contains case studies which concern reports on Hungary found not in Hungarian sources but rather in sources from abroad, such as Adémar de Chabannes and the Bavarian traditions of Scheyern. Among these studies, only the one on the European sources of the Hungarian Hun tradition which is very clearly tied to the subject indicated in the title of the book. Veszprémy very clearly feels that the association of the Hungarians with the Huns and with Attila predates Anonymus. This association, however, could hardly have stretched back to the period before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin and rather should be attributed to intellectuals familiar with the German Attila tradition, who traveled in great numbers to the Kingdom of Hungary in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

László Veszprémy’s book thus offers an engaging intellectual adventure, and as far as the content is concerned, the reader will not be disappointed. The organization and editing of the book, however, at times leaves something to be desired. I myself was somewhat annoyed that Veszprémy discusses some of the more significant problems (such as the relationship between Anonymus’ Gesta and the earliest textual layers of the Illuminated Chronicle) in isolation, following the structure of the studies that had been published earlier as articles. The book is not always sufficiently didactic, a problem which is also related to the manner in which the boundaries between the various studies have not been adequately transcended. This will make the book more difficult to use as a handbook on early Hungarian historiography. True, that was not Veszprémy’s goal, but given the source material in the book and the new findings which are presented, the specialist readership will undoubtedly hope to use this beautifully published book in this capacity.

Dániel Bácsatyai
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900. Edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2018. 534 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.160 

The absence of modern writing on Eastern European food history is sometimes rather conspicuous. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find that Brill has recently published a volume titled Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900, which is part of its Balkan Studies Library series. The volume, edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu, contains 17 studies by various authors spanning 534 pages and comes with color illustrations and a general index at the end. The collection starts with the editors’ introduction, which is well written and informative. There are also brief biographies of the participating authors, a short historical chronology of the Balkans starting from 1456, and notes on translation and transliteration.

The project was divided into five thematic parts, each containing two to five studies. The first part focuses on the Ottoman world, the second deals with ingredients and kitchens, the third shifts its attention to trade and food supply, the fourth discusses local cookbooks, and the last part examines the issue of representation, in other words how Balkan food, cooking, and (in)hospitality were perceived by foreign observers.

The essays in the collection generally speaking fall into two categories. Some authors strove to present the reader with an overview of a broadly outlined topic, like Moldavian or Wallachian cuisine in the early modern era, while others delved deep into the details of one particular theme, e. g. when and how olive oil replaced butter as the primary source of fat in Turkey. In the following paragraphs, I briefly comment on each study and then share a few general remarks.

After the excellent introduction by the editors, the first study written by Suraiya Faroqhi from Istanbul Bilgi University deals with the gradual introduction of olive oil into Turkish cuisine. It presents an interesting perspective, demonstrating that the dominance of olives was not as absolute as one would have expected in this area based on what we know about ancient Roman and, later, Italian cuisine. It also introduces the topic of cultural resistance, when Faroqhi explains that the relative reluctance of Turks to use olive oil as a staple of Mediterranean cuisine might have been caused by its popularity among Greeks.

The next study, by Hedda Reindl-Kiel, provides a well-written overview of the sources available on Early Modern Eastern cuisine, including a seventeenth-century Persian cookbook, shopping bills, and lists of food distribution from the sultan’s court. This last item is particularly illuminating, and Reindl-Kiel demonstrates how food distributed in the upper echelons of Ottoman society surpassed simple nutritional functions and gained an important symbolic value. As reports written by contemporary European observers, such as the one by the Habsburg ambassador to the High Porte, Heøman Èernín of Chudenice (1576–1651), suggest, foreigners often misunderstood the distinctive role of food in Turkish society.

Özge Samancı’s chapter on cuisine in nineteenth-century Istanbul lists a broad variety of foodstuffs utilized in early Turkish printed cookbooks, the oldest of which appeared in 1840. Margareta Aslan’s work contains a discussion on the history of food in Transylvania with particular focus on Turkish influence. She points out some interesting comparative differences in food culture between Romanians, Turks, and Hungarians (e. g. the use of sweeteners in certain contexts or diverging preferences for various spices in the Balkan regions). The first part of the collection comes to a close with an essay by Olivia Senciuc dealing with the attractive theme of coffee and tea in eighteenth-century Moldavia and Wallachia. Perhaps Senciuc’s most interesting conclusion is the realization that despite the constant Ottoman political, economic, and military influence, the wealthy boyar families began to consume coffee relatively late, only in the second half of the seventeenth century, which coincided with the adoption of caffeinated drinks by upper classes in the other regions of Central and Eastern Europe.

The second section of the book, titled “Ingredients, Kitchens and the Pleasures of the Table,” opens with Kinga S. Tüdõs’s study of early modern festivities in Transylvania. For a readership particularly interested in Hungarian culture, this is perhaps the most relevant passage, as Tüdõs brings into focus the Hungarian group of east Transylvanians, called Székelys. Tüdõs’s extensive use of inheritance inventories resembles similarly oriented research on the cultural history of the dining customs of the early modern noble classes, which became a subject of considerable interest in Bohemia in the 1990s and early 2000s.1 The study draws heavily on the manuscript cookbook of Princess Anna Bornemisza (1630–1688), which prompts me to suggest that it might be beneficial to compare this source with a collection of three mid-seventeenth-century handwritten cookbooks attributed to the Czech nobility and preserved in the National Museum and Strahov Library in Prague. These Czech collections are nearly contemporary to Anna Bornemisza’s cookbook and reflect a similar socioeconomic background.

The following study by Maria Magdalena Székely draws the readers’ attention to another historical region, the principality of Moldavia. Székely does not rely exclusively on the scarce written historical records, but also introduces information gleaned from archeological, archaeobotanical, and archeozoological sources which provide an additional perspective. Székely’s work offers a comparative analysis of early modern food culture in Moldavia, which will help other Central and Eastern European historians better contextualize their own research. Violeta Barbu, the author of the next study on early modern food culture in Wallachia, uses an equally broad approach, basically providing a textbook-like delineation usable by any historian searching for comparisons with findings in their own research. Like Székely, Barbu also makes creative use of the sources, for example Rituale Romanum.

From the conceptually broad studies, we move back towards microhistory at the beginning of the third part of the collection. It begins with a paper by Enikõ Rüsz-Fogarasi describing food supply in the Romanian city of Cluj in the early modern period, in which Rüsz-Fogarasi builds on her previous interest in the history of hospitals in Transylvania. This text is valuable for its focus on a comparatively early period (1550–1650), but it also shows how challenging it is to work with relatively scarce written sources. Analogically, Mária Pakucs-Willcocks’s study focuses on a single Transylvanian place as well, the city of Sibiu. Her paper therefore works very well in comparison with the previous chapter. Pakucs-Willcocks begins with an examination of import fees and other legal contexts for trade with the Ottomans and later delves into detail when discussing the individual types of food. I would highlight her attempt to shape often limited sources into series of data, systematically tracking certain commodities.

While the two previous studies dealt with trade more or less exclusively in Transylvania, Gheorghe Lazãr’s paper shifts the focus to trade in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Wallachia. Lazãr divides his interest between what he calls “the big retail trade,” which means the export of horses, cattle, and grain and “the small trade,” referring to the import of luxury goods. Both are equally valuable, but quite distinct from the perspective of writing about the history of food culture, as they offer testimony to differing socioeconomic realities.

The fourth section of the book, which is also the shortest, consists of two chapters examining historical Balkan cookbooks. First, Castilia Manea-Grgin describes two early modern handwritten collections of recipes: “Compendium on the Preparation of Day-to-Day Dishes,” owned originally by Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664), and the slightly more recent “Book in which Dishes of Fish, Crayfish, Oysters, Snails, Vegetables, Herbs, and Other Dishes for Fast and Non-fast Days are Written, In their Due order.” The origin of this second manuscript is uncertain, but it is likely a seventeenth-century source possibly linked to Constantin Cantacuzino, who served between 1675–1677 as the Great Steward to the Wallachian princes. It is worth noting, however, that the analysis avoids the food-related parts of both collections, focusing instead on related topics, such as the management of orchards, gardening, and viniculture. Nevertheless, the study is still quite useful for food historians, because these topics are related to the history of nutrition, and Manea-Grgin also provides a thorough examination of the foreign influences she was able to detect, particularly in the Romanian collection.

In the following article, Stefan Detchev writes about the oldest printed cookbooks in Bulgaria, which were published in the 1870s. As this is a very modern topic, it is well outside my area of expertise, but I imagine that a comparative study with other cookbooks of the period, for example, might yield interesting findings related to the birth of modern femininity in the Central and Eastern European context.

The introductory study of the last section was written by Andrew Dalby, the prolific British historian of food, who examines several travelogues written by foreigners about their stays in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Romania. Although mostly focused on modern history, this chapter does occasionally delve into much older, seventeenth-century reports by William Lithgow, John Smith (of Pocahontas fame), Robert Bargrave, and Edmund Chishull. Dalby’s text is an excellent read and very entertaining, though it does present (understandably) an exclusively outsider’s perspective of the Balkans, as Dalby does not read local sources.

Fortunately, Angela Jianu, the author of the following chapter, addresses this issue in her analysis of travelogues from the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Dalby, Jianu provides feedback on information published by the travelers mentioned in her paper. She also pays careful attention to concepts like “commensality” and “otherness” in the Balkans, which she describes as a region “in-between” the East and the West. The penultimate study by Anna Matthaiou draws on a plethora of information concerning modern food culture in the Balkans, while also commenting on its fractured nature. This study chronologically extends well into the twentieth century and provides interesting insights into the construction of Hellenized “national” cuisine and the homogeneity versus the diversity of local traditions.

Finally, Andrei Oiºteanu draws the readers’ attention to the Jewish tavernkeepers in Romania with an emphasis on prejudice and stereotypes associated with the life of this minority in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. His chapter also brings up broader contexts and is worth reading for those interested in Judaic history from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

Overall, Earthly Delights presents an intriguing and critically important collection of studies. The volume is well organized, and the shortcomings to which a reviewer might draw attention are only minor. There are a few typographical errors, but not more than one would expect in such large project. I particularly appreciate the fact that most of the studies were written by authors with clear links to the Balkans and not by foreigners theorizing about the region. This is necessary due to the difficult linguistic landscape of the region, as shown for example by the painstakingly documented trilingual toponyms in passages related to Transylvania.

For foreigners like me, the study highlights certain issues inherent to Balkan historiography. For example, I find it interesting to observe the propensity of Romanian historiography towards the French theoretical tradition of the Annales school. In Czech historiography, this source of inspiration is filled mostly by German scholars and, recently, the growing importance of English historical writing.

Another general observation I would make concerns the relative lack of written sources, which became more abundant only after the mid-seventeenth century. It can be partially supplemented by archeological and archaeobotanical findings, but I suspect that this form of research requires levels of funding which are not yet readily available in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps the most striking feature is visible particularly in the final chapters, where readers are continually reminded of the Protean nature of the Balkans as a simultaneously backward, static place where time stands still (and good inns are hard to come by), while it was also a place of tumultuous change in a “melting pot” of cultures, nationalities, religions, languages, and political interests. The editors appropriately reflect on this phenomenon in the introduction when they claim that globalization and multiculturalism are not modern inventions, as regions like Transylvania were faced with similar challenges centuries before these terms became fashionable, contentious issues for present culture wars. Overall, Earthly Delights is an essential read for any historian of food, especially a historian focusing on the seventeenth century and later periods.

Karel Černý
Charles University
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Estates and Constitution: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary. By István M. Szijártó. Translated by David Robert Evans. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. 350 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.166

Readers interested in the history of Austria, the Habsburg Monarchy, and its successor states may have become accustomed to the high academic quality of the series Austrian and Habsburg Studies (edited by Howard Louthan and published by Berghahn Books in association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota), which covers a wide range of themes in fields from ethnic conflict and nationalism to fin-de-siècle culture and women’s history, to mention only a few of the subjects which have been covered since 1996, the year in which the first book in the series was published. István M. Szijártó’s new book (the 30th title in the series) fits perfectly in this trend both because of its subject and by virtue of its complexity and rigorousness. Szijártó’s outstanding monograph offers an admirable example of a work of scholarship on complex problems in the somewhat “exotic” history of early modern East Central Europe which both conforms to the local (in this case, the Hungarian) historiographical tradition and meets the standards of the Anglophone academic world. In the case of the latter, credit is also due to the excellent work of the translator, David Robert Evans.

Szijártó’s endeavor is unique in the sense that he attempts to bring close to non-Hungarian readers the history of the Hungarian Diet, a topic which has been “grievously neglected in international scholarship,” to use the words of Robert John Weston Evans from the back cover of the book. This is not to say, however, that the subject has been entirely ignored in recent non-Hungarian historiography. One could mention, perhaps first and foremost, the monograph by Jean Bérenger and Károly Kecskeméti, Parlement et vie Parlementaire en Hongrie 1608–1918 (Paris, Honoré Champion Editeur, 2005). Yet Estates and Constitution offers more than a work written in the traditional vein of parliamentary history in its narrower sense. To support this statement, it is worth taking a look at Szijártó’s earlier works in the field to understand their evolution and determine their places in relation to one another. This is all the more important, since Szijártó himself felt it necessary to point out at the beginning of his work that his book is “the product of almost three decades of research” (xi).

The first significant fruit of Szijártó’s long-term research project was his 2005 monograph A diéta. A magyar rendek és az országgyűlés, 1708–1792 [The Diet. The Hungarian estates and the parliament, 1708–1792] (Budapest, Osiris), which became the fundamental work in the field. Although attention was paid to the social historical background (first and foremost to the fundamental role of the bene possessionatus nobility, the prosperous landowning gentry in the counties, and, later, the Diets) both in this monograph and in Szijártó’s subsequent collection of studies, entitled Nemesi társadalom és politika: Tanulmányok a 18. századi magyar rendiségről [Noble society and politics: Studies on the history of the estates in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Universitas, 2006), in his later works, Szijártó offered more thorough and nuanced discussions of the social-historical aspects of institutional change. In his 2016 book A 18. századi Magyarország rendi országgyűlése [The Diet in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Országgyűlés Hivatala) and in his 2017 DSc thesis Emberek és struktúrák a 18. századi Magyarországon: A politikai elit társadalom- és kultúrtörténeti megközelítésben [Individuals and structures in eighteenth-century Hungary: The political elite from the perspective of social and cultural history], he provided a thorough analysis of the roles of the bene possessionatus nobility and the career paths of political actors. However, in these works, the change of perspective became manifest on another level, namely in Szijártó’s growing interest in questions concerning cultural history and the history of political discourse. In fact, these latter aspects come to the fore in Estates and Constitution, too, which is a “modified, extended, and restructured” version of Szijártó’s abovementioned 2016 book in Hungarian (p.xi). In a sense, Szijártó’s recent monograph in English can be seen as a concise account of the main findings of this long-term research project, adjusted to the extent necessary to specific circumstances arising from the situation when a scholar aims to speak to a “global” audience about historical problems rooted in chiefly “local” contexts.

The structure of the book is quite user-friendly, and although its primary character is that of a monograph, it could also be used as a handbook. It has been broken into three sections, each of which is divided into chapters, which again have several subsections, most of them a few pages long. Broadly speaking, each of the main parts covers a fundamental aspect of eighteenth-century politics and is written from a specific analytical viewpoint. In the first part (Chapters 1–2), the principal structural elements of early modern Hungarian politics and the machinery of the Diet are outlined; in the second (Chapters 3–7), the parliament is presented as a functioning institution and the main locus of political practice; in the third (Chapters 8–10), some aspects of the political discourse and social-cultural history are in the foreground, alongside the historiography of the early modern parliament.

One of the main strengths of the book is its primarily holistic outlook. Szijártó presents institutional, social-cultural, and intellectual issues as different aspects of one and the same history. If one reads the analyses carefully, one gets a detailed picture of their complex interrelations, at least in the context of the eighteenth-century parliamentary history of Hungary. In addition, Szijártó’s essentially holistic approach goes hand in hand with his highly sensitive insights into grassroots level phenomena. Big processes and large structures are handled in close relation to the dimension of human agency and everyday practices of parliamentary life, and individual occurrences are never treated as mere illustrations of general tendencies. This feature of the book seems to be all the more important, since the mutual interdependence of these two dimensions becomes manifest on various levels throughout the analyses. Accordingly, the most common narrative structure of the subsections is a sequence consisting of a general account of the overall trends, followed by a thorough analysis of the most relevant cases supporting, nuancing, or modifying the original statements. Of course, this manner of writing history is only possible on the basis of a vast corpus of historical sources, and indeed this can be seen as the backbone of the whole work.

Chapter 1 provides a summary of the most crucial elements of eighteenth-century Hungary’s political system. Szijártó pays particular attention here to the dualism of king and estates, which made eighteenth-century Hungary an estate polity (Ständestaat), and he emphasizes the paramount importance of the tractatus diaetalis, the process of negotiation between the two sides of the political chessboard (pp.12–17). The long-term functioning of the Diet as the main locus of the bargaining process between king and estates demonstrates that the power of the latter proved much more durable in Hungary than in other parts of the empire, since the Habsburgs felt it necessary to convoke the Diet in the country “even after a hiatus of five, ten, or even twenty-five years” (p.18). The historical fundament of the Hungarian Sonderweg, as Szijártó stresses several times in the book, was the Rákóczi War of Independence and the compromise between crown and country which came in its wake, codified in the Treaty of Szatmár, which “stabilized the position of the Hungarian estates, restoring the dualism of king and estates of the previous era” (pp.2, 98–99). The significance of the separate path taken by Hungary became manifest during the War of the Austrian Succession, in the course of which the Hungarian estates remained loyal to Vienna and, as a result, Hungary (unlike the Hereditary Lands and the Czech provinces) was left out of the centralizing and rationalizing reforms of Haugwitz, which “represented a turning point in the political development of the Habsburg Monarchy” (p.99).

After portraying the main institutional factors of the workings of the Diet in Chapter 2, Szijártó goes on to outline one of the main findings of his book, and he demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, a profound change took place in the political agenda of the parliament, leading from confessionalism to the emergence of the dualism of king and estates dominated by constitutional questions. Religious issues, after dominating the debates in the 1710s and the 1720s, were (at least until 1790) omitted from the discussions of the Diets. Denominational divisions lost their former importance, and the defense of different aspects of noble privileges came to the foreground in parliamentary politics. As the investigations in Chapter 4 show, this process made it possible for the estates to take a strong line against the ruler in questions concerning the size of the yearly contribution (contributio) and the nobility’s exemption from taxation. The new situation induced the decrease of the level of polarization within the estates and gave rise to a new form of antagonism vis-à-vis the crown, narrowing the possibility of compromise between king and estates considerably. In Chapter 6, this sharpening of divisions between crown and country is also demonstrated on the level of the political decisions of the deputies, displaying the process in the course of which “oppositionality and government loyalty” became “mutually exclusive choices” (p.171).

The main social-historical component of this process was the emancipation of the well-to-do gentry, the bene possessionatus nobility from the aristocracy, which came to dominate the political life of the counties in the course of the first half of eighteenth century. In the background of this process, which is described in Chapter 9, we find the dissolution of the old networks of familiaritas between the aristocracy and the lesser nobility and the takeover of the power of the landowning prosperous gentry in the counties. The breaking up of the system of patron-client relations resulted in a significantly higher degree of social and political independence of the bene possessionatus nobility. On the institutional level, the growing significance of the well-to-do gentry manifested itself at first at the county assemblies, where it became the leading political force.

However, several aspects of the institutional development of the Diet in the eighteenth century (most importantly the decision-making mechanisms and the increase of the importance of the county deputies, as shown in Chapter 7) make it clear that the bene possessionatus nobility was able to reassert itself on the level of parliamentary politics as the predominant political factor. Undoubtedly, the “noble-national” movement in Hungary in 1790 was part of this process: in fact, it can be seen as an attempt by the well-to-do gentry to reshape the political system of the country according to its own interests and values, aiming to convert its local dominance in the counties to real political power on the “national” level.

At this point, the relevance of the perspective of intellectual history, from which Chapter 8 is written, becomes clear. Through textual analyses of various sources, Szijártó verifies his thesis concerning polarization between king and estates as the “central tendency of politics” (p.263) on the level of political discourse as well. Szijártó demonstrates inter alia the rise of the term “constitution” in the political parlance of the Diets, a process that can be seen as a main element of the conceptual foundations of nineteenth-century developments in political discourse and in the politics of grievance in general.

Henrik Hőnich
University of Public Service, Thomas Molnar Institute for Advanced Studies
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Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism. Edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. 416 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.171

At the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Jarosław Kaczyn˙ski, head of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, explained his strong anti-immigrant position by claiming that the Polish nation had a historic mission to defend Christian Europe from enemies who wanted to destroy it. He has also used this argument to justify homophobia and attacks on women’s rights. Similar claims resound across Eastern Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made similar claims about Hungary, as has Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša for Slovenia. Pro-Western Ukrainians intent on joining the European Union also see their country as a bulwark protecting Europe, albeit against a different enemy: Russian imperialism. In each case, nationalist leaders look back in time and translate histories of wars fought against Bolsheviks, Ottoman armies, and Tatar invaders into myths of heroic martyrdom in order to cast themselves at the center of present-day struggles to define where Europe is and what it should mean to those who live there. Eastern Europe today abounds with visions of nations vying with one another to be the rampart of Europe, a bastion protecting a continent surrounded by enemies. Why are these myths so ubiquitous? And what gives them such power?

The urgency of these questions today makes Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism, edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher, especially welcome. The fourteen essays in the volume analyze examples of rampart or bulwark nation myths in a variety of contexts, ranging across the region from Russia and Ukraine to Hungary and Romania and in time from the late fifteenth century to the present-day. A helpful introductory essay by the editors frames the entire volume, highlighting the power of these myths to create meaning through the cultural imagination of space. Bulwark discourses abound, they write, “where it is necessary to strengthen identity and culture, to define a society in demarcating it from Others and to imagine a territory” (p.11). They suggest that competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to define imperial spaces as national space made Eastern Europe especially fertile ground for this kind of myth-making, imparting fantasies of national sacrifice and civilizational defense with a cultural power still felt across the region today.

Many of the essays in this volume illuminate the ways in which visions (and narratives) of borderlands and border security are so often shaped by beliefs in a civilizing mission. In her own contribution, Heidi Hein-Kircher shows how the city of L’viv (Polish: Lwów) was imagined in late nineteenth-century travel guides as an outpost of Polish civilization surrounded by barbarism. Echoes of this theme can be found in other essays, for instance Paul Srodecki’s comparison of anti-Bolshevik ideology in interwar Poland and Hungary, Philipp Hofeneder’s account of Polish and Ukrainian history textbooks in Habsburg Galicia, and Steven Seegel’s fascinating analysis of maps and the politics of mapmaking in East Central Europe. Volodymyr Kravchenko explains that bulwark myths were largely absent from Ukrainian national discourse until the late nineteenth century, when historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi made this trope a staple element in the national historical imagination. By contrast, several essays—Stephen Norris’s on the complex afterlives of artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s famous painting Warriors and Kerstin Jobst’s on the cultural construction of an Orthodox Crimea—reveal how Russian imperial ideology legitimized itself through historical myths about the origins and early history of Slavic Orthodoxy. These studies show that the bulwark myths so central to the cultural geography of Eastern Europe were not always imagined in opposition to enemies from the East. Sometimes the threat came from the West.

Other contributors highlight the sacral power that modern nationalist bulwark myths drew from older languages of religious threat. Kerstin Weiand locates some of the earliest instances of a pan-European bulwark discourse in late fifteenth-century speeches made to the Imperial Diet by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, councilor to Emperor Frederick III and later Pope Pius II. In them, he called on Christian Europeans to unite against an implacably savage Ottoman Muslim enemy. His warnings, which circulated in print form throughout Europe, found especially receptive audiences in Poland and Hungary. Centuries later, nationalists in both countries would refashion this history into dramatic myths of resistance and martyrdom on the eastern marches of European civilization. But this ideological transformation was not peculiar to Catholic societies. According to Liliya Berezhnaya, the Russian Orthodox monks of the Pochaiv Lavra monastery remade their collective memories of conflict with an expanding Ottoman Empire into a vision, updated for the nineteenth century, of Orthodoxy under attack from Jews, Polish Catholics, and a host of cultural ills coming to Russia from the West. Zaur Gasimov proposes that the religious origins of modern bulwark myths were even more malleable, showing in his essay how émigré Turkic intellectuals from the Soviet Union imagined Atatürk’s Turkey as a (non-Christian) bulwark defending Turkish and Turkic culture from Communism.

This collection reflects the diversity of bulwark myths in Eastern Europe. It has less to say about causes: why do bulwark myths spring to life at some times and lie dormant at others? The volume also leaves readers to draw their own connections between bulwark discourses in Eastern Europe and myths of civilizational defense at work in other places. Today, no less than in Piccolomini’s age, calls to defend the bastions of Christian civilization resound throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. As this volume shows so well, bulwark myths persist in many places. Rampart Nations is an excellent guide to a problem that shows no signs of going away.

Paul Hanebrink
Rutgers University
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The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 367 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.174

Over the course of the last thirty years, we have seen a growing amount of research in the field of cultural nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe. Most of these endeavors have aimed to examine, within multidisciplinary frameworks, the complex political, economic, and social roles of the various kinds of cultural activities in the area of great empires and “small nations.” The Matica and Beyond is indeed the twenty-first book in the National Cultivation of Culture series published by Brill.

The book is a collection of fifteen works written by cultural historians from all over Europe. The fifteen texts result in a surprisingly consistent volume, as the essays are methodologically and thematically very similar, and they draw on an array of exciting new sources and offer similarly engaging conclusions. The editors of the book, however, faced challenges in combining the essays to form a meaningful whole.

As far as the geographical range of the studies is concerned, the book consists of six manuscripts dealing with cultural organizations in the Habsburg Monarchy, whereas the rest of the papers deal with other European associations, though these organizations and associations all had the same essential purpose: to enhance national and ethnic awareness among members of a certain nation.

In the introduction, Joep Leerssen presents the structure of the book and explains the extent to which the phenomenon of Matica has been investigated or marginalized both politically and in the scholarship. Leerssen also calls attention to significant similarities and links in the national movements under discussion and the surprisingly important role of the Maticas in linguistic turns and geopolitical changes.

The first essay, Zsuzsanna Varga’s “The Buda University Press and National Awakenings in Habsburg Austria,” is about the roles of publishing in strengthening national consciousness and identity among Slavic peoples. Varga examines numerous books written in vernacular languages and spellings, especially works by Serbs, who played a leading role in the struggle of the Empire’s Slavic nations for autonomy and independence.

Magdalena Pokorna provides the first essay in the collection that offers insights into a Matica’s activity. Pokorna offers a detailed discussion of one of the crucial Maticas for the Slavs, the Czech one. It is nicely complemented by “The Slovak Matica, Its Precursors and Its Legacy” by Benjamin Bossaert and Dagmar Kročanova. Due to the different political circumstances, these two Maticas did not have similar operational policies, but they did have the common aim of establishing stronger connections with the other Slavic nations (Croats, Poles, Serbs, Slovenians, Bulgarians, etc.) in order to achieve greater cultural and national independence in opposition to the dominant German culture. The fourth essay is a short overview by Miloš Řezník of actions taken by Lusatian Serbs, Ruthenians, and Czech Silesians. Řezník offers insights into the ways in which regionalism and nationalism often collided.

Marijan Dović offers an essay on the work of the Slovenian Matica, in which he explains how this organization was not just a place for book publishing, but also for self-education and common thinking about issues like the school system and the media culture.

Daniel Barić discusses the emergence of the Dalmatian Matica and how it later became part of the Croatian one. Barić claims that “the first maticas were founded in the South Slav area in a time of redefinition of the nation, hence there were competing terms in use” (p.119). He also states that “the multiple engagement of the Croatian maticas mirrors the efforts made to cultivate and celebrate a distinctiveness within a multicultural environment” (p.134). Ljiljana Guschevska’s essay on Macedonian societies details how intellectuals struggled to form a multilayered Macedonian identity.

The essay entitled “Language, Cultural Associations, and the Origins of Galician Nationalism, 1840–1918” deals with the strengthening of language identity, which was meant to be a source of power in boosting nationalism. Philippe Martel offers another example of a struggle for more powerful nationalism through language use in an essay focusing on the “Impossible Occitan Nation.” Martel foregrounds the absurdity of the idea of Occitania due to language and identity anachronisms.

In the Netherlands, in contrast, the rule was one language, two states, and many nations. The essay “Educational, Scholarly, and Literary Societies in Dutch-Speaking Regions, 1766–1886” by Jan Rock deals with three main types of organizations and clubs: philological, intermediating, and non-governmental. These clubs strengthened the language identity of different communities in Netherlands. The author also perceives the similarities with the model of governing the Maticas, although “one major difference lies in the political contexts and therefore in the nature of governmental support” (p.204).

The struggle for independence among the Welsh sought cultural and linguistic autonomy rather than political autonomy. Marion Loffler, in her contribution to the volume, presents a nuanced comparison of Welsh cultural nationalism with the aspirations of Slavic people and explains the major differences between pan-Slavism and pan-Celticism. Similarly, Roisín Higgins emphasizes the importance of newspapers in strengthening the Irish nation. She relates the Young Ireland movement with the Illyrian one which began to rise to prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century in Croatia.

Jörg Hackmann focuses in his essay on the roles of school associations in the rise of national consciousness. Through school associations and struggles for language rights in the gymnasiums in bigger, linguistically mixed cities such as Riga, Tartu, and Jeglava, the Estonians, Latvians, and Germans tried to resist the russification of their communities.

Iryna Orlevych presents the activities of a crucial organization which was responsible for cultivating a sense of national consciousness in Austrian Galicia. During almost a century of its existence, Matica was a very powerful pillar of the Church and an important element of Galicia’s cultural identity. Later, it lost its fundamental role (to strengthen cultural identity) and became a political organization of the Russian Empire.

The last paper in the book deals with specific aspirations of Tatars, among the most marginalized people in the Russian Federation. The author of the paper, Usmanova, examines Tatarian cultural and educational opportunities in Russia, touching on all the obstacles to a possible strengthening of the Russian Tatars’ identity.

In a slightly complex conclusion, Alexei Miller claims that “the Maticas and comparable organizations were part of the history of European peripheral nationalisms, but they were also a part of the history of Empires” (p.362). Therefore, as Dović formulates it, Maticas were the “heart in the body of the nation and [...] literature was its blood” (p.104).

The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe is definitely a unique and successful scientific project which has the novelty to give a detailed overview of the activities and roles of cultural organizations, such as the Matica itself, in Central and Southeastern Europe. It unquestionably constitutes a contribution to the secondary literature which will be of interest to historians, sociologists, and scholars of culture, since it concerns a very dynamically developing field and draws attention to an array of intriguing topics, such as the role of individuals in these organizations and the complex relationship between regional and national identities. The volume is particularly interesting in part because of the way in which it treats key moments and the Maticas’ key roles in the so-called national awakenings among Slavic nations. Some papers would definitely have been more interesting if they had been accompanied by explanatory figures. Overall, the book offers an overview of and insights into the ways in which the Maticas and many other associations, such as councils, clubs, cultural and art societies, and political parties, acted in order to strengthen regional and ethnic components of nations in Europe. The book successfully fulfills its ambition to emphasize in a multidisciplinary way the importance of cultural associations in the political and social histories of “small European nations.”

Ivan Brlić
Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar
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Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives. Conference report.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.178

Organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), the conference entitled Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives took place in the form of eight sessions between November 4 and 26, 2020. Due to the ongoing pandemic, instead of an in-person event, the organizers conducted the conference online, streamed via Zoom and Youtube, thus making it accessible to a wide international audience.

The most important goal of the conference was, according to the website of ENRS, “to assess the current state of Holocaust memory research” in the light of increasing globalization, as well as various new trends. Through seven key topics and a final roundtable discussion, the speakers explored issues connected to the interaction of universal and local Holocaust memory and ethical questions related to them. Each session started with a keynote address, which was followed by presentations by young and established scholars and the observations of a commentator.

The first session, which addressed the practical ethics of Holocaust memory, started with Piotr Cywiński’s (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) keynote, in which he delineated the development and major turning points of Holocaust remembrance. The following four presenters highlighted certain episodes and practices of the memorialization process, such as the role that Raul Hilberg, eminent scholar of the Holocaust, played in the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Olof Bortz emphasized that Hilberg wanted to make the museum’s exhibit as authentic as possible, which generated tensions between different views on how to present the past and thus contributed to the discussion on commemoration.

The second session was dedicated to the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of documents compiled by the Oneg Shabbath group in the Warsaw ghetto, which is considered “the earliest historiography of the Holocaust.” Keynote speaker Omer Bartov (Brown University) linked the Ringelblum Archive to the main topic of the conference by discussing four factors: the increasing importance of history writing from below, local histories, the Holocaust as a first-person history, and the benefits of these new approaches. According to Bartov, the term “industrial killing,” which is so often applied to the Holocaust, is problematic because it obscures the fact that in many cases the victims stood face to face with the perpetrators before they were killed. Research on these atrocities and the relations between Jews, their neighbors and the Germans, as well as individual experiences can further an understanding of the nuances and dynamics of the Holocaust.

Bartov’s points were supported by the following presentations, which discussed various characteristics of the Ringelblum Archive. Katarzyna Person, for instance, focused on the situation of women who were forced to become prostitutes in the ghettos and the assessment of their role by the historians of the archive. By placing a relatively small group in the center of the investigation, Person could provide a more detailed picture of their agency, the difference between sexual barter and rape, and the specificities of how they were written about in the archive.

The third session, which dealt with “borderland memories,” began with Éva Kovács’s (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute) keynote lecture. Kovács explored and compared various spaces of remembrance: a private Holocaust museum in Rwanda, an exhibition about Srebrenica in Budapest, and the efforts to uncover mass graves of Holocaust victims in Minsk. She then elaborated on the intertwining local and transnational memory, touching on idealized or suppressed local remembrance too. The following panel presentations also addressed the topics of landscapes of memory and remembrance culture, among them the project description of Nadja Danglmaier and Daniel Wutti. The educational project aimed to integrate the common cultural history (including the Holocaust) of Carinthia, a border region between Austria and Slovenia, into school curricula on both sides of the border.

The session “Overlooking the Local Dimensions of the Holocaust,” which raised questions concerning linguistics and translation, started with a keynote lecture by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Minister of Culture of Lithuania and an academic, about the diaries of Jewish children in Vilnius. Three of the panelists then discussed Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. Dorota Głowacka, for instance, explored the mistranslations in the movie’s languages: Polish, Yiddish, German, French, and how this implicitly conveyed an image of anti-Semitic Poles who were ignorant of Jewish culture. Roma Sendyka’s presentation, on the other hand, suggested a possible solution to this problem, namely the re-translation of the Polish bystanders’ lines.

The fifth session addressed current shifts and methods in Holocaust studies, such as avantgarde environmental history, as discussed by keynote speaker Ewa Domańska (Adam Mickiewicz University), which aims to reveal the complex relationship between the events of the Holocaust and their environment and thus to construct holistic knowledge. In her presentation, Hannah Wilson presented three objects connected to survivors of the Sobibór death camp and how the meaning of these objects changed from generation to generation.

Jackie Feldman of Ben-Gurion University delivered the keynote for the sixth session. Feldman touched on the digital turn, the end of the age of the witness and the ways in which various technological solutions may alter the existing memoryscape. Liat Steir-Livny’s presentation on the short film Eva.Stories was strongly linked to this topic. The movie, which is a compilation of Instagram stories, managed to foster interest among masses of young people, and Steir-Livny analyzed the components of its success.

The topic of the seventh session was the connection between global and local memory, to which Daniel Levy of Stony Brook University provided an adept background in his keynote address. The entanglement of national, cosmopolitan, and global memoryscapes was also tackled by Agnieszka Wierzcholska, who discussed the difficulties that emerged when she was pressed to satisfy the expectations of both Polish and German audiences with her research on social relations in pre-war and post-war Tarnów.

During the final roundtable discussion, Éva Kovács, Ewa Domańska, Daniel Levy, and Jackie Feldman summarized the core issues of the conference, raising new questions and discussing new trends and possibilities in Holocaust research. All in all, the conference offered a rich variety of topics examined by some of the most eminent researchers, and it offered young scholars opportunities to talk about their research. Since the sessions were recorded, they are still available both on the Youtube channel and the Facebook site of ENRS. Thus, those who missed the original event can still listen to them. This can be recommended not only to Holocaust scholars but to anyone interested in contemporary history.

Borbála Klacsmann
University of Szeged
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Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities. Edited by Sabrina Ramet. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 360 pp.

DOI: 10.38145/2021.1.181

The volume, published in the series “Routledge Studies in Modern European History,” brings together ten internationally renowned scholars to discuss the challenges that interwar Europe faced. The preface positions it in the wake of other all-embracing volumes looking at interwar Central and Eastern Europe, the most recent examples being Josef Rothschild’s East Central Europe Between the two World Wars (1974), and Ivan T. Berend’s Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (1998). Recent years have witnessed the emergence of new scholarship drawing inspiration from entangled history and looking at continuities in the post-imperial areas, as well as the impact of nationalizing policies on the processes of democratization. Nonetheless, these trends do not seem to have exerted much influence on the structure of this volume, which is articulated through national unities.

Sabrina Ramet uses the first chapter to clarify the aims of this effort: to trace the roots of the failure of democracy in East Central Europe, as well as the impact of this failure on the statuses of minorities, looking at both domestic (instability and political violence) as well as external factors (the economic crisis and the expanding role of Nazi Germany).

In the second chapter, M. B. B. Biskupski investigates the two alternatives with which the Polish leadership was faced, the one represented by Józef Piłsudski, who envisioned a large and inclusive Poland, and the other, a vision of a smaller and nationally homogeneous Poland, championed by Roman Dmowski. Biskupski, who regards these views as respectively “civic patriotism” and “ethnic nationalism,” blames external factors, which led to a downsizing of Poland’s geopolitical perspective and made the federalist option unfeasible. Chapter three, by Sabrina Ramet and Carol Skalnik Leff, focuses on interwar Czechoslovakia, the only country in the area whose political system is usually praised for its democratic nature. Nevertheless, its major weakness was what the authors describe as the “securitization of democracy” against external enemies. In this context, both the Slovak population and minorities (the German, Hungarian, Jewish, and Ruthenian communities) found themselves in a position of subalternity and unevenness. In chapter four, Béla Bodó examines the Hungarian case, focusing on both minorities within the country and Hungarian minorities abroad. While revisionism remained a central issue of foreign policy, minorities enjoyed diverse statuses, ranging from that of the Germans, whose fate was increasingly entangled with the relationship between Hungary and the Third Reich, to the Jews, who were subjected to early anti-Semitic legislation which culminated in the late 1930s. The roots and the idea of the “ethnic privilege” enjoyed by the “state-forming nation” in Romania are central to the chapter written by Roland Clark (chapter five). Clark offers an overview of the social, ethnic, and religious context of the country, which included Transylvania, bringing into the country significant Hungarian and German minorities, and saw antisemitism across the political spectrum. As Clark argues, interwar Romania established itself as an exclusionary type of democracy, which drew on the idea of homogenization of minorities. In chapter six, Christian Promitzer explores the case of interwar Bulgaria, retracing its political evolution from the first postwar years of the Agrarian bloc, marked by land reform, to the following shift towards authoritarianism, albeit not fascism, as the later head of the Communist Party, Georgi Dimitrov, would have claimed. This was reflected in the attitude towards the Turkish minority, which was characterized both by increasing discrimination and an attempt to forge an alliance with its most conservative sectors in order to marginalize Kemalism. This marked a difference between the treatment of the Turkish minority by the Bulgarian state and the treatment of Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks, whose assimilation was actively pursued. Promitzer also shows that the contemporary influx of Bulgarian refugees was directly connected with increasing pressure on internal minorities. In chapter seven, Stipica Grgić offers a focused discussion of the Yugoslav state, whose weaknesses and disparities in standards were laid bare in its process of unification. In the background of the rising tensions between centralist and federalist strands as well as widespread instability, non-Slavic minorities experienced pressure, enacted also through the land reform, but they nonetheless tried to establish agreements with government parties. In chapter eight, Bernd J. Fischer offers insights into the turbulent interwar years in Albania, with the ascent to power of King Zog, who created an authoritarian power in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to achieve modernization, unity, and stability. While minorities did not represent a troublesome issue for interwar Albania, the existence of an ethnically Albanian population outside the border of the state conditioned both domestic and international relations. The only thematic contribution (Chapter nine) to the book, authored by Robert Bideluex, focuses on peasant parties across East Central Europe. Rejecting the image of backwardness often attached to the agricultural world in Eastern Europe, Bideluex argues that, should they have risen to power, peasant parties would have pursued an alternative (and more human) pattern of development in respect to both liberal capitalist and communist forces. The afterword to the volume, written by Stefano Bianchini, traces similarities and differences among the case studies and positions the political threads of the region in the interwar period, with an initial minimalistic approach to democracy, which included fair elections but not a real democratization of society, and a gradual shift toward authoritarianism, which accelerated after the beginning of the global economic crisis in 1929.

The effort to put together such a comprehensive volume is noteworthy, though the contributions could have been further harmonized. Moreover, the book acknowledges, with uneven efficacy, the entanglements between domestic and international factors in the treatment of minorities in East Central Europe, which, for the first time, found a theoretical protector in the League of Nations. Furthermore, it shows the social background of the authoritarian drive which led to the demise of democracy in the region by the end of the 1930s.

Nonetheless, the reader might get the impression that, in some of the contributions, nations are regarded as pre-existing entities and multinational states are deemed to fail as not founded on consensus. A further contextualization within the wider European context would have shown that the crisis of democracies was hardly exclusive to the Eastern part of the continent. Furthermore, a deterministic view of the fate of Eastern Europe seems to emerge from time to time, reenforced by the fact that the only country geographically located in Eastern Europe which did not turn to socialism after the Second World War—but shared many features with its neighbors in the interwar period—Greece, is excluded from this analysis. While several contributions stand out for clarity and represent recommended reading for students, specialists might have aspired to some more coherence and transnational insights within the volume. However, the volume is timely in analyzing from a historical perspective two issues that still challenge contemporary Europe: the dialectic between liberal democracy and authoritarianism and the relation with the Other.

Francesca Rolandi
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences
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Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 352 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.184

Recently, a small yet growing number of researchers have been working on the transnational history of the socialist countries during the Cold War. Their studies make clear that the socialist countries after the 1950s were far from isolated or autarkic and that these countries developed various transnational connections with the Global South and other parts of the globe. However, while they shed light on various concrete cases of these interconnections, it is often not easy to situate these findings in a larger picture of postwar globalization. The present volume edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-South interconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider history of “alternative globalizations.”

The book consists of an introduction and fourteen essays on political, economic, and cultural aspects of the Soviet and Eastern European connections with the Global South. Many contributors do not adopt the simplistic view of the Cold War as a mere binary confrontation between the two camps and instead depict the story of the East-South entanglements in connection with the activities of the Western counterparts. Furthermore, they often do not regard these relations as a one-sided transfer of socialist modernity from the developed East to the Global South and point out various unintended or surprising impacts on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The introductory essay by the three editors deserves particular attention, since it integrates the essays of the volume and situates the interactions between the Eastern and Southern peripheries in a broader process of postwar globalization.

The first essay, by Mark and Yakov Feygin, offers a well-written overview on the rise and fall of the alternative, anti-imperialist visions of global economy presented at the fora of the United Nations by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s. As Mark and Feygin show, while the socialist countries initially advocated these visions, their adherence to economic bilateralism, the halfway commitment to them, and the accumulating debts to the West fundamentally weakened such visions. The provocative yet stimulating essay by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony also focuses on Soviet economic relations with the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s, but from different standpoint. According to Sanchez-Sibony, none of the visions of an alternative modernity were the main motive behind the Soviet economic entanglements with the Global South. Rather, these entanglements were motivated by the desire to increase economic exchange with the outer world in the margins of capitalist globalization. While these two articles differ widely from each other on the role of socialist modernity, they are, in fact, mutually complementary and are of special value in that they both further a rethinking of the processes and characteristics of postwar economic globalization.

On a more concrete topic of the interconnections, Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel explore Vietnamese labor migration into Eastern Europe. The Vietnamese labor program was initially designed as a means to help Vietnam, but as the economic crisis and labor shortage in Eastern Europe deepened, it became a source of a cheap workforce in the receiving countries. Massimiliano Trentin also examines the attitudes of non-Soviet actors by investigating East German policy in the Middle East. He points out that because of its rivalry with West Germany and its own economic interests, East Germany sometimes behaved autonomously in the region.

As to the cultural relations with the Global South, Łukasz Stanek investigates the interactions between Eastern Europe, West and North Africa, and the Middle East in the field of architecture. To deal with their “weak” bargaining positions, Eastern European actors in West Africa and the Middle East behaved flexibly, which made them highly instrumental for local elites in these areas. Marung examines Soviet Africanists’ activities concerning African agricultural problems. The failure of the Soviet agricultural model in Africa urged these scholars to rethink Soviet agricultural policy at home. The impact of transnational relations on the domestic politics of the socialist countries was also examined by Kalinovsky. He analyzes the interrelations between the Soviet policies in its own South and in the Global South, and he concludes that the Soviet attempt to instrumentalize the regions of Central Asia and Caucasia as a showcase for development in the Global South backfired. In fact, it revealed the weaknesses of the model and encouraged resistance against the regime in these Soviet republics. Maxim Matusevich focuses on the strained relations between the Soviet authorities and the African students at Soviet universities. Whereas the Soviet authorities wished to educate African students about socialist modernization, in practice, these students often emerged as educators of their fellow Soviet students. These interesting case studies make clear that socialist entanglements with the South were not a simple diffusion of a certain model, but the developed socialist countries were also influenced and reshaped by the South.

At the same time, it should be noted that the transnational approaches by the socialist countries, like every other such endeavor, had its limits. In the case of socialist globalization, the actors from the East often did not show great interest in thinking and acting within a global framework, preferring instead to maximize their own interests. For example, Bogdan C. Iacob presents an interesting case of Balkan scholars’ encounters with the Global South in UNESCO. Using the UNESCO project as a platform for their cause, these scholars emphasized the shared experience of Western European colonialism in the Balkan region and the Global South. But since their aim was Eurocentric rather than transregional, they lost momentum in the global arena. Such limits were also present in the transnational relations cultivated by the oppositional movements in Eastern Europe. Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris examine transregional collaboration between the Polish Solidarność and the oppositional movements in the Global South and conclude that the engagement of Solidarność abroad remained limited in scope, as its reserved attitude toward the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa suggests. Adam F. Kola approaches the limitedness of the Eastern European intellectuals’ internationalism from a different perspective. He examines the reason why Polish intellectuals in the late socialist period avoided postcolonial discourse in emphasizing the “Soviet colonization” of Poland.

While these essays analyze the Soviet and Eastern European entanglements with the decolonizing countries, the essay on Sino-Soviet competition over the Global South by Péter Vámos broadens the scope by introducing the Chinese factor to the discussion. In response to the Chinese attempt to forge a worldwide anti-Soviet coalition, the Soviets coordinated the policies of bloc countries vis-à-vis China in an attempt to isolate it globally. Hanna Jansen examines the intellectual thaw under Khrushchev and the activities of Soviet Orientalists in the context of Sino-Soviet disputes. Quinn Slobodian focuses on East German grassroots internationalism, which emerged as a result of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

The book thus covers geographically and thematically wide-ranging topics of global interconnections that emerged after decolonization in the 1950s. The introductory essay provides a good reference point to position these cases within a wider framework of postwar globalization. On the whole, the book enhances our knowledge of the socialist postwar global entanglements with the Global South, and it will be of use and interest to readers who are curious to know more about the subtle, as yet lesser-known aspects of globalization.

Jun Fujisawa
Kobe University
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1 For example, South Bohemian nobility was discussed by Václav Bůžek and Josef Hrdlička, eds., Dvory velmožů s erbem růže: všední a sváteční dny posledních Rožmberků a pánů z Hradce [The courts of noblemen with rose in the coat of arms: mundane and festive days of the last members of Rosenbergs and lords of Hradec] (Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997); Václav Bůžek and Pavel Král, eds., Slavnosti a zábavy na dvorech a v rezidenčních městech raného novověku [Festivities and entertainment at courts and residences in early modern period] (České Budějovice: Historický ústav Jihočeské univerzity, 2000).

2021_3_Book reviews

Volume 10 Issue 3 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

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Hungary and the Hungarians: Western Europe’s View in the Middle Ages. By Enikő Csukovits. Viella Historical Research 11. Rome: Viella Libreria Editrice, 2018. 233 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

The monograph presented here, published in 2018 by Italian publisher Viella, is the result of many years of research, as the author Enikő Csukovits herself notes. The book, entitled Magyarországról és a magyarokról: Nyugat-Európa magyar-képe a középkorban, took its original form in 2013, and it was submitted by Csukovits for her title as Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Two years later, the monograph was published with the support of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Research Centre for the Humanities as part of the series entitled Monuments of Hungarian History. Dissertations. The committee which read Csukovits’s work (referred to as a “large doctoral thesis”) in 2013 recommended it for publication in Hungarian and in translation. One of the reasons for this recommendation was to make the monograph, which fills a significant gap in scholarship concerning perceptions of cultural others, available to an international readership. Another was to make it possible to identify and indicate the sources of stereotypes concerning Hungarians which are still alive today. The publication of the work in English translation is thus a welcome contribution to the secondary literature.

Since the 2015 edition was reviewed in 2016 in the third volume of The Hungarian Historical Review by Judit Csákó, who summarized its contents, I feel exempt from this obligation. However, it should be noted for the sake of accuracy that I use the term “version” because Csukovits made certain changes to the publication printed in English in comparison to the Hungarian edition. The omission of chapter one, which was dedicated to the ways in which geographical knowledge developed in Medieval Europe, was the most significant of these changes (pp.14–16), though a small fragment of this chapter was integrated into the text of a later part of the English-language edition. Changes related to this were also made in the introduction. In the introduction, Csukovits explains her understanding of the concept of “Western Europe” as a geographical term, not a political term. As Gábor Klaniczay correctly pointed out in the review of the Hungarian-language edition, which was published in the journal Buksz in 2016, we do know why Csukovits made no use of source materials of English and “Spanish” provenance which have been both touched on and made available in the secondary literature in Hungarian. Perhaps it would have been better to replace this concept of Western Europe with reference to the area affected by the Latin-language cultural circle. This would have broadened the scope of inquiry and would have required more time, because, for example, literary output originating in Scandinavia, the Czech lands, and Poland would also have to have been taken into consideration.

When Csukovits was carrying out the proposed dissertation research with the assistance of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the reviewers Edit Madas, Klaniczay, and László Veszprémy suggested sources and publications that she had not yet taken into consideration. They emphasized, however, that she would have to make selections from among the sources and would have to choose the most important sources, which best illustrated the emerging view of Hungary and Hungarian people. On the basis of the overview of the sources offered by Csukovits, one can agree that from time to time an important event made the wider public opinion in Europe pay attention to Hungary. Throughout the Middle Ages, such events included incursions made by pagan Hungarians, the conversion of the Hungarians to Christianity, the Mongol invasion of 1241–1242, and the threat posed to Europe by Ottoman Turks. The source material used by Csukovits was adapted to several common themes, and this certainly influenced its selection. She used the sources which she herself considered most important.

In my view, a certain disparity within the range of source materials can be felt, and the sources from the Árpád Era are treated too selectively and laconically. Despite the situation indicated by Csukovits concerning the recognition, availability, and the status of study of sources, the center of gravity in her discussion visibly moved to the material originating from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and not only on account of the quantity of sources or their accessibility, but also because of the research undertaken by Csukovits earlier. Csukovits used the listing of source texts published by Albin Ferenc Gombos more than eighty years ago (Catalogus fontium historiae Hungaricae aevi ducum et regeum ex stirpe Arpad descendentium ab anno Christi DCCC usque ad annum MCCCI) as a kind of guide to sources about Hungary in the period up to the early fourteenth century and thus corresponding to the Árpád Era. No such list is available for the source material concerning late medieval Hungary. Catalogus is a kind of an overview of source texts, and as has been shown by historians in recent decades, it is far from complete. László Veszprémy and Tamás Körmendi, for instance, have pointed out its deficiencies.

Csukovits has successfully taken into consideration the source groundwork without limitations from the perspective of genre, and this constitutes one of the indisputable merits of her work. In addition to historiographical sources, she has also used other sources which have been repeatedly omitted or used at best sporadically, for example descriptions of pilgrimages, travels, reports of legations, monuments of cartography, short stories, and chivalric romances. Csukovits emphasizes that knowledge about the Hungarian people and Hungary had been preserved in different texts, though she stresses that since they were handwritten, these texts were not always available to the persons interested. Csukovits points out that many of the resultant records did not survive, and thus it is difficult to say whether it is possible to obtain comprehensive knowledge about notions prevalent in the Middle Ages as the result of the research she has undertaken. One can also agree with the conclusion that there were no collections in Europe that would have contained the sum of knowledge about Hungary and its residents, to say nothing of sources that would have taken into consideration diverse opinions on the matter. Csukovits also points out that the appellation of Hungary appears in the monuments of medieval cartography more often than designations referring to other countries of Central Eastern Europe. Csukovits offers an appropriate set of 26 maps of the world (pp.70–75, 189–91). The above observation could also be applied to historiographical sources, which can be shown by at least looking through indexes to the publisher Monumenta Germaniae Historica series Scriptores, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum.

Csukovits rightly pays attention to the meaning of ethnonyms and terms used in relation to Hungarians, especially in the period before their conversion to Christianity. However, it is possible here to have reservations about the exhaustiveness of her discussion of the exoethnonyms which were used to describe Hungarians in the past. She limits herself to a relatively small group of them: Saracens, Huns, and Avars (pp.18–19), leaving the others unmentioned. Meanwhile, on the basis of the list compiled by Gombos, it is possible to indicate ethnonyms used to describe Hungarians which often are found in sources related to one another by filiation, such as Hagarites, which gains in importance in the context of the opinion of Ekkehart IV of Sankt Gallen, contained in Events of Sankt Gallen, who expressed a negative opinion in the matter of identifying Magyars with Hagarites. Among other ethnonyms which were used to describe Hungarians in other sources, and which bore specific associations or contents, the following should be mentioned: Jews, Turks, Massagets, Parthians, Scythians, Slavs, Sarmatians.

In the context of primarily Hun-Hungarian identification, which existence was only signalised by Csukovits (pp.18–19), in our opinion, it is also worth paying attention to accounts included in the explicitly connected texts Deeds of the bishops of Tongeren, Maastricht and Liège by Heriger of Lobbes and, based on them Deeds of the bishops of Liège by Egidio of Orval which show the overlap of motifs with the account included in the list of monk of St. Germain to Dado, bishop of Verdun from the beginnings of the tenth century regarding famine and the abandonment of dwellings by Huns or Hungarians, while in the background one also overhears the echo of the Latin word “hungry” and the Old High German “hungar.”

Csukovits also indicates the meaning of terms used to denote Hungarians before the Hungarians adopted Christianity and later used by participants in the crusades when they met Hungarians, such as pagans, barbarians, uncouth, and cruel (pp.19 and 23). In the context of abovementioned terms, attention should also be paid to the role of term gens, which is used in some sources as an exoethnonym of Hungarians, primarily in accounts about the abandonment by the Hungarians of Scythia and incursions at the end of the ninth century and throughout much of the tenth. Attention should also be paid to the role of more complex terms used alongside the ethnonym (H)Ungari, such as: crueler than all monsters, fiercest, most abominable, dirtiest, most burdensome, strongest, proficient in the use of arms, deceitful, worst, bestial, strong, and hostile to God.

Expressions which were used to designate Hungarians in the sources also constitute a form of information about perceptions of them: unknown, non-mentioned tribe, our former enemies, enemies hitherto unknown to those peoples, or new enemies. Csukovits mentions this problem laconically in relation to the record Annals of Saint Bertin (p.17). The account preserved in The Younger Chronicle of Ebersberg and the letter of Prince of Austria Albert I Habsburg from 1291 to the bishop of Passau, which traces the Hungarians back to a serpent living in marshes, are not among the sources used by Csukovits.

One might have expected Csukovits to pay attention to the range of influence of individual identifications, motifs, descriptions, and their perceived “popularity” in a monograph which summarizes perceptions of Hungarians and Hungary. As I noted above, she is aware that it is impossible to obtain a comprehensive overview of views on this subject due to the status of the sources. Nevertheless, she should have paid more consistent attention to both the quantity of preserved manuscripts and the ways in which the respective texts were used by later authors. Had she done so, it would have been possible to obtain at least an approximate view of the popularity and thus influence of given perceptions. One notes a certain inconsistency here. In the case of e.g. Austrian chronicle of 95 monarchs (p.37) and the chronicles written by Domenico da Gravina and Giovanni Villani and Matteo Villani (pp.30, 128), Csukovits pays attention to the significance of the number of preserved manuscripts of these chronicles and their popularity. She also notes, in relation to the work World Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel, not only its publication in Latin or German but also the number of preserved copies (p.66, footnote 260; p.167). She similarly takes into consideration the manuscript tradition of Description of Eastern Europe (p.78) and the chronicles written by Jakob Unrest (p.145, footnotes 114–15).

Csukovits devotes no attention to the so-called manuscript tradition in the case of account preserved in the chronicle by Regino of Prüm (p.18), though it would have sufficed to refer to the study written by Wolf-Rüdiger Schleidgen (Die Überlieferungsgeschichte der Chronik des Regino von Prüm, Mainz: Gesellschaft für mittelrheinsiche Kirchengeschichte, 1977). She also gives no consideration to its influence, either direct or indirect, on subsequent historiography, for instance on editions of Hungarian gesta or on Annals of Metz, Chronicle by Annalista Saxo or the written by Ekkehard of Aura, Otto of Freising, Godfrey of Viterbo, and Martin of Opava, which were widely read in the Middle Ages. In the case of History of the archbishops of Salona and Split by Thomas of Split, which she does discuss (pp.52–53), the problem of the manuscript tradition of this work and its influence on subsequent historiography was omitted.

Csukovits emphasizes that the conversion to Christianity by Hungarians had a vital significance in shaping views of Hungarians to the west. She also assigns a vital role to the positive attitude of Hungarians towards pilgrims during the times of King Saint Stephen, and she associates the appearance of mentions with a negative tone, like the visions of pagan Hungarians, preserved in descriptions of crusades with the defense by Hungarians of their belongings against newcomers. She also points out that Hungarians themselves and their rulers shaped their image when they made pilgrimages, waged war, or went on missions to the west.

In this context, her failure to devote attention to the influence of monuments of Hungarian historiography on opinions concerning Hungarians and Hungary in the west leaves the reader with a certain sense of dissatisfaction. She would have done well to have included, alongside her discussion of sources mentioned to point out views emphasizing the affluence of Hungary of the time, to note the reference to the image of Hungary known in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries as pastures of the Romans, especially since she attempted also to use records of a chorographic and geographic character. This term appears inter alia, as it is believed, in texts related by filiation or resultant, under the influence of Hungarian historiographic records, such as Hungarian-Polish Chronicle, Verse chronicle of Stična, and the History of the Archbishops of Salona and Split by Thomas of Split. It also appears, as noted by Csukovits, in Louis VII’s Journey of Orient by Odo of Deuil, where the term granary of Julius Caesar is used, and in Description of Eastern Europe, but in both cases Csukovits does not note that the terms refer to Hungary (pp.24, 75–82). A panorama of sources which were created outside the area of Hungary, and which describe the land as the pastures of the Romans is complemented by the source known as The Description of Lands, quite laconically in relation to Hungary but baselessly escaping the notice of Hungarian historians (it has been dated to the years between 1255 and 1257/1260).

In the context of shaping the view of Hungarians and Hungary in the west, the chronicle of the world by Alberich of Troisfontaines was omitted. Alberich of Troisfontaines, it is assumed, gathered information from his Hungarian informants, who knew the Hungarian historiographic records. Csukovits would have done well to have taken into consideration the influence of Hungarian chronicles issued in print at the end of Middle Ages, copies of which found their way to the west as early as the end of the fifteenth century, though this would have required painstaking inquiry. In the case of the first of these works, Andreas Hess’ chronicle from 1473, only ten of an estimated print run of 240 are known. The fact that the copies have been preserved to this day in library collections in Western Europe indicates the interest with which they met. Similarly, transcripts of the chronicle issued by Johannes Menestarffer (Wien 1481, issued in print in 1473) have also been preserved in the Archdiocesan Library in Pécs, and the text of Hartmann Schedel’s collection is available at the Bavarian State Library. The German translation of Jan Thuróczy’s chronicle, which was issued in print in 1488 and was created in Bavaria after 1490, is preserved in the Heidelberg University Library. Each of these items would have been worth including among these kinds of testimonials.

The abovementioned handwritten copies and translations of texts of Hungarian chronicles confirm E. Csukovits’s conclusions are based only on works of Henry of Mügeln and Jakob Unrest. All of these texts are a sign of an unabated interest in Hungarians and their country in neighboring Austrian lands or more widely Austrian-Bavarian lands (p.39). As was noted by Veszprémy in his review, the omission of the role of familiarity with The Deeds of the Hungarians by Simon of Kéza in the Apennine Peninsula does not allow for a full assessment of the shaping of views of the Hungarians and Hungary from the end of thirteenth century.

Csukovits should have included in her discussion of monuments of Hungarian historiography that shaped views concerning Hungarians and Hungary the transcripts of handwritten Hungarian chronicles which were either transcribed by authors of foreign origin or were created in the West or found their way there in the Middle Ages.

Csukovits rightly includes Österreichische Chronik by Jakob Unrest, parish priest of Sankt Martin am Techelsberg in Carinthia, in sources discussing Hungarians and Hungary. She suggests, however, that, although this is not explicitly shown in the source text, the parish priest from Carinthia compared Turkish and Hungarian incursions into Carinthia from the 1480s with a plague of locusts (p.148). In this context, it is possible to point out that metaphors comparing Hungarians to locusts appear primarily, though not exclusively, in descriptions of Hungarians making incursions into Europe in the first half of tenth century, e.g. in The Chronicle of the Czechs by Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle or history of the two cities by Otto of Freising, and The Chronicle about the Princes of Bavaria by Andreas of Ratisbon.

The suggestions raised by reviewers notwithstanding, which given the breadth of the research topic and the range of potentially relevant sources, should be considered natural. Csukovits’s monograph provides an overview of perceptions concerning Hungarians which covers several centuries and is based on an array of sources diverse in genre and provenance. It also familiarizes the English readership with a research topic undertaken primarily by Hungarian scholars interested in perceptions of Hungarians in distant epochs and provides a foundation for further research, for instance of a comparative character. Csukovits’s work also fills at least partly the gap in the research on so-called origines gentium. This gap has been felt in part due to the publication by Akademie Verlag of Alheydis Plassmann’s Origo gentis: Identitäts- und Legitimitätsstiftung in früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Herkunftserzählungen (Orbis mediaevalis. Vostellungswelten des Mittelalters 7, Berlin 2006), in which the question of perceptions concerning Hungarians was not considered at all.

Lesław Spychała
University of Wrocław
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Esterházy Pál és Esterházy Orsolya levelezése [The correspondence between Pál Esterházy and Orsolya Esterházy]. Edited by Noémi Viskolcz and Edina Zvara. Budapest: MTA KIK–Kossuth Kiadó, 2019. 352 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

The work under review is the first in a new series (Esterhazyana), though it is certainly not without precedent. It fits well into the series of works containing the correspondence of prominent couples in the Early Modern era (for instance, the correspondence between Tamás Nádasdy and his wife Orsolya Kanizsai, the correspondence between Pál Nyáry and his wife Kata Várday, and the correspondence between Miklós Esterházy and his wife and the daughter of Kata Várday, Krisztina Nyáry). It also constitutes an important addition to the systematic study and publication of documents concerning the Esterházy family and, in particular, Pál Esterházy. Pál Esterházy’s philanthropic and literary activities were thoroughly covered by participants in the 2013 Rebakucs conference, whose presentations were published as a volume of articles two years later. Esterházy’s private life, however, has for the most part been considerably less visible to the research community. Notably, this edition, it seems, will not reveal the secret face of Pál Esterházy either, for although it offers a written record of his 30-year marriage, it seems to provide little more than the morsels of two separately lived lives. As the editors note, “the correspondence is an interesting but often one-sided record of a long marriage. Much is left unsaid in the letters, as if they both had other, separate lives” (p.48).

János Hárich, who compiled Pál Esterházy’s extensive correspondence and other documents, estimated the total collection of letters to number some 7,000 items, 362 of which belong to the correspondence between Esterházy and his first wife, Orsolya Esterházy. This volume presents this body of documents. The primary materials are preceded by four texts. A foreword by István Monok is followed by the “Introduction and Overview of the Research History” by Noémi Viskolcz. Here, it might have been worthwhile to have offered more detail on the lessons to be drawn from the letters and other issues of interest from the perspectives of culture and cultural history. Viskolcz rightly notes that the letters give one considerably more insight into Orsolya’s life, even if she was sometimes terse in her phrasing. Orsolya Esterházy was unable to spell foreign words correctly, and her handwriting suggests lack of regular practice, though it perhaps would be an exaggeration to call it ugly. There was a rapid deterioration in the quality of her handwriting in the 1670s, which Viskolcz suggests may have been the consequence of a medical issue, perhaps a trauma. Indeed, Viskolcz convincingly links this decline to certain events mentioned in the family documents. The rules according to which the letters were transcribed are precise and seem to have been consistently observed, but I will discuss this in more detail in the section on questions concerning transcription.

The introduction is followed by a historical overview entitled “Pál Esterházy and Orsolya Esterházy,” also by Noémi Viskolcz. After Orsolya Esterházy became an orphan at a relatively young age, the fight for control of her property and wealth, the measures surrounding the papal dispensation, and the secret marriage and resulting family scandal all illustrate that, from the outset, the Esterházy family subordinated everything to its marriage strategy. There was no question of a marriage based on love, and indeed one is hard pressed to discern even a trace of the kind of mutual respect that one finds, for example, in the exchange of letters between Tamás Nádasdy and Orsolya Kanizsai. While the introduction promises a glimpse into the history of a long marriage, the letters bear witness to the way in which Pál and Orsolya lived apart for 30 years. It is perhaps not the job of the people who have assembled this collection of primary source materials to deal with such matters, but anyone who wants to subject this body of documents to a meaningful analysis will have to include other aspects that are essential to the study of women’s fates in the seventeenth century. Orsolya very clearly did not learn foreign languages, nor did she move much in society, and the fact that she was often pregnant (she gave birth to at least 17 children) may have been a hindrance, but as the editors of the volume themselves observe, most of the noblewomen of the time were not as drastically cut off from both the culture and society of their time as she was, and it was Pál, her one-time guardian and then husband (who is portrayed as a benevolent man), who may well have been responsible for this. In any case, the question merits more thorough discussion in a comparative framework, if only because the insights thus gained might prompt us to reconsider our image of Pál Esterházy. To give just one example, Pál Esterházy kept admirable control of the family’s papers, incomes, and expenditure, and he kept meticulous records of all items (thus offering a veritable treasure trove for historians today). However, this is perhaps only half the story. The portrait of Pál as a skillful organizer with an almost obsessive compulsion to write seems more complex when one considers that the newly widowed Esterházy kept careful records, down to the last penny, of the costs of his wife’s funeral without, however, bothering to mention when it was held.

The intricate history of the family is followed by a discussion by Erika Kiss of Orsolya’s dowry. The text contains many passages which were cited in the preceding essay, and it might have been preferable for a more cautious editor to have eliminated this redundancy and make the narrative more coherent. That said, Kiss’s contribution is a strong piece of writing, clearly linked both to the letters and to the research that has been carried out in recent years to inventory the Esterházy treasures (I am thinking here first and foremost of the 2006 and 2013 exhibitions). This discussion of the fates of the jewelry, the trousseau, and items of clothing offer some context for the letters and also can be compared with and added to the inventories accessible today, first and foremost Pál’s inventory list, which was previously thought to be jewelry designs.

Turning to the transcriptions of the various texts, several observations can be made. In accordance with the principles underlying the publication of these kinds of texts, the editors have put together a partially standardized text. While the resulting texts preserve features of the language and spelling of the time, we are nevertheless confronted with texts which have never been seen before and which are difficult to search, since they are not entirely standardized. The data concerning the letters (serial numbers, sender, addressee, date) are given, followed by the texts of the letters themselves, the details of the envelope (or the exterior paper in which the letter was sent) and the autograph, and the precise archival notation used today. The texts are clear and legible, but there are some inconsistencies in the use of an exclamation mark in parentheses (“(!)”) to call the reader’s attention to particular details. In the case of text written by Orsolya, for instance, the editors have used this to indicate passages in which she confused the vowels “a” and “o,” for instance spelling the Hungarian word “szolgálatomat” (“my servant”) incorrectly as “szolgálotamat.” However, no indication is given to indicate spots in the texts written by Pál in which he made similar mistakes. It might have been preferable simply to have explained these features of the texts in the introduction instead of cluttering the transcriptions with these kinds of markings. The notes of the critical apparatus and the explanatory notes are not separated from each other, but rather are given in footnotes numbered consecutively. Most of the explanatory notes provide useful information, but again it would have been helpful to have paid a bit more attention to consistency and coherence. For instance, at times the editors seem to think they know, in connection with mention of an approaching coronation, which coronation the texts are referring to (p.345), while at other times they do not (p.333). It also might have been preferable to have included a prosopography as an appendix.

Last but not least, the book is a very impressively designed publication and is clearly the result of conscientious, attentive work. It includes an array of lovely illustrations which have been judiciously selected and it has been attractively typeset. It is a work worthy of the Esterházy family and legacy, and it will serve as an immensely useful source for scholars on the era.

Emőke Rita Szilágyi
Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Literary Studies
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Cameralism and Enlightenment: Happiness, Governance and Reform in Transnational Perspective. Edited by Ere Nokkala and Nicholas B. Miller. With the editorial assistance of Anthony J. La Vopa. New York–London: Routledge, 2020. x+325 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

In the past decade, political economy scholarship has paid considerable attention to the intellectual contexts that fundamentally affected the formation of modern economic thinking by the period of the High Enlightenment. In this course, new findings on interstate relations, the transmission and dispersion of economic ideas, and practices on sub-national and supra-national levels led to a reappraisal of the old labels of mercantilism, physiocracy, and cameralism. Especially in case of the latter, the renewed interest in revising the old interpretation raised doubts concerning its simplistic elements, in particular its elusive character and its identification with German economic theory. The ongoing debates on cameralist thought revealed two main sources of these pretensions in historiography created partly by Anglo-French writers on political economy and partly by German economic historians, both of whom labeled cameralism primarily as a German variation of mercantilism.

By deconstructing this old vision, according to which cameralist policy was a coherent, static, and systematic phenomenon, the most recent investigations have detected subversive synergies and sought to inspect cameralist thought as a changing and European subject, all the while bringing the problems of normative political language, existing practices, and disciplinary boundaries to the fore. Reflecting on these issues, the past years witnessed the evolution of two conceptualizations. The most recent development is connected to Martin Seppel and Keith Tribe (Cameralism in Practice: State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe. Woodbridge–Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2017), which concentrates on the pragmatic side of cameralism, characterizing it as a living and European discourse centered around the local university culture and the coexistence of early modern administration and economy. The other alternative, based on a reevaluation of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi’s place in the eighteenth-century world (Ere Nokkala. From Natural Law to Political Economy: J.H.G. von Justi on State, Commerce and International Order. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2019), underlies this collection of studies under discussion, which, as the title indicates, places itself at the borderlands of political economy and Enlightenment studies, while it seeks to shed light on the gains and losses provided by a transnational perspective.

As for its approach, as the introduction promises, this collection of studies chooses the path of the intellectual history of political economy, and it goes further in the direction of explaining cameralism in terms of political theory. In doing so, the editors of the volume, Ere Nokkala (University of Helsinki) and Nicholas B. Miller (University of Lisbon), stress the key words “porosity” and “blending” as explanatory categories for inspecting cameralism not as a rigid entity, but rather, as they suggest, as an “aspirational practice” and a “lens” through which cameralists were connected to the broader intellectual environment of the eighteenth century (p.16). Exploring the interplays between cameralism and the Enlightenment, the volume strives to draw together the processes of economization and politicization under the so-called “economic turn,” discussing both phenomena as starting points for an evolving cameralist agenda across eighteenth-century Europe. As for the other undertakings in the volume, its aim is to dissolve the old categorization in two senses: in reflecting on the generally accepted prejudices and misinterpretations in historiography and in escaping the discussion of cameralism in the conventional framework of the German Sonderweg theory (p.3).

The thirteen essays in the volume present the findings of three international workshops organized by the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, The Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study and the Research Network: Cameralism across the World of Enlightenment: Nature, Order, Diversity, Happiness between 2016 and 2017.1 The studies offer glimpses in three coherent parts into the main intersections where cameralist thought was influenced by other ideas, ideological frameworks, and practices.

The essays in the first part (“Interactions”) discuss the interrelations between natural law and political economy from various angles, explaining their significance in developing early practice-oriented cameralism to a theory-based state science, with a special account of economic actors. From the point of view of historiography, Lars Magnusson’s criticism targets the reduced scope that drew a close association between cameralist thought and the absolute state. As for the changes in cameralism, he goes on to argue that its transformation into an economy- and natural rights-based discipline was much more influenced by the natural jurisprudence of Christian Thomasius than that of Christian Wolff. This general observation is discussed more thoroughly in Hans Erich Bödeker’s essay, in which he pays particular attention to the reconciliation of private interest with the common good argumentation. As it is presented in his study, the combination of the two in the writings of influential cameralists, such as Justi, Sonnenfels, and Daniel Voss can be traced back to personal intentions and dispositions to the application of voluntaristic and paternalistic traditions in natural law. Therefore, the transformation of the concept of happiness, bringing the idea of state tutelage to the fore by the late eighteenth century, was a hesitant and non-simultaneous process, rather than a strictly chronological one. (p.71)

The other two essays in this part seek to find new evidence of the connection between cameralist thought and international relations, especially international trade and politics. Examining Justi’s publications, both essays go against the old interpretation that equates cameralism with a reduced interest in political power and domestic administration, arguing that in the context of the Europe of the Seven Years War, cameralists faced the challenge of joining the discussion on the “jealousy of trade.” With a focus on the expansion of the cameralist vision to international trade, Ere Nokkala’s essay focuses on the ambitious but less successful campaign of Friedrich II between 1750s and 1760s, which aimed at implementing extensive reforms to Prussia’s domestic and foreign policies. Justi, as one of the promoters of this campaign, had a substantial role in producing publications in which, using the metaphor of “the man of the world,” he described Prussia as a new Athens, whose trading nation lived in a monarchy rather than a republic. This argumentation is approached in Koen Stapelbroek’s essay from the angle of translations and intercultural exchanges. Through a multi-contextual analysis (Austrian, Prussian, French, Dutch), the study offers insights into the history of translating Justi’s anti-Dutch and anti-republican vision on European interstate relations in the 1770s, when, instigated by the rising economic patriotism after the abolition of the Franco-Dutch commercial treaty, the Dutch republic sought to reconfigure its place among European states.

The essays in the second part (“Widening Perspectives”) discuss two classical fields of inquiry, both of which received particular attention in Michel Foucault’s writings, too. Focusing on the interculturality of cameralism, Nicolas B. Miller’s essay describes the interest in populationism as a distinctive characteristic of cameralistic thinking, making cameralists compatible with eighteenth-century comparative science. Emphasizing Justi’s uniqueness among his contemporaries, however, Miller’s argument, which links his efforts to draw general conclusions from comparisons of European populations to the political-moral school that used to be associated with Montesquieu and the Scottish moralists, would have merited a broader explanation. The study fails to recognize the other possible sources of the (German) non-moralizing fashion of comparative political analysis, such as statistics, political geography, natural history, etc. Intellectual kinship is also the central question of Richard Hölzl’s essay. In the framework of presentism, he approaches his subject from the angle of the environmental history of ideas and explores the intersection of the three areas demarcated by the Foucauldian ideas of gouvernementalité and biopolitics, ecological statehood, and cameralist efficiency. By examining the texts of Justi, Pfeiffer, and Sonnenfels in this context, he comes to recognize three basic segments of ecological statehood (the efficient exploitation and conservation of natural resources and the management of natural hazards) as the constituents of cameralist thought.

The essays in the third section (“Dissemination and Local Mediation”) center around the multifaceted problem of cultural translation and dissemination. Concentrating on the intellectual implications, on the one hand, they discuss the influence of cameralism on knowledge production in a specific historical context, but on the other hand, they also shed light on the struggles of interpreting cameralist thought in recent scholarship. As for the political stake of adapting the cameralist framework, the essays by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Alexandre Mendes Cunha, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, and Danila E. Raskov seem to agree that, despite the cultural diversities, cultural transmission in the Lombard, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian surfaced either by domesticating the setting or just some elements of the economic and administrative practice (or discourse) of enlightened reformism, including authors such as Bielefeld, Justi, Sonnenfels, Friedrich II, Beccaria, and Melon. Therefore, processing this intellectual package could yield different results and serve various purposes, from implementing a real practice (Lombardy) to gaining political influence in economic administration and reform (Portugal, Spain) and representing a reformist intention in the tsarist court (Russia).

As for dealing with the conceptual difficulties, all four essays follow different strategies. While Ortolja-Baird investigates the intellectual career of Cesare Beccaria in a classical biographical framework, exploring it from Italian political economy to Austrian cameralist reform, Mendes Cunha and Luna-Fabritius discuss the interactions between their translator protagonists (Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Francisco Mariano Nipho, etc.) and the multilayered context in which cultural transmission occurred. In contrast, Raskov’s essay seeks to position the accumulation of economic knowledge (including the texts by cameralist authors) beginning after the launch of political instructions by Catherine II (Nakaz) in a holistic framework. Deconstructing the functionality usually attributed to translations, he argues that the presence of the cameralist spirit in eighteenth-century Russia can be explained by the logic of the “elective affinities,” rather than coherent development. From this point of view, Keith Tribe’s fair criticism on how to define and investigate cameralist thought (“What is Cameralism?”) is especially valuable. Even if his pragmatic definition (“taught practice”) seems to contradict the approach followed in this volume. Jonas Gerlings’ contribution to Immanuel Kant’s account of cameral sciences is the odd one out in this part, as it returns to the issue of intellectual kinship. Kant’s affinity with the cameral sciences, misinterpreted by the scholarship, as he argues, cannot be discerned from his philosophical critiques, but from his social status in Königsberg’s elite, his lectures given to state officials, and his engagement in promoting luxury.

The volume ends with Anthony J. La Vopa’s epilogue, which reposits Peter Gay’s account of what the investigation of structures means for scholarship on the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. In his concluding remarks, La Vopa considers the interplay and convergences (or blending) between eighteenth-century political economy and cameralist discourse as a specific compound, characteristic mostly for the formation of cameralist thought. Concerning this general assumption and the volume’s pretensions on this issue, two further implications should be noted, both relating to the perspective of the history of science neglected by this volume. First, the essays in the volume bring in a number of examples of the heterogeneity of cameralist discourse. With some exceptions (Stapelbroek, Raskov), however, the references to other fields of knowledge, such as statistics, physiocracy, natural history, etc. are given without much reflection. Even if the editors’ argument relies on a comprehensive understanding of porosity and blending, this point would have merited a wider perspective for a comparative analysis of the eighteenth-century disciplinary landscape and knowledge production. This maneuver might have been beneficial, as it could have provided further rhetorical and structural evidence not only concerning the complexity of cameralist discourse, but also concerning the question of why blending and porosity actually occurred in adapting and disseminating cameralist thought.

Second, the essays of the volume focus on explaining cameralist thought in the context of political economy. Although this choice is aligned with the volume’s intellectual program, it causes avoidable losses in semantics. The most noticeable example of these simplifications is the inconsistent translation of Justi’s practical cameralism (“Polizeiwissenschaft”) either as the “science of Policey” or as the received anachronisms the “science of police” or “police science” (widely used only from the mid-nineteenth century onwards). Interestingly, both translations ignore the general meaning of “Polizeiwissenschaft,” referred to as a political science (“scientia politica”) primarily in the German-speaking world. In conceptual terms, this remained in use even in second half of the eighteenth century, dating back to the dissolution of the early modern Aristotelian political doctrine. Reflecting on the historical background of intellectual exchange between natural jurisprudence and cameralist thought would have proven especially helpful.

All in all, Cameralism and Enlightenment is a rich and valuable collection of essays reflecting on thought-provoking ideas, and it provides an impressive account of the intersections between cameralist thought and the Enlightenment movement. With its choice of subject, the book merits scholarly attention, and it offers several fundamental arguments which will hopefully lead to constructive debates in the field. As for the intellectual position of the volume, it seeks to describe its subject as a general European phenomenon, compatible with other eighteenth-century trends in politics and economy. By challenging some of the pretensions of the scholarship, it places itself in an inconvenient position of navigating and mediating between incommensurable traditions of discourse of intellectual history and political economy studies. In doing so, it provides a decentered view on cameralism, primarily based on the European dispersion and dissemination of Justi’s account. Therefore, the volume’s transnational perspective is rather set on interpreting the implications of Justi’s attempts to expand the cameralist scope, rather than on integrating other less-known representatives of cameralism. The other great concern of the volume is that it centers on avoiding the trap of the German Sonderweg theory, which is especially welcome and is articulated most clearly in the essays of third section, the greatest achievement of which is that it provides novel approaches to the Mediterranean, Iberian, and Russian perspectives. It is a great loss, however, that following the wide and integrative approach of the workshop papers, other regional histories, such as those of Scandinavia and East-Central Europe, were not included in this volume.

 

Tibor Bodnár-Király
IZEA – Universität Halle
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Roma Voices in History: A Sourcebook; Roma Civic Emancipation in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II. Edited by Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov. Leiden: Brill–Ferdinand Schöningh, 2021. 1104 pp. doi: 10.30965/9783657705184
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

Roma Voices in History is an unprecedented and, therefore, extremely precious publication which will definitely change the paradigms in Romani studies from various points of view by re-writing several stereotypical presumptions, prejudices, historical fake-news, and misunderstandings which have dominated various scientific discourses, including historical, ethnographical, and sociological research. Over the course of the last 30 years, the authors, Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, both of whom work at the School of History at the University of St. Andrews, have written a great number of books and articles about Roma history with a specific focus on Bulgaria, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and the Ottoman Empire. In the relatively small circle of international scholars in Romani studies, Marushiakova and Popov have a rich scientific oeuvre, both as historians and ethnologists. Marushiakova is also the president of the Gypsy Lore Society, the world’s oldest organization of Roma studies, founded in Great Britain in 1888 but located in the USA since 1989. The present sourcebook is the result of an ERC-project entitled RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars, carried out between 2016 and 2021.

Both the RomaInterbellum and Roma Voices in History offer a new approach to the study of Roma history in which archival documents prove that the various Roma communities in Europe, instead of being only “passive recipients of policy measures, are also active architects of their own lives (XIX).” This new paradigm, which implies taking a longue durée view of Roma history and suggests that Roma are active subjects and participants in their history and, more concretely, in their political emancipation, complements the existing paradigms about Roma history. As Mátyás Binder notes, referring to the research of Thomas Acton and Pál Nagy, Roma history has either been viewed as a history of struggle and persecution or as the paradigm of changing modes of coexistence (Mátyás Binder, “A cigányok”, vagy a “cigánykérdés” története? Áttekintés a magyarországi cigányok történeti kutatásairól [2009]). According to other views, Roma have two histories: one that is written from outside (by non-Roma historians) and one that is mostly written by “self-appointed” representatives of a naïve science (Péter Tóth, A magyarországi cigányság története a feudalizmus korában [2006]). Finally, there is a body of widely acknowledged and frequently cited literature which presents Roma as a “people without history” (Katie Trumpener, The Time of the Gipsies [1992]), as people who master the “art of not being governed” (James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed [2009]), or as a culture based on bricolage and exchange (Judith Okely, Constructing Culture through Shared Location, Bricolage and Exchange [2011]). Marushiakova and Popov sharply criticize these approaches and emphasize the existence of historical consciousness among Roma and, therefore, the evidence of Roma history, also accentuating that “how much and what kind of historical sources still remain undiscovered in archives and libraries worldwide and …have not been put into academic circulation, hardly anyone can determine” (p.XX).

Thus, innovative and pioneering approaches lie both in the collection and presentation of the primary sources (roughly 1,000 pages, with the longest sections devoted to Bulgaria, Romania, and the USSR, while Greece, Latvia, and Finland are covered in the shortest ones) and in the surrounding context sketched in the comments following the primary sources, offering an interpretation which, instead of providing simply a “Roma-centric prism,” reflects on the Roma emancipatory movements in line with the general historical and social context. This integrative view is also expressed in Marushiakova and Popov’s definition of civic emancipation: it is an action for the sake of an equilibrium between the principal dimensions of the Roma presence (community and society), acceptable both for the Roma themselves and for the macro-society. Therefore, according to Marushiakova and Popov, the Roma movement for civic emancipation is a permanent struggle to achieve the equal civic status of the Roma as an ethnic community and as individual citizens with their rights in all fields of social life (political, religious, educational, economic, cultural, etc.). It should be underlined, however, that no other book or previous research on a transnational level has been published about the early stages of Roma emancipation. Normally, research projects and databases deal with the Roma civic movement only after World War II. As Acton observes, for instance, “there were no transnational entities until 1945, only various survival strategies (...) until 1945 Roma politics was based on acceptance of marginalization and submission to the nation-state” (Thomas Acton. Beginnings and Growth of Transnational Movements of Roma to Achieve Civil Rights after the Holocaust). Other scholars, such as Vermeersch, van Baar, and Binder, focus on the post-socialist period and compare the different forms of ethnic mobilization and the Romani movement after 1989.

What texts examine the material of the different Roma movements? Until the publication of this sourcebook, the archival documents that had been collected offered insights into the relationship of the majority society to the Roma minorities (laws, ordonnances, interrogation protocols, the notes of various assemblies and councils the leading figures of which reflect on the “Gypsy question”). This time, it’s the voice of Roma actors, mostly reported in materials that have been published for the first time, including many documents which have never been used before for academic purposes. In the first chapter, which illustrates the prelude to the emancipatory movements of the interwar period, presenting materials from the nineteenth century, the reader encounters the first requests from 1865 to establish a separate state (Gypsy Voivodina) and the appearance of the first professional association in 1890 (of Gypsy musicians, also in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). These early examples, which prove that the beginnings of Roma emancipation followed the paths of the regional nation-building processes, are followed by materials collected from eleven different countries, presented first in the original language and then in an English translation and then supplements with comments by experts. Although the name of the commenters is mentioned and they also appear in the acknowledgment section, it would have been preferable to have introduced them very briefly or at least to have indicated their affiliations. Nevertheless, the primary sources and the comments are both exceptionally exciting. They include documents concerning the establishment of religious and educational associations, articles published in different Roma newspapers, and publications by Gypsy activists from the USSR.

As also suggested by the authors, this outstanding sourcebook should be used not only by a limited niche of scholars and Roma activists but also in primary and secondary education. From now on, discussions of nationalistic visions and the formation of civil society during the first half of the twentieth century throughout Europe should be complemented by discussion of these sources and stories, and Roma civic emancipation in the central, southeastern, and eastern regions of Europe should be seen and understood as an integral and inseparable part of the general development of modern nationalism and, therefore, of the entire European historical canon.

Eszter György
Eötvös Loránd University
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The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s–1920s. By Maria Todorova. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 364 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

In some ways (and in her own words) Maria Todorova’s book is a culmination of a trajectory which began with another “imagining,” that of the Balkans: history as an emancipatory project which problematizes ideology and the erasure of liminal spaces and lives (p.252). The author sets out to recapture the appeal of socialism and its utopia at Europe’s margins (for the first, pre-1900 generations of Bulgarian socialists), and she masterfully succeeds. The result is a book which will be of interest not only to scholars on the region or the ideology, but those interested in emotions, utopias, or the creation of the modern political subject.

Todorova concentrates on the period before 1917, a time when the notion of a socialist utopia was up for debate and had not yet found “earthly form.” She challenges the dominant narrative of two types of social democracy (a Western and a Russian one), which she suggests constitutes an oversimplification of the ideas circulating at the time, when, despite the supposedly hegemonic ideological power of the Second International, other socialisms could flourish on their own merits. Bulgaria, with the strongest social democratic movement in Eastern Europe during that period, thus offers a perfect example with which to fracture this narrative, which situates socialism within working-class industrial societies or sees its arrival in rural communities as an aberration.

Part I of the book deals explicitly with this typology. It consists of two chapters in which Todorova describes the transfer of ideas into Bulgaria and the ways in which local socialists navigated nationalism in these formative years for the nation-state. As Todorova points out, socialism has almost been erased from the latest global histories, despite being the premier dissident idea of the nineteenth century. The first chapter strongly disproves the notion that Bulgarian socialism was transmitted mainly through Russian ideas and the Russian language, and Todorova masterfully shows the local political conditions which shaped the ideas of Bulgarian socialists. In chapter two, the author takes the Western socialists to task too, uncovering their prejudices against the fate of progressive projects in the Balkans at the time.

In Part II, Todorova concentrates on the creation of these generations of socialists through the use of a database and personal narratives. Nearly 3,500 socialists on whom we have data are tallied, allowing Todorova to show the different trajectories that took them into the movement, from education to experiences of poverty. Here, Todorova combines the quantitative with the qualitative in the best way possible, drawing on many life histories to show the various “socialisms” that existed in Bulgaria, from anarchism and Tolstoyesque ideas to the various Marxist trends. The extent to which socialist ideas exerted a powerful influence on almost all key figures in the Bulgarian national revolutionary movement is notable, and this expands the argument beyond the relatively small socialist movement to the larger trends in popular ideas at the time. Chapter five also explicitly deals with the roles of women in the movement, showing convincingly that many women were socialists before they were wives and supported their socialist husbands in both hidden and open ways, helping them serve as leaders of the movement.

In the final part, Todorova zooms in the most, tackling the issue of scalability: are these lives singular or representative of something else? In three wonderful final chapters, she tells the stories of the socialist elder Angelina Boneva, the graphomaniac Todor Tsekov, and the socialist couple Koika Tineva and Nikola Sakarov. Each story brings out a different strand of her wider argument. She considers how personal stories are created and how memoirs and autobiographical tales differ. The socialist subjects here are far from those we know from similar work done on Soviet socialist diaries, for example. There is no overarching model of the “socialist self” to which these Bulgarians cleave, hence Todorova uncovers various strands of self-narration.

As in her previous work, Todorova sheds light on her own intellectual and archival journeys, and this adds another layer to this work. We see her chasing down references in provincial town archives or meditating on the erasure of personal details in diaries by descendants. This has been a noted feature of Todorova’s work and helps her craft a narrative which engages the reader on every page. She is attentive not just to the political and intellectual journeys of her protagonists, but also spends plenty of time showing how political the personal really is. Anecdotes abound, from tales of food being sent to Kautsky to glimpses into the love lives of some of the protagonists and touching personal notes, complete with flowers, shared by husbands and wives.

Thus, the arguments that Todorova advances intertwine. She digs up the historical debris of the failed project of socialism, rescuing it both from the Soviet shadow that overdetermined its pre-history and its contemporary losses. Carefully noting the limits of her sources, she nevertheless recaptures a world of human visions and emotions that shaped a utopia that was not yet there and even after 1917 was contested. Through the personal narratives of various figures, she shows the broader divisions of Bulgarian socialism into Narrows and Broads, their internecine struggles, and the issues at stake. She convincingly shows that these socialist utopias were born out of the peculiar circumstances of post-independence Bulgaria: an imperfect but existing parliamentary democracy with a largely egalitarian social structure and a strong focus on education as cultural capital. These socialists thus constructed politics attuned to the Balkan circumstances, beyond German or Russian patronage. Though their imaginative vision was physically destroyed by the White Terror of 1923–25 and narratively destroyed by the hegemony of orthodox communist historiography after 1944, Todorova implores us nonetheless to take it seriously. Just because something failed doesn’t mean it must be excised from history. And if we focus solely on things that did succeed (if the whole history of the vision of a socialist utopia is merely a way to explain the Soviet experiment), we miss things that did in fact happen, for Bulgarian socialism did create its own concepts and lived experience between 1870 and 1920.

Todorova’s book is not just a historical tour-de-force, showing how emotions and ideologies continuously shape each other or how individuals form their own subjectivities. It is also not simply a beautiful narrative of extraordinary lives of ordinary people who sought to find their place in life. It can also be read as a call to take early socialism seriously as a project which gave rise to multiple ways of fighting for solidarity and a better world. It is no coincidence, in my view, that the poem “September” by Geo Milev, a Bulgarian socialist who died as a martyr to his cause, is frequently cited. Many people from all walks of life saw something vital in these ideas in Bulgaria and participated wholeheartedly in constructing themselves as participants in this project and the project itself as a unique movement.

Victor Petrov
University of Tennessee
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Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe, Representations, Transfers and Exchanges. Edited by František Šístek. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. 302 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

The present volume is the result of a Czech research project entitled “Central Europe and Balkan Muslims: Relations, Images, Stereotypes,” coordinated by Ladislav Hladký and František Šístek. Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe proposes a panorama of the encounters, exchanges, and transfers among the peoples of Central Europe and the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The volume devotes attention to the development and transformations of a modern Bosnian Muslim identity on the long term. It investigates the attitudes and policies of Central European societies towards Bosnian Muslims and asks how Central European representations and conceptualizations of Bosnians affected the identity of the latter. Central Europe is understood by the authors in the widest possible sense, which covers the former territories of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Balkans, and Germany. The Balkans and Central Europe are deeply intertwined and overlapping ethnic spaces, and, as František Šístek convincingly argues in the introduction, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes should be included in discourses on Central Europe even if these peoples are ascribed to other regions as well. The time scope of the volume extends from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, which is necessary if one seeks to offer an analysis of the long-term influences and effects of Bosnian Muslim history concerning identity constructions and representations. A case in point is the effects of the Millet system on religion, nation, and culture. The Millet system not only restrained the formation of national identities in the nineteenth century, which was reinforced by the policies of Béni Kállay (the long-time Habsburg governor of the province) on separating religious communities. It also had a lasting influence on the identity constructions to which Bosnian Muslims turned in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav periods (as discussed in the chapter by Božidar Jezernik).

Bosnian Muslim identity has been significantly influenced by the special (ethnic and religious) position of the group in the constantly changing political landscape in the Balkans. The chapter by Charles Sabatos attributed a malleable and weak identity to Bosnian Muslims. For instance, the Croatian writer Vjenceslav Novak regards them as misguided Serbs who have been lost to their community. South Slavic writers would consider their identity as a “temporary costume” (p.146) which should be replaced by a different Slavic identity in the long run.

There are no thematic sections or underlying structure in the volume, but some arguments are put forward by several articles and thus are worth discussing in some detail. One of them concerns the special status of Bosnian Islam in the Muslim world. Zora Hesová introduces the concept of secularity, that is “a capacity to exist qua religion within a secular context” (p.117). The high level of secularity of Bosnian Muslims is largely thanks to the legacy of Habsburg rule, which established an autonomous Islamic community. Hesová demonstrates how this institution managed to survive until the twenty-first century, for instance, in the very structure of the most recent constitution of the Bosnian Islamic community in 2004. The process of secularization had started in other spheres in the late nineteenth century as well. Concerning the educational system, Oliver Pejić describes how Croatian elementary school textbooks were adapted to the needs of both Christian and Muslim pupils. The deliberate adaptation of textbooks helped replace traditional religious schools with interconfessional state schools and promoted the Westernization and integration of the Bosnian Muslim community in line with the efforts of Habsburg administrators.

The Habsburg experience and the geographical proximity of Bosnian Muslims to Europe significantly impacted Central European attitudes towards the community. These attitudes, like the Bosnian Muslim identity, were malleable and constantly changing. The negative stigmatization of Bosnian Muslims is a recurring phenomenon in Central European societies. The chapter by František Šístek argues that Czech literature and travelogues generally presented a negative image of Bosnian Muslims. The “Turk” (also used as a synonym for Bosnian Muslims) is similarly presented as barbarian and savage during the occupation war. The chapter by Martin Gabriel reveals that Muslim fighters were associated with the Turks and were described as “brute and inhuman” in the Habsburg press. The Turkish reference remained a long-standing stigma for Bosnian Muslims, as illustrated by Marija Mandić, who notes a particular Serbian proverb (“A Turk convert is worse than a Turk”) and its uses in public discourse. The proverb was used to repudiate and demonize the Ottoman heritage and stigmatize Slavic Muslims as betrayers of the national body. However, the geographical proximity of Bosnian Muslims and the direct interactions between Bosnian Muslims and Central Europeans resulted in positive attitudes towards Bosnian Muslims in certain contexts. The chapters by Aldina Čemernica and Merima Šehagić give examples of these attitudes: Bosnian Muslims are regarded as secular and white Europeans, the exemplary representatives of a European Islam. In addition, Bosnian Muslim migrants faced less discrimination and stigmatization (for example in Germany), and they were even regarded as a refugee elite in some countries. This positive view was shaped in part by the aforementioned higher level of secularization among Bosnian Muslims.

As is noted in the closing remarks, the volume does not fully adopt the promised long-term perspective, because the Yugoslav period has attracted much less scholarly attention so far and, as is plainly seen in the time-scope of the present contributions. In the meantime, there has been a growing interest in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Habsburg rule between 1878 and 1918. This finds expression in the plethora of works devoted to the political, cultural, and economic aspects of Habsburg occupation in the provinces and in the creative use and rethinking of now classical approaches like Said’s Orientalism and post-colonial theory, which are nicely reinterpreted and rethought in the present contributions. However, the volume does not do justice to representations and transfers in the whole of the Central European region. The interactions among Hungarians and Bosnian Muslims are not addressed in any of the contributions, although the Ottoman Empire and Hungary have had an eventful common history, and Hungary, as an integral part of the Habsburg Monarchy, was actively involved in the occupation and annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A symbolic indication of this neglect is that Francis Joseph is often referred to in the text as “the Kaiser,” although Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied by the whole of the empire and was governed by the common minister of finance (not responsible to and not elected by the Austrian or Hungarian government). In spite of this lacuna, the volume is a welcome addition to the ongoing scholarly debates on the history and present of Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the Balkans but also as a constitutive element of Central Europe.

Mátyás Erdélyi
French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences
Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History
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Women and Politics: Nationalism and Femininity in Interwar Hungary. By Balázs Sipos. Trondheim: Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures & Societies, 2019. 163 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

The English-language monograph by Balázs Sipos, which focuses on an era of Hungarian women’s history on which no comprehensive historical analysis had yet been published, is a long overdue contribution to the secondary literature. Sipos is associate professor and head of the Women’s History Research Centre (Nőtörténeti Kutatóközpont) at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest. He is also a widely-published author on Hungarian women’s history and media history. His present work is significant in part because, with the notable exceptions of the books and articles by Andrea Pető and Judith Szapor, very few English-language works have been published on the history of women in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sipos does not limit his focus to women’s history of the interwar period, but examines also the second half of the Dualist Era and World War I. Given his methodological background in media history and his exhaustive analysis of the periodization of women’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he is able to discuss long-term changes and place his arguments in a wider context. He sets out to offer a combination of political, media, and cultural history by treating these fields of inquiry as an organic whole, an aspiration which he admirably achieves with this book.

Sipos has studied almost every aspect of women’s lives and the ways in which their lives were affected by dramatically shifting attitudes towards female emancipation. He argues that the media “created and transmitted an ideology of […] emancipation encouraging women to be prepared for independent life” (p.6), not only before 1918 but also throughout the Horthy era. To support his hypothesis, he draws on contemporary Hungarian periodicals, women’s magazines, literary pieces, lexicons, and products of the Western media, such as movies and novels.

After providing a general political, economic, and social overview of the era, Sipos highlights the most important milestones in Hungarian women’s emancipation between 1867 and 1939 by examining different trends in women’s movements and organizational culture. These details are essential, as they enable him to introduce his highly innovative viewpoints related to the periodization of women’s history in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Hungary. Sipos breaks away from the traditional models and argues that, “rather than deactivating feminism, the war generated new problems and complicated old ones” (p.24). Furthermore, he proposes that it is high time to reevaluate women’s history in the interwar period, an opinion I fully share. In the seven chapters of the book, Sipos demonstrates several times that the whole era (not only the decades before 1918) were characterized by growing engagement in public affairs by women. The most important factor in this field was that women continuously tried to adjust to newly-emerging challenges, and alongside new participants, new consensuses also appeared on the scene.

Sipos insists that the interwar period was not characterized by “feminine passivity” (p.25), because women remained active in the public sphere in the 1920 and 1930s. He thus challenges the traditional periodization of women’s history regarding the 19th and 20th centuries and offers a perspective which is entirely new to the secondary literature. Sipos claims that the first period of women’s history lasted from the 1860s (not from 1867) until the turn of the century. The second one, he suggests, began around 1900 and lasted until the years following the Second World War. He justifies his argument with several sociocultural reasons, including the development of different branches of women’s organizations and the extension of the institutional frameworks of women’s institutional education. Within this second period, he distinguishes “three temporary ‘subperiods’” (p.45), namely the period between 1914 and 1922, the years of the Great Depression (1929–1934), and the “period of anti-Semitic measures taken during the Second World War” (p.45). This approach is highly innovative, although it might have been useful to supplement it with a further a “subperiod” between 1900/1904–1913/1914, as several turning points in the women’s movement came during this period of roughly 15 years.

In Chapters 3–7, Sipos analyses the extent to which anti-feminist and anti-emancipation policies can be said to have influenced the situation of women between the two World Wars. In his assessment, this is or more precisely should be the central question of interwar women’s history in Hungary. In the third chapter, he studies the role and significance of World War I in the alternation of women’s political, economic, and social positions. In Chapter 4, he examines interpretations of the notion of the “modern” women, women’s issues, and feminism in the contemporary Hungarian media. He also considers the neo-Biedermeier portrayal and those women who stayed at home. The end of this section gives important data on women’s employment as well. After examining the different types of discourse about and for women in the periodical press, Sipos studies the transnational female role models (i.e., the Flapper and the Garçonne), the images and interpretations of which influenced Hungarian public opinion. In the last section, he gives an overview on how contemporary Hungarian movies approached and displayed female roles.

Sipos works with a significant source base and uses altogether 19 contemporary Hungarian periodicals, of which he discusses two in greater detail (A Magyar Asszony [The Hungarian Woman], which was the official organ of the National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége), and Új Idők [New Times], edited by Ferenc Herczeg) (pp.91–111). He also relies on Ius Suffragii, the official organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later renamed the International Alliance of Women), which is an almost inexhaustible source on the women’s movement before 1924. Among these periodicals, the reader might miss the more in-depth analysis of the official organ of the Feminists’ Association (Feministák Egyesülete). Naturally, Sipos notes that the Feminists’ Association weakened considerably after the regime changes of 1918–1919, but the publication of A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat [The Woman: A Feminist Periodical] continued until 1927/1928. Although it was unable to regain its former positions, its number of members, and the number of readers of its periodical within the framework of the “new women’s movement” of the Horthy era, the Feminists’ Association succeeded in redefining itself and its goals in the early 1920s. That meant, however, that within a narrower framework than before, it could operate until its ban in 1942 and then between 1946 and 1949. With regards to the organizations, it is perhaps unfortunate that their names are only given in English translation, with no mention of their original Hungarian names.

The volume is rich in citations from the sources and also in interesting statistical data and illustrations. Sipos primarily addresses fellow scholars, but his book will still capture the interest of a readership curious to know more about the history of the interwar period. Most importantly, Sipos’s monograph will do a great deal to further the integration of scholarship on women’s history in Hungary into the international body of secondary literature, which today is perhaps more important than it has ever been.

Dóra Czeferner
Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History
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“Glaube an den Menschen” [Faith in humanity: A diary from Bergen-Belsen]. By Jenő Kolb. Edited by Thomas Rahe and Lajos Fischer. Translated from the Hungarian by Lajos Fischer. Bergen-Belsen – Berichte und Zeugnisse 7. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. 280 pp.

“Hit az emberben”. Bergen-belseni napló. [Faith in humanity. A diary from Bergen-Belsen]. By Jenő Kolb. Edited by Thomas Rahe and Lajos Fischer. Bergen-Belsen – Berichte und Zeugnisse 8. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020. 280 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

In recent years, there has been considerable interest among historians in diaries related to the Holocaust. This is part of a paradigm shift in the secondary literature on the Holocaust, which has come to focus more on family sources, mostly ego-documents. Nonetheless, historians (Hungarian historians in particular) only rarely make use of contemporary personal materials (such as diaries, correspondence, and photographs) as sources on modern history which are as relevant as archival documents.

One of the highly disputed chapters of the Shoah is the history of the so called Kasztner train. Rezső Kasztner (also went by the name Rudolf Kasztner and Israel Kasztner) worked as the deputy chairman of the Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee (Vaada) in Budapest. In 1944, as a result of his negotiations with Kurt Becher and Adolf Eichmann, he was able to organize the escape of more than 1,500 Hungarian Jews to Switzerland for a huge amount of money, which was transferred to the SS. This rescue action was part of Himmler’s big “exchange plan” formed with the Allies, for which Bergen-Belsen had formed by the SS back in 1943.

The personal sources related to the Kasztner passengers have peculiar significance. Jenő Kolb and his daughter managed to get on the Kasztner train. Kolb was born in Sopron in 1898 to a secular middle-class Jewish family. He studied art history in Austria and Germany, and in the 1920s, he became a member of the prominent Jewish liberal intellectual circles of Budapest as a lecturer and journalist. In the early 1930s, Kolb turned to Marxist-Socialist-Zionist ideas, and by the end of the decade, he had become a leading figure in the Hasomer Hacair movement. He kept a diary from the moment of his deportation from Budapest (June 30, 1944), throughout his time in Bergen-Belsen (July 9–December 4, 1944), and after his successful escape and his first days of freedom in Switzerland (December 6–12, 1944). His work was not unknown to historians. The original handwritten Hungarian text was donated to the Yad Vashem by his daughter, Shosana Hasson-Kolb, and preserved by the Jerusalem-based Institute and Archive from the late 1950s, but it was essentially forgotten until 2000, when the Bergen-Belsen Memorial (Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen) decided to publish it. While this German-language edition met the scholarly expectations of its time, there have been many new research findings since then, so this new edition, complete with commentaries and notes, is a welcome publication. It is unique in part because of the publisher’s aim to reach both an international readership and the Hungarian readership. In order to attain this goal, Wallstein Verlag published Kolb’s diary almost simultaneously with the very same editorial contributions in 2019 and 2020, first in German and then in Hungarian.

The volume is divided into two major parts. In the first, the editors (Lajos Fischer and Thomas Rahe) explain the circumstances surrounding the publication of the new editions. Rahe also offers an epic study on the connection between Jenő Kolb’s diary and the fates of the passengers on the Kasztner train in the concentration camp. This ambitious summary focuses on almost every aspect of the Kasztner story, giving a remarkable historical framework to the diary based on current research findings and sources which have been methodically interpreted. Rahe analyzes the societal components, including the number of the passengers, concluding that it may have been 1,684, though no one has conclusively determined the exact number of passengers so far. Rahe also analyzes the nationalities, religious distribution, and ages of the Kasztner group in Belsen, demonstrating (based on his own research) that 1,179 passengers (71 percent) seem to have been Hungarian, while the rest were Romanian, Yugoslavian, Czechoslovakian, and Polish Jews. They were mostly middle-aged Jews, frequently Zionists, with a significant number of East-Hungarian Orthodox Jewry and “Neolog” inhabitants from Budapest. It is worth noting that the significant proportion of elderly people (8.5 percent) was the second largest ratio of old inmates in the concentration camp world (after Theresienstadt). Rahe then demonstrates how the heterogeneity of these factors contributed to the heterogeneity of the group as a whole, which led to several inner problems during the process of deportation from Budapest, problems which mostly came to the surface in the Aufenthaltslager of Belsen. The second part of the study reflects on the most essential questions of the daily lives of the prisoners inside the camp. They were “prominent Jews” as part of the “exchange program,” so they were treated differently by the SS and were held in a separate sector (Sonderlager, later referred to as the Ungarnlager) of the exchange camp area. Rahe’s examination offers a portrait of a comparatively multi-ethnic, privileged group of Jews from the Carpathian Basin who were hoping to be spared. He examines the children’s schooling, the surprisingly diverse array of cultural activities in the barracks, the religious customs and activities of the prisoners, and other instances and forms of self-organization among them. The last section of the study is about the diaries which were kept by the inmates in Bergen-Belsen, regardless of how they arrived in the camp or which part of the camp they were held in. Rahe mentions 30 diaries, though he does not include in his discussion all of the Hungarian diaries documented in the secondary literature in Hungarian.

Rahe’s discussion is followed by a short study by Szabolcs Szita concerning some of the details of the Kasztner train. Surprisingly, Szita did not use the most relevant and current bibliography for his work, so his remarks add little new information to our knowledge of Kolb’s diary. In contrast, the personal accounts by Kolb’s daughter Shoshana Hasson-Kolb give intimate details about her father’s life before and after deportation, highlighting his activity in the Hasomer Hacair’s movement.

The second, largest part of the volume is the diary itself. The text suggests that, as an influential and agile intellectual, Kolb played a key role in the Ungarnlager. He was responsible for Zionist cultural activities, and he established a choir and held lectures on music and art history in the group’s accommodations in the 10–11. barracks. Kolb write log entries every day or at least every other day, which is why his diary is the richest and most extensive of the diaries from this “prominent group.” These informative entries present the history of the Kasztner train, from the detention camp in Budapest, the boarding of the train at the Rákosrendező railway station, and the long journey from the Hungarian capital to Bergen-Belsen and then to Switzerland. The longest and most detailed entries were written while Kolb was in the concentration camp. Many entries are about his beloved homeland and his anxieties concerning the fates of his relatives and friends. Other entries offer an impression of everyday problems within the barrack, including the constant sense of fear, insecurity, hunger, and the lack of information. Kolb also provides a great deal of information about the distinctive personalities of some of the inmates and, in particular, the cooperation among the rival Hungarian groups, especially between the orthodox and the Haluc youngsters. He was obviously prejudiced because of his attachment to the Zionist movement, but the editors offer more than 270 footnotes to explain his biased comments or they call the reader’s attention to the current historical bibliography. In some cases, it might have been preferable had Rahe and Fischer resolved some of the issues that arise because of the old-fashioned foreign phrases in the diary entries. They include two additions which offer nice supplements to the diary. Kolb felt that he and the other inmates were the inhabitants of a kind of closed small town in the middle of the horrific concentration camp. He often wrote about the different levels of the self-organization system of the Ungarnlager under SS control, from its leadership to the everyday mechanisms of different subdepartments. The editors have included official Operation Rules of the Ungarnlager as an annex, which provides useful context for the diary entries, and they have also included short biographies of all the individuals mentioned in the pages of the diary, plus a useful glossary on the most common Hebrew words found in the entries.

This publication of Jenő Kolb’s entire diary with the accompanying editorial materials constitutes a serious contribution to the social history of the Hungarian Holocaust and our understanding of the complex realities of the Nazi concentration camps.

András Szécsényi
Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security
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The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989. Edited by Ferenc Laczó and Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2020. 344 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” ― Franz Kafka

The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989 is a rich, multifaceted volume consisting of 24 essays and two interviews. It reflects the complexity of post-communist Eastern Europe, its 30 years on the path to democracy, and the turbulent present. The book exposes the many prevailing clichés and stereotypes held by those in the West and the East about themselves, each other, what happened since 1989, whose “fault” it was, and how we ended up where we are today, at a moment which feels like an inflection point.

It is impossible to summarize all 24 essays here, as the editors went for breadth and gave authors significant creative freedom. Instead, I have two goals in this review. First, I will highlight a few points made by several of the authors. Second, I will offer a way to move beyond the East-West paradigm by inviting the reader to abandon the exhausted labels of “East” and “West” and focusing instead on conceptually capturing the democratic decline worldwide.

What are the East and the West? The East is loosely defined as a set of countries that spent more than half of the twentieth century behind the Iron Curtain. What is the West? Liberal democracies? The US and the countries of the EU? The only shared understanding about the West, as the reader can guess, is that the West is not the East. This is because both the East and the West are artificial constructs, as is the division which separates them. They are oversimplifications or shortcuts which simplify complex realities which are difficult to grasp by those who live them, study them, or gaze at them.

The opening essay by Dorothee Bohle and Bela Gretskovits is an intellectual tour de force of the past 30 years through the lens of political economy. The authors, eminent scholars of Eastern Europe, highlight three popular misperceptions concerning the construction of capitalism on the European periphery, the mixed blessing of free movement of capital and labor in the EU, and the power of the EU to oppose illiberal tendencies in its (Eastern) member states. I will focus on the first of these, (the construction of) capitalism on the periphery. Here, the consequence is perhaps best exemplified by the recent transfer of German Amazon to the Czech borderland. Amazon, a global company, does not serve Czech customers. It does not ship to the Czech Republic. Instead, Czech workers prepare packages for German customers. For Amazon, the Czech Republic is a place on the periphery of the Western market, with cheaper labor, more docile workers, and less strict labor regulations. The East is a reservoir of cheap and conveniently located labor.

The essay by Bohle and Greskovits connects thematically with those by Phillip Ther and Claus Leggewie, which focus on German unification. In a way, the transformation of East Germany is a paradigmatic case. Best described as “shock therapy,” the measures that were introduced in the wake of unification changed everything in a short period of time, both in political and economic terms. The East Germans were told to change but also periodically reminded that their past had permanently damaged them. Failure to adapt was used to stigmatize. Critics were ostracized. The “inferiority” of East Germans was used to justify what was done to them, and the wild capitalism in East Germany benefited few. The approach was replicated with minor alterations across the region by powers domestic and foreign. The political consequences of this approach are gradually emerging now, two of which are the revolt of (some) East Germans and East Europeans against “colonization” by the West. Everything was supposed to be better in the West until it was not (for most).

The chasm between expectations and reality led to the rise of protest movements and increasing support for the different types of radical right. People might not have known what they wanted, but they increasingly came to reject what they had gotten. As Claus Leggewie highlights, the East might be showing the West a glimpse of its future, a society in which “losers” revolt. The winners took it all. Those “left behind,” a significant part of society, are alienated. Caught in the second-class citizenship of an increasingly contracting welfare state, they seek refuge in nativism.

Jan Zielonka argues that these processes are not unique to the East. According to Zielonka, both the East and the West are stereotypes the roots of which admittedly lie in some historical reality, but as stereotypes they are nonetheless counterproductive, as they thwart systematic studies of change. Over-generalization and under-conceptualization prevent us from seeing both the differences and similarities across the East and West. Old labels such as “post-communism” have exhausted their explanatory power. A variety of regimes emerged after communism, so there is no singular post-communism. Perhaps we ought to focus on historical legacies, elite choices, institutional variations, and the differences in active citizenship (the ability of citizens to play active parts in the democratic processes) at the ballot box and in the streets if necessary.

Contrary to Zielonka, Ivan Krastev, in a book with Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed (2019), sees the East European development after 1989 as an imitation of the West.2 In the book and in an interview (which is a part of the book under review), Krastev sees democracy in the East as a copy or an imitation of a victorious Cold War paradigm, which resulted in resentment of the elites who were behind the process of imitation and of the original which was being admitted. However, to explain the illiberal turn as a revolt against liberalism, Krastev and Holmes under-conceptualize liberalism. Beyond a set of values and norms, liberalism has a significant economic dimension. The rise of populism has some autocratic roots, but it is mainly a backlash against the transition-era neoliberalism.3 Perhaps the light did not go off. Rather, it was turned off by the elite presiding over the economic transformation.

This legacy of the era is low wages and poverty for significant parts of the population, and all hiding in plain sight behind macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP growth and low unemployment, not to mention the facades of palaces built by the Eastern European oligarchs. Economic deprivation among parts of the Eastern population, more than political “illiberalism,” shapes negative attitudes to migration and refugees. Inward migration benefits Western companies by keeping labor available and labor costs low. By opposing immigration and globalization, Eastern European workers are defending their economic interests.4

Westward migration is often the only option to escape local deprivation. The price is a brain drain of skilled professionals and poor working conditions for seasonal workers. The primary cause of the demographic “crisis” is not mass westward migration (with some key exceptions such as Bulgaria and perhaps to a lesser degree Poland), but the economic circumstances of young families and the lack of a balance between work and life.5

As the chapter by Bohle and Greskovits shows, the East is a reservoir of cheap labor, and the attempt to escape late capitalism incentivizes some to embrace illiberal populism and its promise of welfare chauvinism. Not only are these processes similar across the East (from East Germany through Poland to Hungary and beyond), but increasingly similar revolts can be seen across the West. There are differences in intensity and the casts of characters, but an increasingly sizable portion of European society is blaming liberal democracy for its failure to tame economic liberalism in the era of globalization.6

The one common aspect over the last decade across the region and the world is the decline in democratic quality. In terms of democracy, defined as a regime resting on pluralistic democratic institutions (a free press, civil society, and the rule of law), the East today is a set of countries with democracies in consolidation, defective democracies, hybrid regimes, and moderate and hardline autocracies. In terms of economy defined as a free market economy, one finds in the East highly advanced, advanced, limited, very limited, and rudimentary capitalist economies. There is extreme variation across the region both in terms of democracy and in terms of economy.7

There is little agreement on the symptoms, causes, effects, and trajectory of the ongoing change (or decline) in the quality of democracy in Eastern Europe and around the world in the secondary literature. A growing body of literature focuses on the recent changes, which are labeled backsliding, illiberal drift, deconsolidation, and swerving.8

One possible cause of democratic decline is the legitimation crisis triggered by the economic crisis. Habermas outlined a “chain reaction” from economic crisis to a crisis of democratic legitimacy.9 An economic crisis (a periodical event inherent to capitalism), triggers a governance crisis. The governance crisis (the inability of governments to cope with the economic crisis) triggers a legitimation crisis. A legitimation crisis is marked by a loss of trust in democratic institutions and a loss of support for democracy as a system of governance by citizens. Alongside economic crisis, external shocks which can trigger the crisis of democratic legitimacy can include globalization, deepening regional integration, and immigration, framed by anti-establishment elites as threats to national sovereignty.10

Democratic decline is not unique to the East. It can be observed all over the world. The symptoms include declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, increased political control of the media, civic apathy, and nationalistic contestation. It is based on the notion of an illiberal turn from liberalism and pluralism.11 The critique of the backsliding/illiberal turn paradigm focuses on its underlining presumption of a more or less linear trajectory and a consolidated democratic system from which recent events are seen as a reverse, a lack of analytical distinction and precision of the loci of democratic decline (demand or supply-side), the resilience of democracy, and the counterbalance between strength and weaknesses on different levels of consolidation.12

If one cannot “lose what one never had,” what is going on in the East and the West? Bustikova and Guasti (2017) proposed a novel model of change characterized by a sequence of “episodes,” some of which can be characterized as an illiberal swerve.13 The notion of volatile episodes does not follow any distinct, coherent long-durée trajectory. It enables Bustikova and Guasti to investigate “the limits of path dependence and consider the possibility of an inherently uncertain path”. The use of a microscopic approach which focuses on smaller temporal sequences marked by elections or other clearly defined temporal sequences rather than on tectonic shifts in regimes provides valuable insights into the dynamic character of democratic quality and sharpens the analytical lens on recent developments in the East and the West. Perhaps it is a time to bridge the East-West divide by focusing our research on similarities rather than overemphasizing differences and oversimplifying their causes.

Some books answer questions, and some books inspire readers to ask more questions. The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989 belongs to the latter group. In an essayistic way, it invites a broad audience to consider questions of the present and the past. Readers might include scholars, students, and journalists, but thanks to the essayistic style, any member of the broader public interested in understanding the varied nature and legacies of the East-West divisions will find the book engaging. The future is open, and our thinking about it is richer thanks to The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989.

Petra Guasti
Charles University Prague
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1 https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/cameralism/544617.html. Accessed September 26, 2021.

2 Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The light that failed: A reckoning (London: Penguin, 2019).

3 Eszter Kovats and Katerina Smejkalova, “East-Central Europe‘s Revolt against Imitation,” IPS Journal March 30, 2020, https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/europe/east-central-europes-revolt-against-imitation-4205/.

4 Pavol Baboš, “Globalization and Support for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 39 (2018): 23–43.

5 Nancy C. Jurik, Alena Křížková, Marie Pospíšilová, and Gray Cavender, “Blending, credit, context: Doing business, family and gender in Czech and US copreneurships,” International Small Business Journal 37, no. 4 (2019): 317–42, doi: 10.1177/0266242618825260.

6 Cf. Kovats and Smejkalova, “East-Central Europe‘s Revolt”; Baboš, “Globalization.”

7 Petra Guasti, “Democracy under Stress: Changing Perspectives on Democracy, Governance and Their Measurement,” in Democracy under Stress: Changing Perspectives on Democracy, Governance, and Their Measurement, ed. Petra Guasti, Zdenka Mansfeldova, (Prague: ISASCR, 2018), 9–27.

8 For the discussion, see Lenka Bustikova and Petra Guasti, “The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe?” Politics and Governance 5, no. 4 (2017): 166–76, doi: 10.17645/pag.v5i4.1156.

9 Jürgen Habermas, “What does a crisis mean today? Legitimation problems in late capitalism,” Social Research 40, no. 4 (1973): 643–67.

10 Guasti, “Democracy under Stress.”

11 Bustikova and Guasti, “The Illiberal Turn.”

12 Guasti, “Democracy under Stress.”

13 Bustikova and Guasti, “The Illiberal Turn.”

2021_4_Book reviews

Volume 10 Issue 4 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

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Vrijeme sazrijevanja, vrijeme razaranja: Hrvatske zemlje u kasnome srednjem vijeku [Time of development, time of destruction: Croatian lands in the late Middle Ages]. Edited by Marija Karbić. Biblioteka Povijest Hrvata 3. Matica hrvatska: Zagreb, 2019. pp. 637.

DOI 10.38145/2021.4.800

Vrijeme sazrijevanja, vrijeme razaranja is the third volume in the series Biblioteka povijest hrvata, published by Matica hrvatska in 2019. This series eventually will consist of seven volumes in Croatian covering the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands from late antiquity until the late twentieth century. The first volume was published in 2015 and the third, which covers the period of the late Middle Ages, in 2019. The third volume of the series has twenty-three authors (five more than the first one), who are the most prominent scholars in their fields, which include history, legal history, economic history, church history, and historiography, and the authors belong to the younger or middle generation of Croatian historians. The volume begins with a preface written by editor Marija Karbić, who highlights that the book covers a turbulent period of the Croatian history characterized by integration and disintegration. This period included the rise of Venetian authority in the coastal territories, continuous conquests by the Ottoman Empire, and turbulent periods when some of the Croatian lands were part of the Kingdom of Hungary. According to Karbić, the volume aims to follow the path of the first book in the series in its structure and topics. She also highlights that the volume follows the path of two previous Croatian history projects, “Hrvatska i Europa” and “Povijest Hrvata.”

This volume, like the first volume of the series, thematically can be divided into three parts. The first part is a general overview which offers different perspectives on and approaches to the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands. It also deals with fields that are usually less frequently discussed, and it offers new approaches alongside the traditionally popular topics. The first two studies, which were written by Borislav Grgin, give an overview of the political history of Croatia in the late Middle Ages (pp.3–23 and 25–38). They are followed by Ante Birin’s chapter on the history of the Croatian nobility (pp.39–54). Damir Karbić then discusses the characteristics of the late medieval Croatian peasantry (pp.55–61). The last chapter, which is about the general social history of the Croatian lands, was written by Gordan Ravančić, who offers a look at urban communities and society (pp.63–77). Following these discussions of social topics, Sabine Florence Fabijanec examines the economic aspects of Croatia, including farming, forestry, viticulture, fishing, trade, commerce, and finance (pp.79–98). Her chapter is followed by two chapters on the continuous Ottoman conquests, both of which were written by Ivan Jurković. The first chapter discusses the migration caused by the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans (pp.99–113) and military history and defense campaigns against the Ottomans (pp.115–33). Zrinka Novak and Zoran Ladić deal with church history and religious life in late medieval Croatia, including the history of the different orders, ecclesiastical organization, and social questions (pp.135–161). Nella Lonza then examines various legal developments (pp.163–77), and Sandra Ivović and Meri Kunčić deal with the intellectual and cultural history of the period in question. Zoran Ladić and Goran Budeč discuss some aspects of the history of the families and private life as the final part of the first thematic unit (pp.213–33).

The second main part of the volume reflects the historical and cultural regionality of Croatia. It deals with territories of Medieval Croatia, including lands that are part of present-day Croatia but were separated in the Middle Ages and territories that are culturally, socially, and historically closely connected to Croatia. The first two chapters, by Marija Karbić and Stanko Andrić, deal with northwestern and northeastern Croatia separately (pp.235–54, 255–304). Both chapters are structured in a similar way. They show the history of the regions in different periods of the Hungarian Kingdom and deal with urban, social, and church history. The following chapter, by Marija Mogorović Crljenko, deals with Istria and the Kvarner Gulf (pp.305–26), followed by a chapter on Gorski kotar, Lika, and Krbava by Ivan Jurković (pp.327–39). The late medieval history of Dalmatia is divided into three parts. Irena Benyovsky Latin offers an account of the history of northern and central Dalmatia (pp.341–59), and Zrinka Pešorda Vardić writes on the golden age of Dubrovnik (pp.361–90). The third part, by Ivan Majnarić, is about Kotor (pp.391–400). The final chapter of the second part, by Ivan Botica, deals with the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina (pp.401–42).

The third and final section of the volume (which is also the longest section) provides geopolitical context, as it deals with the countries and empires that had close relationships with either the Croats or the territories of present-day Croatia or held any parts of it. Marija Karbić discusses Hungary (pp.445–62), followed by Kornelija Jurin Starčević’s examination of the relationship between Croatia and the Ottoman Empire (pp.463–80). Jadranka Neralić deals with the relationships between Croatia and the Papacy between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp.481–502). Lovorka Ćoralić analyses Venice’s role and advances in Croatia (pp.503–20). Borislav Grgin examines Croatia’s ties to southern Italy and Spain (pp.521–29). Robert Kurelić deals with Croatia’s relationship to the Holy Roman Empire (pp.531–44) and Austria (pp.545–59). Damir Karbić analyses the history of the Czech territories and Poland (pp.561–69), and, finally, Vjeran Kursar deals with the Balkans (pp.571–97). After the final unit, the volume includes an index of people’s names (pp.599–616) and an index of geographical names (pp.617–36).

The volume is a continuation and the outcome of a huge project started in 2015. The authors of the volume are among the greatest experts in their fields, and they have composed one of the finest syntheses of Croatian history. Their work and the sedulous work of the editor offer new perspectives on Croatian history, with chapters written about topics that to a large extent have eluded discussion, though they fit well into present trends in international historiography. The division of the book also offers new perspectives. It helps further an understanding of Croatia’s regional diversity and the varying histories of the regions of the country, and it also puts the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands into an international and regional context. The volume includes impressive studies, and it will appeal not only to the community of historians, but also to the wider reading public. Furthermore, it constitutes an important addition to the materials available for educational purposes. This volume, like the first book in the series, is a modern historical synthesis, and as such, it provides an excellent example on which new projects on other Central European countries can draw.

Judit Gál
Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities
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Dalmatia and the Exercise of Royal Authority in the Árpád-Era Kingdom of Hungary. By Judit Gál. Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, 2020. 228 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.803

Coloman the Learned, king of Hungary (1095–1116), was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia in 1102. Within three years, he occupied the most important cities of northern and central Dalmatia, thus unifying Hungary and Croatia into a union that lasted till 1918. The monograph under review, this valuable contribution to common Hungarian-Croatian history, analyses the southernmost part of the Kingdom of Hungary, or more precisely, Dalmatian cities and their place within the kingdom in the first two hundred years through the lens of the exercise of royal authority. Although several aspects of this relationship have been dealt with by Hungarian and Croatian historians, Judit Gál’s monograph has two major strengths. First, it is a modern original work based on hundreds and hundreds of hours of diligent archival work accompanied with intelligent comparative analyses of both national historiographies. Second and no less important, it is a highly analytical, yet comprehensible piece of scholarly work written in English, or in other words, it is accessible to a comparatively wide audience.

The book begins with a concise but very useful discussion of the socio-historical and geopolitical background. On the one hand, there was a relatively young and quite active Kingdom of Hungary which managed to extend its influence on the Adriatic although, on the other side, the doge of Venice had adopted the title duke of Croatia and Dalmatia in the late eleventh century, at the time when the Byzantine Empire was occupied with other affairs in the east. Dalmatian cities, those precious ancient (apart from Šibenik) urban shells in that frustratingly narrow coastal strip beneath the mountainous region in the north, have always had special status and a degree of autonomy which they mostly maintained within the Kingdom of Hungary.

The study is pursued here in two major chapters, constructed and intertwined around the role of royal authority. The first one is dedicated to the church, which played an essential role even in the secular life of Dalmatian cities. When addressing ecclesiastic affairs, Gál focuses on the three most important aspects: the changes in the structure of the Dalmatian church and the role played by Hungarian rulers in its modification; the personalities of the prelates of Dalmatia and changes in their roles; and the role played by royal and ducal donations to the church in the exercise of royal authority. The kings of Hungary did not have permanent local representatives in Dalmatian cities, so the archbishops of Split were Hungarian kings’ right hands, administrators with an extended reach. Dalmatian bishops and archbishops served as symbolic representatives of royal authority who promoted royal policies in their cities. Split archbishops, who inherited the metropolitan status of ancient Salona and were primases of Dalmatia, connected their city with the royal court and helped manage local affairs and promote the kings’ foreign-policy interests.

In the second chapter, Gál examines aspects concerning the exercise of Hungarian royal authority related to secular administration and urban communities. First, she analyses the privileges granted by the kings of Hungary to the cities of Dalmatia. She then examines the roles of the representatives of Hungarian royal authority: the dukes of Slavonia and the bans of Slavonia. She concludes with a discussion of shows of royal power and authority, mostly displayed through royal and ducal visits to Dalmatia. Her analyses of rulers’ show of power reveal that these visits were in fact complex performances with practical and symbolic functions. King Coloman made his visits to Dalmatia, during which he was accompanied by his splendid retinue consisting of Hungary’s highest-ranking secular and ecclesiastic dignitaries (as well as their Dalmatian counterparts), according to a regular schedule: every three years. Other kings traveled less frequently, never managing to follow this pattern, while the dukes of Slavonia mostly travelled to Dalmatia shortly after acquiring their titles. The bans became increasingly powerful after the Mongol invasion of 1241–42, but the overall Hungarian royal authority deteriorated after King Bela IV died (1270), and the local oligarchy, especially the Šubić clan, gained more influence in Dalmatia.

There are four very useful appendices at the end of the book. The first is on “Iohannes Lucius’ Collection of Historical Manuscripts,” which Judit Gál probably knows better than anyone else at this point, at least among the younger generation of historians from both sides of the Pannonian border. The second is the list of “Dalmatian Toponyms in Various Languages.” The third is the list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Donations to Dalmatian Churches” (1102–1285). The fourth and final appendix is a list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Grants of Privileges to the Cities of Dalmatia.” The book ends with four other additions: two indices (of personal and geographical names) and two sets of historical maps. The first set presents the city maps of Zadar, Biograd na Moru, Šibenik, Nin, Split, and Trogir in the period of Árpád kings. The second shows Dalmatia in 1105, 1180, 1205, and 1298, and it also includes a map of the Catholic Church in Croatia (as of 1298).

Gál spent a substantial amount of time in the Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb and the Archbishopric Archive in Split, and she has made admirable use of the sources she found in both. She came to Zagreb as a MA student, and she brought with her an infectious enthusiasm, good knowledge of Latin, and an ever-improving ability to use Croatian scholarly literature. Dr. Damir Karbić, the director of the Historical Department of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, quickly realized what a promising scholar she was, and showing his usual hospitality, he made sure that she had the proper guidance through Croatian institutions. But all other credit goes to her for her dedicated, disciplined, old-fashioned hard work in the archives. This book is not the only fruit of the many years she spent pursuing research. She has also written numerous scholarly papers, digitized material, and made fresh discoveries in the undeservedly forgotten yet very valuable collection of sources. Historians of Central Europe in the Middle Ages cannot help but be impressed by her achievements, and it is worth noting that Gál, who only completed her PhD in 2019, is still at the beginning of her academic career.

Mirko Sardelić
Department of Historical Research Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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Katonabárók és hivatalnok grófok: Új arisztokraták a 18. századi Magyarországon [Soldier barons and office-holder counts: New aristocrats in eighteenth-century Hungary]. By Tamás Szemethy. Budapest: MNL–BTK TTI, 2020. 479 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.806

Tamás Szemethy’s book, analyzing the emerging Hungarian “new aristocracy” of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of social history, is based on a PhD thesis defended in 2020 at Eötvös Loránd University under the supervision of István Szijártó. Szemethy is one of the most promising members of a circle of young social historians who are gathered around Szijártó’s “school” at the Department of Social and Economic History of Eötvös Loránd University. Szemethy’s doctoral thesis was finalized and turned into a book within the framework of the research group “The political culture of the Hungarian estates’ system (1526–1848)” (NKFI K 116 166), coordinated by the National Archives of Hungary and the “Integrating Families” Research Group of the Institute of History of the Research Centre for the Humanities (LP2017-3/2017), supported by the “Momentum” (“Lendület”) Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The main goal of the book is simple: to validate or refute the topos of the “dilution of the Hungarian aristocracy” in the eighteenth century, which Szemethy considers a persistent commonplace in Hungarian historiography. The volume raises some crucial questions concerning the so-called “new aristocrats,” i.e., those who earned the title of a Hungarian baron or a count as plain nobles, characterizing it as a social group to establish his chosen research methodology. His main inquiry concerns the framing of the group, the careers of its members, and other factors preceding the elevation of their ranks, as well as possible explanations as to why the ruler decided to bestow on them a new rank. Finally, Szemethy also considers the typical career moves of the group.

Methodologically, the author commits himself prosopography, one of the auxiliary disciplines of social history, arguing that it can provide a qualified set of data which enables one to arrive at findings concerning the main tendencies of the group in question and general changes in the eighteenth-century social elite. Szemethy tries to define what he means by this in the first chapter, which could be treated as a practice-oriented contribution to this field of historical auxiliary sciences. According to this, not only has prosopography been separated from the traditional genre of archontology, but its advantages and disadvantages have also been considered. Referring to the work of English historian Lawrence Stone, Szemethy mindfully reflects on the limits and difficulties of doing prosopographic research, highlighting the problems of gathering sources that are of adequate quality and quantity, as well as the scarcity of narrative sources (first of all, ego-documents). He also cautions against conflating the typical characteristics of the whole group with those of its few prominent members, e.g., those individuals who held high offices and stirred interest among contemporaries. Based on these considerations, Szemethy constructs a group of “new aristocrats” as the subject of his analysis, zooming in on 91 people from 76 families between 1711 and 1799. He excludes from this group naturalized foreign aristocrats (indigenae) and those who earned the title due to their relatives and not their own career moves. In practice, apart from the chapters on atypical careers, his research is based fundamentally on the classical and more recent genealogical literature on the one hand and on the Royal Books (Libri Regii) on the other, though Szemethy also uses urbarial conscriptions, files from the Austrian State Archives in Vienna (nobility files, etc.), and other archival sources, if to a lesser extent. His style is succinct, clear, and factual, and his chapters are rhetorically well-structured, but the richness of the information provided sometimes makes it rather difficult to read them.

The book is divided into four main chapters and includes an almost 200-page long appendix, which contains all the relevant biographical and career data concerning the members of the group, as well a much shorter list of the high-ranking soldiers who earned the Military Order of Maria Theresa. This well-built database constitutes the backbone of the analyses. The structure of the whole book and the individual chapters is clear and logical, almost didactic. The short methodological introduction is followed by the longer prosopographic analyses of “typical” careers. The subsequent chapter then presents three “atypical” cases, and finally, a conclusion summarizes the achievements of the project.

Within the group of “new aristocrats,” two bigger subgroups, namely the office holders and the soldiers, have been set apart, and the title-donations of lower (baron) and higher (count) value are examined separately. By reason of the changing tendencies, the baronial donations implied different inner periodization and further subgroups: regarding the officials, the two subperiods are 1711–1770 (18 persons) and 1770–1799 (16 persons). In the case of officers, the timeframes are 1711–1758 (10 persons) and 1758–1799 (16 persons). In the first case, the dividing line is grounded in the emergence of a professionalizing office holder, marked by the baronial donation of Károly Reviczky, which approximates the conclusions of a study by Szijártó and Tünde Cserpes on the “high office holders” of the eighteenth century, cited frequently by Szemethy. The second case is much simpler, because the foundation of the Military Order of Maria Theresa definitely marks the beginning of a new period.

Concerning each group and subgroup, the careers, social backgrounds (ancestry, social status), and financial situations of its members are compared. Their financial situations are reconstructed on the basis of the amount of land they owned according to the urbarial conscriptions, an indicator which offers a rough approximation of the wealth of a certain family. However, the urbarial conscriptions indicate only possessions that were burdened by urbarial services. The measure of the current social status and the degree to which the “new aristocrats” could be said to have been integrated into the traditional aristocracy is assessed based on the connubium, i.e., the marital strategies of people recently elevated in position and their children from the perspective of the social and legal statuses of their spouses.

The subgroup of soldiers who earned baronial titles before 1758 is similar to the officials of the same period. In other words, most of them were elevated from wealthy noble families. After 1758, in contrast, several soldiers of humble backgrounds rose to the new aristocracy as well. However, the estimated wealth of the so-called “soldier barons,” based on the urbarial conscriptions, of the period was much less on average than the wealth of the officials. While the meritocratic elements of selection became significant among the soldiers in the last third of the century and this criterion (merit) also began to by more frequently applied within the central bureaucracy of the period, it remained only a subsidiary reason for bestowing a baronial title on officials. Regarding officials who earned a baronial title, Szemethy also points out that the father’s career was a factor only in a few cases of title donation, while the legal status of wives and mothers could also contribute to a certain extent to the rise of the nobility into the layer of aristocracy.

A subchapter focuses on those who earned the title of Hungarian count, making up the top elite of the emerging new aristocracy. As Szemethy points out, the Habsburg Monarchy had neither a unified aristocracy nor a unified nobility. Thus, the Austrian provincial, imperial, Transylvanian, Bohemian, and Hungarian title donations were all available at request at the same time, though at different prices and representing varying contents and values. The Hungarian titles were of the greatest value because of the political rights they potentially provided, i.e., the participation of aristocrats in the meetings of the upper house of the Hungarian diet in person or by proxy. The title of Hungarian count was not only more expensive than the title of baron, but as Szemethy presumed and has verified, it required a more successful military or civilian career, in addition to wealth and ancestry. From the group of 91 people, 28 became counts, and a third of them earned their title in two steps. As the author points out, most of them belonged to wealthy noble families with mid-size and large-size estates, and a significant number of them acquired their lands by themselves. While the number of official and soldier barons was balanced in the period, in the case of counts, only those who had a successful official career could advance, and only five soldiers were given this rank, who also needed to earn a significant land donation. Because of these reasons, until the end of the period under study, the subgroup of counts formed a more exclusive and prestigious circle than the barons within the new aristocracy and the group of magnates in general.

In contrast to the quantitative analysis in the second section, which is dry but rich in information, the third part focuses more on narrative methods and careers and elevation in rank of three persons considered “atypical.” These chapters originally were intended to complete and contrast the prosopographic analysis of the group of new aristocrats. However, each of them could be read as a micro-historical essay in itself. Zooming in on the three atypical careers, Szemethy shows further sides of his talent as a historian by examining other problematic questions and using new types of sources. In the case of István László Luzsénszky, Szemethy focuses on the role of the patron-client relationship between the ambitious nobleman and clergyman Luzsénszky and his influential patron, Imre Csáky. In doing so, he relies on their highly formalized “functional” correspondence, based on a method used by Heiko Droste. Szemethy points out that the elevation in rank was an outcome of the accumulation of Luzsénszky’s family inheritance as wealth and as socio-political symbolic capital. Reconstructing the case of György Farkas Chiolich, the author tries to track a charge of cradle-snatching against the bishop of Zengg-Modrus. He proves that Chiolich took steps to earn an aristocratic title in addition to his prelateship in order to accumulate more power and authority not only among the clergy, but also among laymen. Finally, the third case study focuses on Mihály Manduka, later known as Mihály Horváth, an ambitious Greek merchant of non-noble background who rose to become a figure of the Hungarian nobility and, a few years later, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, of the aristocracy as a baron. The chapter affirms the findings of renowned urban historian Vera Bácskai, according to which Horváth should be regarded as an “ennobled burgher” rather than as a “new aristocrat” who embraced the identity and ethic of the landowning nobility. Consequently, he could be considered one of the predecessors of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs.

In his concluding remarks, Szemethy, on the one hand, points out that the efforts of the Viennese court to make talented military officers more visible by bestowing titles on them led to a kind of “dilution” of the Hungarian elite. On the other hand, he calls attention to the fact that, of the officials, those who received a baronial title belonged to the wealthy and were able to reach the required standards. The new counts remained an exclusive group the members of which could assert themselves better in the environment of the traditional aristocracy. Szemethy summarizes his findings as follows: “[I]t would be more accurate to consider the social changes of the second half of the eighteenth century not simply as the dilution of the elite, but rather as its transformation and complementation with new elements.” All things considered, Szemethy has drawn a persuasive image of the eighteenth-century “new aristocracy” based on the method of prosopography, complemented in some cases with the inclusion of different kinds of primary sources, as well as some more innovative ways of analysis. Nevertheless, I cannot help but make a few critical remarks concerning some aspects of his undertaking which follow mainly from Szemethy’s presuppositions and the inflexibility of his method.

First, with regard to the treatment of primary sources, two significant shortcomings have to be mentioned. Szemethy did not research and use family archives systematically or extensively. Furthermore, his research on the practices of the chancellery and the changes it underwent over the course of the century is also flawed. Szemethy was frank about this, claiming that his “research in family archives yielded disappointing results,” and he mentions as an example the Luzsénszky family archive and the lack of narrative sources, first and foremost private family correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. Nonetheless, the conclusions he draws are hardly convincing, and they are even less so if all the related families are considered. Due to the lack of narrative sources, he is unable to demonstrate how “new aristocrats” considered and represented their own social status within the public sphere or what attitudes emerged in the narrower and broader social environment towards them. The contemporary set of the positive and negative topoi concerning new aristocrats should have been analyzed too, irrespective of their factual content. With regards to the former point, the case study of the Luzsénszky–Csáky relationship offers the possibility of narrative analysis, and with regards to the latter, the same is true of the “pilot study” on Gábor Draveczky in the first chapter. As for the practices of the chancellery, it would have been fruitful to consider the requests that did not result in title donations, particularly regarding the Military Order of Maria Theresa.

Second, while the starting date of the study, 1711, is unequivocally considered the beginning of a new era, marked by the year when Charles III ascended the throne, the ending year, 1799, is rather disputable. In Szemethy’s, his choice enables him to examine the tendencies of the fin-de-siècle in the context of late eighteenth-century military and political history, while the context of Napoleonic Europe provides a fundamentally different framework. The French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars profoundly changed the political and military situation for the traditional powers of Europe, including the Habsburg Empire and thus the Kingdom of Hungary. Nevertheless, the whole period between 1792 and 1815 (or so forth) should have been treated rather in its entirety to show tendencies in progress under the rule of Francis I, marked as “cabinet absolutism.” This would have made it possible to assess the effects of the French Wars on the subgroup of the emerging “military aristocracy.” For example, the case of Dániel Mecséry, who earned not only the Knight’s but also the Commander’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa and thus became a baron still struggled for land donation in vain and died relatively poor. Moreover, he left behind a German autobiography which constitutes a valuable narrative source, in contrast with those on whom Szemethy has focused in his research.

Finally, some remarks should be made with regards to the structure and appearance of the book. The method of presenting factual information, sometimes to a superfluous extent within the main text (apart from the three analyses of the “atypical” careers, where it seems necessary for the reader to be able to follow the text), is to some extent debatable, because the appendix contains detailed biographical data concerning each member of the group. Instead of this, the publisher could have published the tables in the appendix as an online searchable database (which would have been a more concise and economical option). Fortunately, this is also in progress, according to the latest information. Since the subject and name indices are missing from the volume, the use of the appendix and, in fact the whole volume is difficult. Nevertheless, the book can be downloaded for free, which remedies this problem to a certain extent. Notwithstanding these remarks, however, the richly illustrated and attractive book is well-edited and of very high quality.

Ágoston Nagy
University of Public Service
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A Mighty Capital Under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000. Edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim. History of the Urban Environment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. 282 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.812

This collection of ten papers covers the major urban environmental changes in London over the past two centuries. The British capital was the first global city: the explosion of population growth and the concentration of the population in a smaller area during the nineteenth century presented previously unprecedented challenges. At these times, as was true in many countries in Europe, Central Europe, including the Hungarian capital, followed the technical and scientific innovations introduced in London in response to urbanization. From the 1850s onwards, London made several environmental improvements in order to enhance the living and health conditions of its citizens. Alongside news and publications, word was also spread by the flow of British professionals to Europe. Their role in the major infrastructure projects in Budapest (e.g., the Chain Bridge, the water and sewerage networks, etc.) also makes this volume of studies of particular interest to specialists in the history of Central Europe.

The book is introduced by a substantial editorial foreword, which provides insights into the historiography of urban environmental history followed by a brief overview of the last two centuries of London’s environmental history and the major crises and problems the city faced.

Jim Clifford’s study (“Greater London’s Rapid Growth, 1800–2000”) describes the city’s growth over the last two centuries and the changes that have occurred, drawing primarily on a comparative analysis of maps. Defining (the boundaries of) the city is extremely difficult. The administrative boundaries do not cover the whole of the city’s surroundings, and local government in this period operated quite independently of the (otherwise weak) central leadership. This and the following study, in its concluding remarks, draw attention to the increasingly serious and urgent need to address the continuous risk of flooding as a result of climate change and the city’s expansion. The second paper, by Christopher Hamlin (“Imagining the Metropolitan Environment in the Modern Period”), examines the history of London as an environment, with a specific focus on the human aspect of how contemporary people understood the city as a physical and social medium.

Anne Hardy’s study (“Death and the Environment in London, 1800–2000”) examines the problems we have seen so far from demographic and epidemiological perspectives. Rapid population growth in the nineteenth century presented environmental challenges to housing, and mortality rates were extremely high. The city authorities were unable to cope with these issues until the second half of the century. The problem was linked first to pollution and poverty and, from the middle of the century onwards, more specifically to the quality of air, water, and geographical locations and to periodic outbreaks of epidemics (e.g., cholera and typhoid). Environmental improvements were sought as a solution, and a slow decline in mortality did indeed begin. Contemporary and historical observations have described London as an environmental death trap, but this picture is much worse than the actual situation was. According to Hardy, this could be explained by poor central control, as the various historical studies have always been concerned with the administration of a given local borough, and thus the London-wide context is not really known.

Christopher Ferguson (“London and Early Environmentalism in Britain, 1770–1870”) examines the relationship between early environmentalists and London. The individuals and associations that fell into this category sought to understand the various impacts of urban growth on the environment with the aim of protecting and improving human life and its values. In many respects, they were important predecessors to today’s environmentalists. Although the medical approach of the 1870s focused more on the human body than on the living environment in terms of the development of disease, the spread of the idea of prevention and control led many European cities to focus on environmental hazards in terms of public health.

Finally, a later study in the book by Bill Luckin and Andrea Tanner (“‘A Once Rural Place’: Environment and Society in Hackney, 1860–1920”) also belongs to this thematic unit. This paper is directly linked to Ferguson’s study through its examination of the relationship between sanitation and environmental practices in Hackney, an inner London borough. The paper reviews the environmental hazards associated with health problems already identified in earlier studies. By the 1920s, the influence of the sanitary movement, which linked moral conditions to health, was beginning to fade. This case study also reflects and supports Hardy’s demographic conclusions.

Peter Thorsheim’s study (“Green Space in London: Social and Environmental Perspectives”) looks into the evolution of green space in London and the uses of green spaces over the past two centuries. The notion of sustainability, in which environmental, social, and economic issues are inextricably intertwined, are traced in this study of the history of uses of green space.

Leslie Tomory’s study (“Moving East: Industrial Pollution in London, 1800–1920”) explores London’s industrial pollution problems. The crises caused by industrial pollution in the nineteenth century were not as acute as the epidemics and pollution around dwellings, and they therefore have attracted less attention. Industry representatives also made it difficult for local authorities to regulate industries, and eventually they had to be regulated at government level. The city’s air was gradually cleaner as factories moved eastwards, where they could operate under less regulated conditions, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that real changes were made in relation to smog.

Two papers in this volume are dedicated specifically to a historical examination of the problem of water supply. Vanessa Taylor’s study (“Water and Its Meanings in London, 1800–1914”) examines the changing meanings and management of water in the long nineteenth-century London. The chapter provides a substantial chronological summary of the history of water supply in London. The paper then thematically reviews the city’s debates about local supply, the relationship between changing conceptions of water and sanitation, and the changing forms and roles of domestic supply in everyday life. Increasing water supply in response to an elevated demand facilitated further population growth in expanding urban spaces. The possibilities and conditions of water availability for urban dwellers improved considerably, but major infrastructure decisions were made over their heads, and the ongoing debates about this in the nineteenth century were linked to London’s governance mechanisms (e.g., the lack of central control and the strength of local government). There were conflicting priorities regarding urban rivers (the public was more concerned with water supply and sanitation, while the administration was basically interested in the function of rivers as a pollution removal system, although it monitored their deteriorating condition over time), but their “natural” state did not yet matter much. The idea of the river as an ecosystem had not yet been raised. The final chapter of the book also expands on the issue of water supply and the urban environmental history of London with a comparative study of New York by Bill Luckin and Joel A. Tarr (“Water for the Multitudes: London and New York, 1800–2016”). As Taylor does in his study, Luckin and Tarr examine the ways in which the growing population was supplied with water. Which proved more efficient, a privately controlled water supply or a publicly funded water supply? New York’s system, established by the 1830s, solved the problem of supply through the use of sources far from the city. The water quality was better, but this meant regular conflicts with the locals, with whom a final agreement was only reached in 1995. In London, the problems of municipal administration were seriously resolved in 1902, when water supply was transferred from private companies to the then Metropolitan Water Board, which significantly improved the situation.

The volume concludes with an extensive appendix of notes and an index to the studies. In the former, the authors have taken care to draw the reader’s attention to a large body of additional literature on the various subtopics. The index is very rich, with names of persons, geographical names, and key terms. It is a particularly useful tool for the sub-topics that are covered by several studies from different perspectives (e.g., London’s administration, different territorial definitions, environmental and epidemiological issues, etc.).

Most of the studies are well structured, and cross-references between the chapters help the reader find links within a given topic. Hamlin’s study, which seeks to examine the global city from several angles, stands out somewhat. It fits in the volume in terms of its topic and ambitions, but it is more of an essay that raises thought-provoking points. Rather than dwell on the classic topics of urban environmental history, these papers offer a glimpse into the history of various complex debates (urban green use, the construction and control of urban space, the many different meanings of pollution and water, etc.). There is also a strong emphasis on the current and future impact of acute problems.

Ágnes Németh
Eötvös Loránd University / Budapest City Archives
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Vielfalt ordnen: Das föderale Europa der Habsburgermonarchie (Vormärz bis 1918). By Jana Osterkamp. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. 531 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.816

In the historiography, the Habsburg Monarchy has long been characterized as the “prison of the peoples” (Völkerkerker), a state which, allegedly, would inevitably have fallen apart because of “nationality conflicts” while it was also (again, allegedly) shaped first and foremost by the issues of “nationality politics.” However, in the more recent scholarship, more emphasis has been put (not least because of the pioneering works of Pieter Judson) on the fact that the Habsburg Monarchy offered a legal framework for different identities and self-localizations, beyond the national cluster thinking, and represented a functioning legal system.

While the micro-historical studies explore the complexity of the local level, Jana Osterkamp has tried to put these local pieces of the puzzle together in a new narrative. Given her legal and historical knowledge, Osterkamp is able to interpret new findings of Habsburg research from a legal perspective.

With her innovative concept of the “cooperative empire,” Osterkamp succeeds in capturing both in historical and legal terms the supranational and proto-federalist character of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially the Austrian half of the empire. She introduces the concept of the “cooperative empire” as a description for legal and political opportunities beside and among the local structures (Jana Osterkamp, Cooperative Empires [2016]). The concept emphasizes integration, equality, and symmetries among the imperial “peripheries.” Therefore, the Habsburg Monarchy can be understood as an interdependence of several centers and peripheries, in which a complex multi-level system was established beyond (and even against) the imperial centers.

This approach allows Osterkamp to make the supranational character and the legal-administrative functions of the Habsburg Monarchy more visible. Statehood was not nationalized in Austria (Pieter M. Judson, L´Autriche-Hongrie était-elle un empire? [2008]), and the Habsburg Monarchy did not grant any single people a constitutionally anchored supremacy because there was no “nation” in the sense of a political nation (Peter Urbanitsch, Pluralist Myth and National Realities [2004]). A very important legitimation function was therefore assigned to the law (James Shedel, The Problem of Being Austrian [2001]. Despite the empire’s ethnic-linguistic, religious, and regional diversity, which would have made neither the hegemony of a nation nor a democratic nation-state possible, all citizens enjoyed the same rights in the Austrian part of the Monarchy, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation or their professed native tongue.

In her new book, Osterkamp applies the results of federalism studies to the Habsburg Monarchy. She comes to the conclusion that proto-federalist elements can be recognized in the complex structure of Austria-Hungary, which, on the one hand, could not yet clearly come into play at the time (because of crown land interests, nationalisms, and the idea of an Austrian confederation), but which, on the other hand, anticipated a post-nation-state age of the “political.” Osterkamp perceives federalism as a pre- and post-modern idea (p.2 et sq.). In the age of emerging nationalisms and nation-states of the late nineteenth century, this federalist-supranational idea might seem outdated, but especially for the Habsburg Monarchy, the existing structures (such as the crown lands) gave new impulses and meanings while at the same time opening up discourses for new constitutional ideas.

With the concept of federalism, Osterkamp can overcome a state-focused perspective in both historical and legal debates: “Multi-level systems of rule do not have to be sovereign state in their entirety if one wants to examine them as federal systems” (p.10). In this sense, Osterkamp understands federalism as a “vertical division of the state power by different decision-making levels within a long-term existing political order” (p.215, emphasis in original).

The lack of a unified nation does not turn out to be backwardness or a reason for decay, but rather enabled new paths and ideas for an empire that had to legitimize itself beyond the “national”: “The state doctrine of the Habsburg Monarchy could not rely on the central idea of the nation. The place of the nation-state was taken by an enlightened ‘overall state idea’ [Gesamtstaatsideee] oriented towards the effectiveness and welfare of the population, on which Austrian political science had been working since the 18th century” (p.47). The social pluri-culturalism and the imperial-supranational structure corresponded to a formalistic-legalistic understanding of law, which—instead of relying on metajuristic-fictional and emotionally charged categories, such as “nation” or “state” —brought the dynamic processuality and the positivistic formality of the legal system to the fore (Urbanitsch [2004]). The lack of a unified “nation” and even the lack of such a state idea favored a model in which law and administration (as form and function) stood at the very center of state activities. This explains the strongly legalistic tradition of Austrian legal thought, which continued to have an effect after 1918 (and in fact until today) (Ewald Wiederin, Denken vom Recht her [2007]).

Osterkamp gives plurality and supranationality, long considered as deficits of the Habsburg Monarchy, a positive meaning. Although the Habsburg Monarchy could not build one nation (p.121), its constellation enabled a system in which ideologically motivated terms, like nation-state and sovereignty, were not in the foreground. The Habsburg Monarchy yielded a multi-level structure of the administration instead of centralized, one-dimensional governance (pp.87, 214 et sq.). Osterkamp differentiates between various forms of federal structures (administrative federalism, crown land federalism, union of dualism), which she compares with the federalist ideas of the time (trialism, non-territorial personal autonomy, a “United States of Austria,” etc.) (p.413).

Osterkamp’s analysis offers a new explanation for the state structure and cooperation within the Habsburg Monarchy, and it may also explain the discrepancy between the narrative of the “prison of the peoples” and the reality of a functioning (although muddled) administration. Pieter Judson ascribes a certain theatricality to Viennese politics: polarizing debates on the stage, but cooperation behind it, or, as Osterkamp writes: “People talked about each other in public, and in the back rooms with each other” (p.224).

Osterkamp investigates not only the structures existing at the time or the federalist (federalizing) proposals, but also takes into account the reality of proto-federalist cooperation as well, for example among the crown lands vis-à-vis Vienna. Her book also analyses the different compromise models (in Moravia and Galicia), the crown land conferences, the petition practice of the local population (especially in Galicia), the financial equalization between the crown lands and between Vienna and Budapest. Separate chapters are devoted to the proto-federalist agricultural, social, educational, administrative, and health policies.

Jana Osterkamp’s monography thus represents the first attempt to describe the constitutional functioning and the administrative practices of the Habsburg Monarchy as part of her innovative concept (“cooperative empire”) and also with regard to today’s jurisprudential and theoretical debates on supranational, federalist entities (like the European Union). It is an admirable attempt impressive in its findings and insights.

Péter Techet
Institute of Political Sciences and Philosophy of Law, Hans Kelsen Research Centre,
Albert-Ludwig-University of Freiburg / Centre for Legal History Research, University of Zurich
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Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Slovak National Hero and Co-Founder of Czechoslovakia. By Michal Kšiňan. London–New York: Routledge, 2021. pp. 300.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.819

In recent decades, Milan Rastislav Štefánik (1880–1919) has become one of, if not the, most important Slovak historical figures in Slovakia. Born in Nitra County, he left Hungary in 1898 after completing grammar school, first to study in Prague and then to live in France as an astronomer. He then spent years traveling the world and became a prominent figure in the French scientific and political elite. In 1912, he acquired French citizenship. He joined the French army when the war broke out and used his contacts with members of the political elite to reach Prime Minister Aristide Briand, through Czech émigrés Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, whom he knew from Prague, and Edvard Beneš. Together with them, he quickly won support among the great powers for the post-war liquidation of the Monarchy and the creation of new state structures. Štefánik’s political vision and his diplomatic and military organizational work thus played a major role in the creation of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Tragically, however, Štefánik never actually set foot on the soil of this new state. On his journey home, not far from Bratislava, his plane crashed on landing.

Several impressive papers on Štefánik’s life and work have been published in recent years. One of Kšiňan’s innovations in this already vibrant discourse is that he has created a deconstructionist biography: he deliberately does not follow a linear chronological sequence from birth to death (and does not bring his narrative to a close with Štefánik’s death, but rather ends much later). This method allows Kšiňan to focus on what he considers the most important issues in Štefánik’s life. Given the complexity of Štefánik’s personality and the remarkable turns his life took, it would be almost impossible to organize these penetrating analyses into a straight narrative. Over the course of some 39 years (and especially during the last decade and a half of his life), Štefánik pursued a multifaceted career that was almost unprecedented not only in Hungary, but probably in Europe. This presents the historian with daunting challenges. Within the framework of a single narrative, one has to delve into the inner workings of the French astronomical society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while also considering the subtle shifts in domestic politics in Ecuador, France, Bohemia (or the Czech lands), Russia, England, the United States, Italy, and Romania, not to mention the systems of rules and customs in the French salons, the functioning of the Masonic lodges, and countless other contexts, for without this detailed backdrop, Štefánik’s life and achievements are hardly comprehensible.

After an introductory historical overview intended presumably for the non-Slovak reader, Kšiňan has divided his book into four major themes. It is worth noting that he does not cover Štefánik’s entire life. Apart from a few digressions into some of the events of Štefánik’s youth, he concentrates on the last 15 years of his life, the period between 1904 and 1919, when Štefánik gradually emerged as an increasingly prominent figure in intellectual and political life in France. As Kšiňan himself states in the preface, he is primarily interested in the Štefánik as the “Slovak national hero.” More precisely, he seeks to consider the qualities, networks, relationships, and events in Štefánik’s adult life, between the ages of 24 and 39, that made him such an important figure, so rapidly elevated by the new state to the status of a national icon.

The first chapter, which begins with a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of social capital, examines how Štefánik created his network of French social contacts before the outbreak of World War I and how he transformed his social and cultural capital into economic capital. Kšiňan also considers how Štefánik used his interests and hobbies (astronomy, photography, a passion for collecting, an interest in the arts) to maintain his social capital. This analysis is important, as it furthers our grasp of how Štefánik was able to convince French decision-makers in the middle of the war to consider the views of two Czech emigrants (Masaryk and Beneš), how he was able to persuade them and Western public opinion to entertain a new vision of the future of Central Europe, and how he was able to balance the interests of Russia and France, powers which initially had different ideas about how to resolve the Czechoslovak question.

In the second chapter, Kšiňan uses Max Weber’s concept of the charismatic leader as a point of departure to explore, through various case studies and micro-studies, how Štefánik influenced his those around him, or in other words, how he used the network of relationships presented in the first chapter. Kšiňan devotes particular attention, for example, to Štefánik’s relationship with women, which was one of the most important elements of this network. From his Prague years onwards, Štefánik, who apparently was not a terribly fetching man, eagerly sought the company of the daughters of wealthy, powerful, aristocratic families with good connections, and he often accepted large donations from them. This subchapter also offers a good example of how Kšiňan, despite his basic premise, maintains a critical distance from the subject of his study. For instance, he makes the following contention: “Štefánik’s flirtations and frequent partings were a consequence of his impulsiveness and fear of being trapped by common stereotypes of relationships. Often, however, he enjoyed the process of seducing and conquering women; he was more of a seducer than a Don Juan. The interest of ladies certainly catered to his egocentrism and narcissism since he always needed to be in the spotlight.” The analysis of Štefánik’s mission to Ecuador is also outstanding. It offers a detailed discussion of the geopolitical context of Štefánik’s secret mission and how his negotiations brought the South American country into the French sphere of interest.

In the third chapter, which follows the most classical format of a biographical narrative, Kšiňan presents Štefánik’s military and political activities during World War I. Unlike many earlier authors, however, Kšiňan does not take the founding of Czechoslovakia as a fundamental goal, i.e., as a goal established at the outset. Rather, he suggests that it was a political innovation which took clearer form during the war years.

The final major section analyses Štefánik’s identity and the political debates after his death, showing that although Štefánik was far from satisfied with the setup of the new republic, he was not fundamentally in favor of Slovak aspirations for autonomy. Rather, he would have strengthened the Slovak presence in a centralist state on the basis of parity rather than Czech dominance. The last two subchapters provide superb micro-examinations of two myths about Štefanik. The first concerns the circumstances of his death, about which conspiracy theories are still common (for instance, that his plane was shot down by Hungarians or that it was mistakenly shot down by Slovaks who, because of its Italian markings, mistook it for a Hungarian plane, or that Beneš had the plane shot down, or that Štefanik deliberately committed suicide). With exemplary thoroughness and critical distance, Kšiňan points out that the circumstances of the crash cannot be clarified because of the negligence of the investigating authorities, and he convincingly refutes various unfounded theories. The second myth concerns Štefánik’s alleged Freemasonry, which is also a popular theory, though one finds no support for it in any sources and there are far more arguments against it than there are for it.

Kšiňan’s monograph, which draws on a vast source base of unprecedented size and new methodological approaches, persuasively rewrites the historical narrative concerning Milan Rastislav Štefanik, calling attention to details which previously were only superficially understood, introducing new topics, and refuting stubborn legends. The book is clearly one of the best biographies of the Štefánik. Kšiňan takes as his point of departure the notion that Štefánik is a national hero, but the book is really about much more than that. It furthers a far more nuanced understanding of who this man, known today as a Slovak national hero, really was.

József Demmel
University of Public Service / Historický ústav Slovenskej akadémie vied, Bratislava
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The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country. By Zsuzsanna Varga. Translated by Frank T. Zsigó. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2021, 323 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.823

Zsuzsanna Varga’s comprehensive account of the political economy of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War exemplifies the international and transnational turn in research on agricultural and rural history. The book is ordered chronologically and consists of seven chapters. After the introduction, which outlines the research approach, chapter one offers an overview of the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture and exports to East Central Europe. Chapters two, three, and four cover the phases of the collectivization of Hungarian agriculture and the retrenchment to private farming from 1949 to 1961. Chapters five and six deal with the transfer of Western knowledge and technology, including “closed production systems” from the USA, after the conclusion of collectivization. Chapter seven evaluates the successes and limitations of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” in the wider context. In the conclusion, Varga synthesizes the central insights of her study.

Using a rich body of macro-, meso- and micro-level sources (official documents, international press, oral interviews, etc.), Varga explains the shifting route of Hungarian agriculture between the onset of land collectivization in 1949 and its definite abandonment in 1989 within the framework of “transnational comparison” (i.e., the combination of comparative and entangled approaches). She highlights two transsystemic transfers of politico-economic institutions, technology, and knowledge to Hungary: first, the “Eastern transfer,” which transplanted the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture, regarded as an “inner colony” for industrialization, into a pre-socialist mode of farming built on private property and market orientation; second, the “Western transfer,” which transplanted a capitalist production system into a socialist agriculture based on the Soviet model. Varga argues that Americanization was one sort of solution to performance problems caused by Sovietization in the 1960s. By the 1970s, a “hybrid agriculture” had emerged in Hungary that applied the latest Western agricultural technology on state farms and producer cooperatives created on the basis of the Soviet model. The end of food shortages and the growth of agricultural surpluses were labeled as the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.”

Varga clearly shows that the Hungarian agricultural transformation during the Cold War was not a well-paved path but, rather, a rocky road. Waves of state-led collectivization according to the Soviet model were interrupted by phases of de-collectivization that reflected the destabilization of the socialist regime, mediation by its agrarian lobby, and peasant agitation. While the Soviet model was implemented, negotiated, and adapted top-down by the Hungarian state apparatus, the adoption of Western technology and knowledge emerged bottom-up through partnerships of state farms and producer cooperatives with private companies from beyond the Iron Curtain. The resulting division of labor involved large-scale state and collective farms specializing in capital-intensive arable production as well as small private household plots specializing in labor-intensive vegetable, fruit, and livestock production. The study shows institutional and technological transfer between countries with different political and economic systems can increase agricultural performance, provided that actors at sub-national levels gain agency to mediate between systemic imperatives and everyday priorities.

Although Varga does not refer to James Scott’s notion of “high-modernism,” her monograph contributes to the debate on state-led agrarian change in the twentieth century. The emergence of a both Sovietized and Americanized mode of farming in Hungary highlights the limits of top-down development schemes by authoritarian nation states and their technocratic planners as well as the potentials of bottom-up initiatives from the countryside. Rather than state-enforced “high modernism,” the emergence of a Hungarian “hybrid agriculture” indicates a case of “low modernism” that shifts national economic performance through informal and formal institutionalization of sub-national grassroots activities. The creative adaptation of state-imposed collectivization by local actors – which was quite risky, as indicated by show trials against cooperative leaders – is framed in terms of a “successful alternative” to the Soviet model. From the prevailing socioeconomic perspective, this conclusion seems reasonable. However, doubts arise concerning the “successful” and “alternative” character of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” when one shifts to a socio-natural view. The Western technoscientific package adopted by Hungarian state farms and producer cooperatives as well as the state-enforced Soviet model they struggled with rested on similar agro-industrial imperatives: the replacement of muscle power by machinery and agrochemicals based on fossil energy, the dissolution of the symbiotic relationship between arable and livestock farming, and the shift of both land and labor productivity according to the needs of industrial society. Seen from a socio-natural angle, the transnationally induced modernization of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War might appear much “higher” (in Scott’s terms) than from a purely socioeconomic view.

This critical comment should not cast a poor light on the rich evidence provided by the monograph, but rather indicates a direction for future research on the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.” The well-researched and well-narrated account of the Hungarian agricultural transformation will be of great value not only for scholars of rural and agricultural history, but also for anyone interested in the international and transnational history of Communist Europe during the Cold War.

Ernst Langthaler
Johannes Kepler University, Linz
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Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –802

BOOK REVIEWS Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –805

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Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –811 BOOK REVIEWS

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Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –815 BOOK REVIEWS

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Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –818 BOOK REVIEWS

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BOOK REVIEWS Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –822

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BOOK REVIEWS Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –825

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2020_1_Book reviews

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Volume 9 Issue 1 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

Antemurale Christianitatis: Zur Genese der Bollwerksrhetorik im östlichen Mitteleuropa an der Schwelle vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit. By Paul Srodecki. Historische Studien 508. Husum: Matthiesen, 2015. 532 pp.

In 2013, when Paul Srodecki defended his dissertation (which bears the same title as the book published two years later) at the University of Giessen, even he probably did not realize how relevant the theme he had chosen for his work would come to be over the course of the next few years. And yet he may have had some guess. In the preface to the book, he puts the changes which the traditional images of Europe have undergone in context in connection with the expansion of the European Union in 2004. He notes that even in the first years of the new millennium, the governments in Central and Eastern Europe made frequent use of Late Medieval and early modern topoi, such as the concept of “bulwark of Europe and Christianity.”

In addition to the relevance of the subject of the book, it is also worth noting that Srodecki examines the evolution of the topos which figures in his title according to the tradition of the classical German schools of history, first and foremost in the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Poland. His methodology shifts between an investigation from the perspective of the history of ideas and political science explanation patterns. Only rarely does one find arguments based on conceptual or discursive history. Following a thorough explanation of the corpus of sources under examination and his methodology, Srodecki offers eight chapters of varying lengths in which he presents the subject of his research and his findings.

Not surprisingly, he begins with a chapter on conceptual history in which he examines ideological tenets, one by one, and presents the terms he will discuss (antemurale, propugnaculum, murus, and scutum), which reflect traditional warlike rhetoric. In a discussion of the opposition, rivalry, and even conflict between East and West, one cannot avoid offering an overview of the Ancient and Medieval history of the asymmetrical counter-terms. Beginning with Gog and Magog from the Old Testament and concluding with the East–West schism in 1054, Srodecki presents the most important historical nodes, putting his investigation into this larger context. For the bulwark rhetoric (Bollwerksrhetorik) was already present in Antiquity (one need merely consider the citation taken from the Vulgate as a kind of slogan for the book), but it was used with varying intensity in different periods.

Though Srodecki draws particularly heavily on sources relevant to the Hungarian and the Polish Kingdoms, he nonetheless cannot avoid beginning with a discussion of the roles of the Teutonic Order, which he characterizes as a kind of a trailblazer in the spread of the revived trope of the bulwark. In the course of the Crusades, the Teutonic Order rose up as a defender of Christianity. Then, when Andrew II of Hungary had them settle in Burzenland in the course of the wars against the Cumans, they soon again characterized themselves, mutatis mutandis, as the defenders of Christianity, though they were fighting not to liberate the Holy Land, but rather against the pagan Cumans. Srodecki offers a brief presentation here of how this image became a familiar and widely used trope in the kingdoms on the eastern edges of the Western Christian world, first and foremost the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary.

In the use of the bulwark rhetoric (as in the case of uses of other asymmetrical counter-terms), sometimes the same parties who regard and interpret themselves as the embodiments of the allegory disagree among themselves and begin to differ, and a very chaotic warlike situation comes about, particularly on the level of rhetoric. It is, after all, simple to say that a Christian group that forms the bulwark of Christianity is good and the pagan enemy is evil. However, as soon as two groups each of which considers itself the bulwark of Christianity come into conflict with each other, the question inevitably will arise as to which of them is the authentic bulwark of the one true faith. Srodecki discusses this interesting question in the chapter in which he presents the long battles between the Teutonic Order and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in particular between the Order and the Kingdom of Poland up until the first third of the fifteenth century.

Then begins the section of the monograph that really constitutes its spine. The few pages concerning Humanist topoi, the (anti-)Turcicas, and the image of Humanist Europe offers the backdrop for the chapters on the rhetoric in Hungary and Poland concerning the two kingdoms as the bulwarks of Christianity. Srodecki attributes considerable importance in the spread of this topos to Humanist orations and in particular to the work of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and then his selection as pope, was ever more impassioned in his efforts to urge common action against the Turks in the name of Christianity and Christian Europe. In the first of the two longest chapters in the book, Srodecki offers an overview of the history in Hungary of the period associated with the rulers of the Hunyadi family from the perspective of the evolution of the trope of a defensive bulwark. While John Hunyadi rose as the “scourge of the Turks” athleta Christi, his son Matthias waged campaigns over the course of his rule not only against the pagan Turks but also against heretics, in other words, the Hussites, or at least Srodecki puts the battles he fought for the Czech crown (i.e. the crown of another Christian people) into this narrative. Srodecki notes the importance of the roles played by Matthias’s court chroniclers (Ransano, Bonfini) in interweaving the political legitimacy of the ruling house and the rhetoric of a defensive bastion into their historical narratives and thereby furthering the acceptance of both in the wider circles. By the end of the chapter, Srodecki has completely separated the crusade fought in the realm of rhetoric and the actual crusades fought on the battlefield, and at this point, it again becomes difficult for the reader to disregard the actual political bearings and implications. The longest and most thoroughly thought-through chapter of the monograph addresses the spread of the antemurale concept in the Europe of the Jagiellonian dynasty. As he did in his discussions of the rulers of the Hunyadi family, here too, Srodecki presents the history of the use of the term alongside the histories of the dynasties and the dynastic battles. The narrative of the history of the two dynasties and the kingdom culminates in the Battle of Mohács. With the fall of the kingdoms, the notion of a defensive bulwark also begins to crumble and fall out of use.

In harmony with the concept of translatio imperii, there were heirs to this rhetorical tradition and enemies of these heirs, but these were relatively small outbursts which flared up in isolated pockets compared to earlier cases. Of them, it is worth mentioning perhaps the denominational conflicts which broke out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Srodecki makes only brief reference to later use of the concept, and quite rightly. He does not undertake in this monograph to examine the defensive bulwark rhetoric in the modern era. What he has undertaken he has admirably achieved, namely to offer an overview and a readable narrative of the history of the topos he has chosen in the Late Middle Ages and the early modern era.

Emőke Rita Szilágyi
Research Centre for the Humanities

Az indigenák [The indigenae]. Edited by István M. Szijártó. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2017. 235 pp.

The volume is based on a conference held on September 19, 2014 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest by a group of scholars focusing on the social history of early modern and modern Hungary. The conference dealt with a particular group of the society of estates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the laconic title of the book probably sounds unfamiliar and even enigmatic to most readers, it is worth beginning with a definition. In short, the traditional legal institution of indigenatus served as a form of ennoblement through which someone of foreign origin was incorporated into the Hungarian political nation (natio Hungarica). Originally, naturalization was a royal prerogative, but during a diet, it required the consent of the Hungarian estates as well. Between the legislative sessions, the king was eligible to decide with the collaboration of his Hungarian counsellors. Although the bestowal of the title was an established practice, it was not always used. Foreigners could be settled in the country and naturalized “tacitly,” without the solemn procedure, though this did not mean that they could enjoy noble liberties and privileges.

As István M. Szijártó, the editor of the volume emphasizes, while indigenatus as a legal category is unambiguous, from the viewpoint of social history it appears as a more complex and intriguing phenomenon. As Szijártó points out, the question of who could be considered an indigena was determined not by legal status, but by the political contexts and interests. Consequently, the real starting point for historical research must be the inconsistent practices of the period, i.e. when and why somebody was labelled an indigena, as well as the attitude of the rest of the Hungarian estates towards these individuals. The use of this label clearly served as a form of social and political discrimination until the middle (or rather the end) of the nineteenth century.

As Szijártó writes in his introduction, “far more myths have circulated in Hungarian historiography about the indigenae than actual research endeavors dealing with them.” Fortunately, most of the studies in the volume are founded on genuine archival research, which compensates for the field having fallen into neglect for a long time. Furthermore, though the articles were written by an array of graduate students, early career researchers and experienced scholars, they set an evenly high standard, and some of the younger authors make essential contributions to the field. The time scope of the collection is rather broad, as the first study deals with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the last two with the post-Compromise (1867) years. However, the focal point of the volume is the era of the “constitutionalism of the estates” (as pointed out by Szijártó), i.e. from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. It is not surprising that this question was particularly important in the period of the social, economic, and political ascent of the wealthy gentry (bene possessionati) and the long-lasting political practice of dualism between the king and the estates.

In the first article of the volume, Tatjana Guszarova discusses the process of indigenatio solemnis, the official and solemn naturalization of foreigners at the diets during the reign of the first Habsburg kings. Guszarova presents this act as a means with which the Habsburgs cemented their political position in the kingdom. Article LXXVII of 1550 specified the rules of indigenatio solemnis, establishing the conditions of the process for a long time. By offering an overview of the naturalizations which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Guszarova demonstrates that the efforts of the Habsburgs in this field proved successful, since they managed to increase the number of Hungarian nobles of foreign origin.

András Forgó investigates a subgroup of indigenae, the members of the prelates and the middle-ranking members of the clergy who were naturalized, with emphasis on the superiors of the monastic orders. Forgó emphasizes that many monastic superiors arrived in the country after the Ottomans had been driven out, and they had been sent to reorganize the monastic centers. However, the Hungarian estates were distrustful towards them and accused them of using the monastic institutions merely for personal gain. Consequently, in the eighteenth century, it became customary for the monastic superiors to make efforts to attain naturalization. Forgó concludes that by obtaining indigenatus, the monastic orders could take the wind out of the sails of the Hungarian estates, even if the operation of the monastic communities remained in foreign hands, headed by an abbot or a provost of foreign origin.

To my mind, the subsequent three studies written by historians who are in the earlier phases of their careers are the most thorough and even trailblazing contributions to the volume. Tamás Szemethy examines the ways in which people managed to become part of the Hungarian aristocracy. There were essentially two means of entering this group: the bestowal of a title by the king (the people who belonged to this category were the so-called “new aristocrats”) and naturalization. Szemethy’s study compares these two subgroups with regard to their number and occupations (soldiers, officials, and clergymen) between 1720 and 1799. He points out the problems of clarifying the separation of the two subgroups and the terminology regarding them. Szemethy’s investigations are based primarily on the Corpus Juris and the Hungarian Royal Books (Libri Regii), though he points out that these sources are not sufficient in and of themselves as the foundations for a proper analysis. By examining the relevant legal sources, one could offer a plain definition of the process of naturalization, but the actual legal practice appears to have been more complex. Szemethy shows that, in addition to the formal process, it was possible to obtain indigenatus in an alternative way. According to Béla Kempelen and Zoltán Fallenbüchl, in the periods between the sessions of the diet, following a proposal by the king, the incorporation of a foreigner had to be announced in a county assembly and reported to the Archbishop of Esztergom, and a diploma had to be issued by the Royal Chancery (Cancellaria Regis). Szemethy emphasizes that while it is possible to define the group of “new aristocrats” legally, in the case of the indigenae, the legal approach should be replaced or at least complemented with social historical analysis.

In comparison to the other contributions to the volume, the approach adopted by Zsolt Kökényesi is an exception. Kökényesi examines the other side of the coin, the ceremony of Erbhuldigung, the solemn pledge of fidelity in Lower Austria in the first half of the eighteenth century. This ceremony was significant, because it was a public act made by an archduke ascending to the throne. The ceremonies meant the formal handover of the Lower Austrian estates, and they were spectacular events. Due to their significance, descriptions of the proceedings and detailed lists of participants were published. After an enumeration of the participants, Kökényesi examines the presence of Hungarians. A Hungarian aristocrat could take part in the Erbhuldigung either as an Inkolat (one who was incorporated into the Lower Austrian estates) or as a foreign guest of the festive banquet. Kökényesi’s study concludes that most of the Hungarian participants in the ceremonies were magnates who maintained good relations in Austria and who wanted to be integrated personally into the upper elite of the Habsburg Monarchy. Thus, their participation in these events can be considered part of a conscious strategy.

In his case study on the 1751 diet, János Nagy looks at the political aspects of naturalization. He analyzes a unique and promising group of archival sources: the requests for indigenatus and the documents produced by the commission of the diet investigating the process. Nagy points out that that the indigenae were self-supporting actors who had legitimate social claims. Consequently, he deals with their role in the debates in the diet, their image in prevailing public opinion, and also how they argued in their requests addressed to the diet. Nagy shows that the strategies they used when they were trying to convince the Hungarian estates differed slightly from the strategies they used in their requests addressed to the king. The requests addressed to the estates applied four basic modes of argumentation: note military merits, note service to the common good, enumerate Hungarian ancestors and relatives, and refer to possession of lands in the kingdom. Nagy contends that, in the context of the diets, labeling somebody an indigena was essentially political.

In the next chapter, Adrienn Szilágyi deals with the indigena-families of Békés County in the first half of the nineteenth century, approaching the question from the standpoint of local society. In Békés County (today in southwestern Hungary), following the expulsion of the Turks, Johann Georg Freiherr von Harruckern acquired two-thirds of the lands as a royal donation. He played a crucial role in local politics, and after his death in 1742, his son Franz followed in his father’s footsteps. However, when the son died in 1775, the male line of the family died with him, and the heirs divided the lands into five parts. Consequently, in the following decades a few naturalized families were able to establish connections in the county. Szilágyi points out two characteristic strategies used by the naturalized magnate families in this specific county: some families were absent and remained affiliated with the imperial center, while others integrated into the life of the county as active agents in local political and economic life.

Béla Pálmány draws attention in his study to the wave of naturalizations during the diets of the Reform Era. He emphasizes that during most wartime diets at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, no naturalizations occurred, but after the Napoleonic wars, many foreigners obtained status as indigenatus. The French Wars and the 13-year break in legislation impacted the number of naturalizations. Pálmány shows that the merits of those involved in the wars were stressed upon naturalization (traditional military merits, office-bearing in the service of the court and country, and as a new element, appeals to various activities undertaken as civilians). During the diets of 1839–40 and 1843–44, the legal-constitutional aspects of indigenatus were also disputed, and with the April Laws of 1848, the significance of the issue decreased remarkably.

Although with the vanishing of the old political system of the estates, the political significance of indigenatus was weakening, the question was still on the agenda because of the personal legislative right of the members of the House of Magnates. The last two studies focus on this period. Veronika Tóth-Barbalics investigates the indigenae of the House of Magnates between 1865 and 1918. The House of Magnates was reformed in 1885, resulting in considerable changes in the composition of the chamber. With Article VII of 1885, membership was now bound to a tax census of 3,000 forints per year and to the constraint of opting, meaning that naturalized magnates had to make a statement confirming that they practiced the right to legislate exclusively in the Hungarian Parliament. The study complements the investigations of Károly Vörös, demonstrating that of the indigena-families which dropped out of the House of Magnates, only a small number found their way back into a legislative body.

Finally, the study of Dániel Ballabás discusses the same period, but from a more comprehensive and problem-oriented viewpoint. His study deals the Corpus Juris as an authentic source on the process of naturalization, claiming that between 1542 and 1840, 594 people obtained indigenatus in total. After delineating the heritage of the previous period, the study investigates the relationship between the indigenae and the changes to the citizenship law in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ballabás also studies the question of membership in the House of Magnates, citing some peculiar arguments against indigenae. As had been the case in the Reform Era, the opposition presented the archetypical indigena as an absent foreigner, unable to support national interests.

All in all, the findings of the studies complement those of earlier studies and refute some long-lasting political and historical myths. The volume provides deeper insights into the field through thorough study of primary sources. It enriches first and foremost our knowledge of the social history of the upper elites of the Kingdom of Hungary, though the praiseworthy presence of both social and political viewpoints notwithstanding, the approach of quantitative social history dominates, while the “interpretive” attitude focusing on the political discourses and legal practices of the age remains in the background.

Ágoston Nagy
National University of Public Service

The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire. By A. Wess Mitchell. Princeton: University Press, 2018. xiv + 403 pp.

This is an ambitious, bright, fluent book. It represents an interdisciplinary challenge for historians. It brings the methodology of strategic studies to bear on the Austrian state as it had grown to great-power status by the early eighteenth century, emerging from the carapace of the Holy Roman Empire and negotiating the extinction of the Spanish line of its ruling family.

“All Great Powers need a grand strategy to survive,” we are told (p.304). So, what was the secret of the Habsburgs’ success in the century and a half after 1700? Mitchell begins with the geographical determinants of their realms: an exposed situation in the center of the continent, but with mountain ranges providing protection and river systems securing internal lines of communication. Mitchell makes repeated references to these factors, although neither Frederick of Prussia nor Napoleon was much hindered by orographic obstacles, while the waterways, even those within the Danube’s hydrological network, were grievously underexploited for a long time. Mitchell stresses how well Austrian governments came to understand their terrain thanks to the unrivalled quality of their cartography (a pity his own maps are so crude, illegible, and generally feeble). Essentially, Austria, as a satiated land power surrounded by threats, adopted defensive military postures. It did not risk its main body of troops unless absolutely necessary. That is also the message of a recent book by Richard Bassett entitled For God and Kaiser, in which Bassett makes the same argument in a more facile and anecdotal way. Mitchell points to the Habsburgs’ successful “sequencing,” as he calls it, of time and space. They needed, on the one hand, barriers and buffers: fortified redoubts in their own border areas or, better still, beyond them, but in friendly hands; and client states, earlier especially in southern German and northern Italian territories, later also in the western Balkans. On the other hand, they needed alliances. In the 22 wars fought by Austria during this period, it almost always (19 times) stood on the side which had more allies.

That involved a balancing act, directed first against France, with support from the German lands, Great Britain, and elsewhere; then the construction of a coalition against Frederician Prussia; then decades of struggle with shifting power groups to resist France again in its revolutionary and Napoleonic mode. For a century from the 1750s, the Habsburgs’ chief alliance was with Russia, but that would prove costliest in the long run. The (for Mitchell willful) alienation of Russia during the Crimean war began the rapid erosion of Austria as a great power, combined as it was with a loss of buffers, a new offensive mentality in the high command, and a neglect of earlier operational prowess (by the 1860s, Habsburg troops in Germany were reduced to using Baedeker guides to find their routes). Emperor Francis Joseph, revered by some as the conserver of the Monarchy, rightly appears here, in a strong final chapter, as its foremost gravedigger.

The broad international backing, or at least neutrality, that Austria long enjoyed has often been attributed to recognition of it as a “European necessity.” Mitchell resists this notion, especially for the eighteenth century. He emphasizes Austria’s agency and the influence on its decision-making of a stream of local military theorists, from Montecuccoli to Archduke Charles and Radetzky. Predictably, Mitchell’s appreciation of Habsburg foreign policy culminates in a rosy presentation of the Vienna settlement and the age of Metternich. He shows (in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger and Paul Schroeder) how a pax Austriaca was secured by the fruitful deployment of international alliances, puissances intermédiaires, and localized low-cost interventions. At this point we may, however, begin to wonder how complete or even accurate this analysis is. What of Metternich’s woeful mishandling of the domestic affairs of the Monarchy? Did not that count towards the strategic reckoning? Yes, but only on the credit side of the ledger: “The greatest geopolitical success of the Metternich system came in 1848” (p.251). In other words, Austria was particularly effective at fighting its own, largely unarmed people. “General Windischgrätz put down the Prague uprising” (p.252): all in a day’s work, no doubt, for an accomplished Austrian strategist. And we are told how well some fortresses held out against the revolution at home (no mention of the fact that others, in the hands of the Hungarian rebels, held out even longer).

Mitchell’s lack of interest in actual governance goes with some carelessness about detail. He uses the doubtful term “Erblände” throughout for the hereditary lands. He names the wrong Schwarzenberg in 1813 (it was Karl, not Felix). Forms like “Clam-Martinez” and “Menningen” (Memmingen), “Württemburg,” “Witelsbach,” and “Freiburg on the Danube” arouse unease. And even in the grand geostrategic scheme of things, Mackinder’s forename was Halford, not “Harold.” Thus, Mitchell cannot be trusted for a full picture of the determinants of Habsburg decline in the nineteenth century. But that is not what strategic studies are about. Rather we may see his contribution as heuristic. It suggests that in the last phase, we can usefully distinguish two Habsburg empires. One was the popular and progressive construction subscribed to by many people of the Monarchy and much rehabilitated in recent scholarship (notably the American school around Pieter Judson). The other was the strategic Austria, the machine for making foreign policy. The people’s empire was aspirational and emergent; the dynastic empire was real and degenerative. From the 1860s onward, the latter’s crisis undermined the former. Revealingly, the Austria-Hungary decades form no part of Mitchell’s story, since from his perspective, the Monarchy by then was already a spent force.

Robert J. W. Evans
University of Oxford

“Engesztelhetetlen gyűlölet”: Válás Budapesten (1850–1914) [“Implacable hatred”: Divorce in Budapest, 1850–1914]. By Sándor Nagy. Budapest: Budapest City Archives; HAS–Momentum Family History Research Group, 2018. 503 pp.

Sándor Nagy, a senior archivist at the Budapest City Archives, summarized the results of his nearly two decades of research in this volume, which is impressive in many ways. Although the question of divorce, prohibitions against divorce, and licensing of divorce under certain conditions has already been actively studied by contemporaries, a comprehensive analysis of the topic has not yet been written. Sándor Nagy’s work fills this gap. Although most of the concrete examples offered in the book are drawn from urban contexts, the volume offers the reader much more. In the first two parts, which come to about 250 pages, Nagy meticulously explores the evolution of divorce in Hungary, including the perceived or real differences between cities and rural settlements. From confession to confession, he examines the room for maneuver that couples who wished to terminate their marriages had, the interaction between social attitudes to divorce, and the evolution of the legal environment. The reader can also follow the process of the secularization of divorce and the consequences of this process. In addition to examining opinions concerning divorce prevailing in Hungary at the time, Nagy also presents and evaluates earlier findings on the topic in an international context or refutes stereotypes that have become widespread in the secondary literature. For example, he explains in detail why statistics show many more divorced women than men in Budapest. He also throws into question the view according to which the degree of urbanization and modernization is directly proportional to the number of divorces. In some cities in Hungary, such as Kolozsvár (Cluj), which was considered more of a mid-city, couples were more likely to divorce than in Budapest or the much more populous Paris. The stereotype that women benefited from the introduction of civic divorce and it helped them to assert their interests is also questioned. Nagy draws attention to the methodological and computational flaws in the data compiled by contemporary statisticians, which confirmed the preconceived notion that the introduction of civil divorce would bring about an increase in the number of cases. The number of divorces, reconstructed by Nagy, on the basis of court sources, does not prove this. Rather, the number of divorces in Budapest declined significantly in 1896, followed later by a steady but slower increase compared to the number of divorces in towns in rural parts of the country.

In the earlier secondary literature, the question of divorce was primarily discussed by historical demographers, but the sources and methods they employed dealt only with a few aspects. By contrast, the court files that Nagy focuses on and also the other related sources (private letters, recollections etc.) he uses, adopting methods from the field of legal history which so far have been neglected, offer a completely new picture. For example, there is a compelling larger chapter on “alternative solutions” (the “ante-room” of divorce), in which Nagy writes about abandonment and concubinage, paradoxically, on the basis of the subsequent court files. Furthermore, in similar detail, he explains how one could become a legitimate or illegitimate child.

Several chapters touch on gender differences, not in general, but usually in terms of social affiliation. One of the reasons for this is that women’s work, the property rights in marriage, and the financial security of women (and their children) played a crucial role in the initiation and continuation of the procedure. Nagy’s investigation of the fates of people involved does not end with the divorce. He tries to follow the parties and determine what happened to them after the divorce, including how they declared their family and social status, whether they remarried, re-divorced, and whether their prosperity was influenced by the dissolution of their unhappy marriage. Particular attention should be paid to the chapter “Relations and Networks,” in which Nagy gives concrete examples of how divorces could “spread” with the assistance of relatives, neighbors and lawyer acquaintances in a particular community.

Nagy deals with the sources with exemplary objectivity, and in the introduction, he notes that the expression “implacable hatred” in the title is a contemporary legal term. Parties needed simply to use this term in order to terminate a marriage relatively quickly without greater complications. Accordingly, we learn less about bedroom secrets and the real-life emotional conflicts of the litigant spouses and instead come to know how the lawyers “trained” their clients, what consensual divorce meant, and what happened to someone who was not trained or who did not listen to good advice.

It is evident from the monograph that it is from the pen of a very knowledgeable, recognized expert on the sources held in various archives, who is familiar with the relevant literature and who has given the subject lengthy reflection and reassessed prevailing ideas on the history of divorce in the period discussed.

Eleonóra Géra
Eötvös Loránd University

Everyday Nationalism in Hungary 1789–1867. By Alexander Maxwell. Berlin–Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. 262 pp.

For a few decades, we have been witnessing a reassessment of the workings and the importance of nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe. Innovative scholars rethink the weight of national identity in studies based on solid empirical research and thorough theoretical considerations. The voluminous 2016 book by Pieter M. Judson (The Habsburg Empire: A New History) can be regarded as a summary of these new findings. However, this thought-provoking book does not pay much attention to the Hungarian Kingdom. Hungarian critics of the work have pointed out that the case of Hungary does not fit into many of the tendencies that Judson demonstrates. Furthermore, one has the feeling that in this major work, which provides an impressive critical analysis of national identity and indifference in Cisleithania, Hungary is presented as an “oasis” of the national idea, where it was able to flourish in a way that nationalists from Cisleithania could only dream of. Fortunately, in the past few years, some works have been published which treat Hungary in a way that is worthy of the abovementioned historiographical trend. These works focus not only on Hungarian (Magyar) nationalism, but also on the different minorities in the country and their responses to the challenges posed by an increasingly powerful Magyar nationalism. One thinks, for instance, of the remarkable book by Alexander Maxwell, which is one of the most recent in this trend.

The purpose of the book is to examine the beginnings of nationalism as a lived experience in the Hungarian Kingdom between 1789 and 1867. The work focuses on certain aspects of nationalism that the secondary literature has tended to ignore, namely the nationalization of banal objects and practices of ordinary people, such as national drinks or national marriage customs. The book can be divided into three main parts. The first (chapters 1 and 2) presents a thorough study of terminological and theoretical aspects. The second part (chapters 3 to 7) provides an analysis of the aforementioned nationalization of everyday phenomena. Finally, in the conclusion, Maxwell evaluates his findings from the point of view of nationalism theories, though some discussion of this question is found in every chapter.

Although, as already stated, the book’s main focus is on the nationalization of everyday life, the first two chapters, which offer a consideration of terminological problems, are just as significant and original as the subsequent ones. In the first chapter, Maxwell analyses the word “Hungarian.” He points out that this kind of analysis is essential to any book dealing with the nationalism(s) in the Kingdom of Hungary, though it is worth noting that many substantial works published in Hungary and abroad fail to offer any rigorous discussion of such a fundamental term and use the word as if its meaning were self-evident. This is a grave mistake, in particular given that the term featured prominently in national rhetoric. Maxwell shows how the distinction between Hungarian (signifying all inhabitants of the Kingdom) and Magyar (meaning exclusively the linguistic community) was developed among the non-Magyar communities. This distinction signified a more tolerant approach, as it listed Slovaks, for example, and Magyars as equal inhabitants of their common country, Hungary. No surprise that Magyar nationalists were harshly against this differentiation. Concerning Maxwell’s own usage of the words, knowing that a perfect solution does not exist, he uses the term “Magyar” in cases in which there was a conflict between Magyar nationalists and the other communities. This solution seems to be more adequate than that of Judson, who only declared briefly and bluntly that the distinction between “Hungarian” and “Magyar” made “little intellectual sense” to him, and so he deliberately avoided using the terms “Magyar” and “Magyarization.”

The notion of “nation” is very similar to that of “Hungarian” in the sense that it was an eminent element of nationalist rhetoric, yet several scholarly works use the term as if its meaning were self-evident. First, Maxwell presents the complicated history of how Magyar and “minority” (another highly problematic term) intellectuals defined the notion of “nation” and “nationality” up to the 1868 Nationalities Law. One might regret, however, that he fails to offer a similar analysis of the so-called “Hungarus consciousness,” which is considered in the secondary literature as a widespread form of collective identity that transcended ethnicity and based self-definition on loyalty to Hungary as a territorial unit. Second, Maxwell also examines the applicability of the definitions of nation offered by different nationalism-theorists. Maxwell’s method is highly recommended: instead of using the definition of one particular theorist and superposing it to the nineteenth century, he proposes an empirical research strategy which consists of analyzing the notion as a rhetorical device, putting emphasis on how historical actors themselves interpreted and used the notion of “nation.” This strategy fits into a trend which is gaining prevalence today, as scholars choose an empirical method instead of being absorbed by the overwhelming array of nationalism theories.

With the third chapter, Maxwell arrives to the main object of his work. Chapters three and four proceed from a Marxist inspired base-superstructure model to explain the phenomena of national tobacco and national wine. Maxwell also presents the limits of this model by showing that although economic interest played a key part in advertising these items as “national goods,” the items themselves became cultural phenomena and started a life of their own. To describe this transformation, Maxwell uses the notion of “banal nationalism,” which he takes from the works of Michael Billig, and he adapts this notion to the Hungarian Kingdom. Maxwell also presents the different prejudices concerning the other nationalities’ preferred types of alcohol. The fifth and sixth chapters present elements of everyday nationalism that have gender implications. Maxwell points out that the cult of the “national moustache” meant the exclusion not only of other nationalities but also women. The chapter on national marriages presents how Magyar intellectuals urged their compatriots to choose Magyar women and disapproved of cross-national marriages. Using Carole Pateman’s terminology, Maxwell shows how the rhetoric of national endogamy presented women as collective possessions of the national brotherhood. Though Pateman’s work does not explicitly deal with nationalism, Maxwell considers it useful, as in his view, other gender works do not address nationalism as such, but only its effects on women. The seventh chapter examines national clothing, a topic which is mostly approached from the sociological and gender point of view, neglecting its implications for nationalism. Maxwell, using first and foremost the theory of Grant McCracken, who treats clothing as a sort of language, analyses the spread of díszmagyar (Hungarian national festival clothing for men) and the reaction of the nationalities (mainly Croats) to this trend.

In the conclusion, Maxwell considers what lessons can be drawn from the Hungarian case for nationalism theorists. For we are facing an overwhelming number of nationalism theories which need empirical testing. Maxwell is especially hostile to Anthony D. Smith’s approach, showing that not only is Smith poorly informed about Hungarian history, but his ideas are not even fit to grasp the complexity of the Hungarian case. And he does not limit himself to Smith, but calls into question the notions put forward by all the scholars (Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner among others) who consider nationalism as something which emerged from gradual social transformation. Instead, the history of everyday nationalism turns us to Rogers Brubaker, who has argued that one should see nationness as an event, something that suddenly crystallizes rather than develops. Furthermore, Brubaker’s theory also emphasizes the agency of patriots and the question of reception, an approach which proves more fruitful than the suggestions posed by his predecessors’. Maxwell concludes that Brubaker’s ideas prove the most suitable in dealing with nationalism in an empirical study. It is worth noting that it was also Brubaker’s ideas that helped the notion of “national indifference” gain traction in the secondary literature as a useful concept.

One might argue that, in view of its main sources, Maxwell’s book is more about the idea of everyday nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century than everyday nationalism itself. However, this would be a rather idealistic and even naïve criticism which would reveal a certain inexperience in dealing with the very few available reliable historical sources, which is a burden every historian seeking to study the reception of nationalist ideas in the period faces. Maxwell’s approach offers a solution which is naturally not perfect, but remains one of the best available: the study of national commodities and nationalized practices may be able to bridge “the intellectual history of national ideas and the data available to social historians.”

Imre Tarafás
Eötvös Loránd University

Magyarok a bécsi hivatalnokvilágban: A közös külügyminisztérium magyar tisztviselői 1867–1914 [Hungarians in the Viennese bureaucracy: Hungarian officers in the joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1867–1914]. By Éva Somogyi. Budapest: MTA BTK TTI, 2017. 268 pp.

At first glance a collective biography of Hungarian officers in the ranks of the (in)famous Viennese bureaucracy, the book by Éva Somogyi offers far more than that, namely an empirical investigation of the very functioning of dualist Austria-Hungary. This insight is all the more appreciated, since recent literature concerning Cisleithanian integration and imperial (rather than national) identity would fill libraries, but the roles played by Hungarians in operating the dualist state are rarely investigated. However, the way they conceived their duty as civil servants in the Joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs sheds light on a peculiar kind of imperial loyalty and state patriotism which is often analyzed in connection with their Austrian colleagues but which is implicitly regarded as quasi non-existent in the more nation-state-like Hungarian part of the dual Monarchy. By meticulously uncovering the daily work done by officers to maintain the empire and ensure it prospered, the book makes up for this shortcoming on the one hand and draws a precise picture of how the establishment of the state (which is almost impossible to define from the perspective of its political essence) functioned in practice on the other.

After a short but comprehensive overview of the Viennese administration, Somogyi offers an investigation of the Joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then uses this as a foundation for a discussion of the aforementioned aspects. The Ministry was the most specific institution of the dualist state. As the prevailing minister was also president of the Joint Cabinet Council, it was something like a common government of the Gesamtstaat, though needless to say it was not acknowledged as such. This was the institution within the framework of which the multiple interests of the multiethnic empire were reconciled and a livable compromise was found between the two parts of the Monarchy. Members of the staff of this institution who had Hungarian citizenship formed a circle which took part in the exercise of executive political power. As a result, their numbers, roles, careers, visions of Vienna and the Empire, and their national, imperial, and other loyalties and social positions are not only interesting from a mere prosopographical point of view but also help us understand how everyday efforts and dialogues filled out the terms of the Settlement, which at times were vague, with practical content.

Following a presentation of the imperial institutional structure and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within in detail, Somogyi offers another chapter on the backdrop to her story, a chapter which brilliantly depicts the milieu of late-nineteenth-century Vienna, or more precisely what Vienna meant to Hungarians who were engaged in the civil service. Some kind of genius loci existed in the Ballhausplatz, a tradition institutionally cultivated, characterized mainly by an unconditional loyalty to the emperor and a class-identity of gentlemen in his service. Though imperial state patriotism is a commonly used term in Habsburg historiography, it is new to read about a disciplined corps which behaved in lines with its values.

In the fifth chapter, Somogyi provides a thorough presentation of her protagonists. At this point, the monograph truly benefits from the uniquely rich personal files of the Foreign Service, preserved in the Viennese Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. Based on these sources and other personal sources, such as diaries, letters, family documents, etc., Somogyi reconstructs the walk of life of nearly a hundred bureaucrats. Given Somogyi’s precision and consistency in her use of analytic categories, this work could also be used as a handbook or a database, and it will be exceptionally useful for future research endeavors. Somogyi has also documented the constantly increasing number of Hungarians in the Foreign Service until the reach of parity (in dualist Austria-Hungary, this meant a proportion of 30% Transleithanian officers). This growth was an answer to the need for Hungarian speakers, which was a consequence of the structural and constitutional reforms of the Settlement and also a tool with which the Ausgleich was made more attractive to the Hungarian public. From a methodological point of view, the number of cases allows Somogyi both to draw statistical conclusions and to make her story charmingly personal. While the bureaucrats considered impartiality and detachment virtues, in Somogyi’s book, they take on the personalities of social climbers, misunderstood lovers, conflicted patriots, or spoilt dandies.

Beginning with the next chapter, the text shifts from political, structural, and ideological questions to strictly social-historical analyses. From generation to generation, a detailed picture is offered of the bureaucrats’ family backgrounds, educations, and lifestyles. We see that although this corps never really lost its aristocratic nature, it became more and more professional as expertise became an increasingly important qualification if someone sought to hold such a position, and at the same time it began to enjoy a prestige comparable to that of the diplomatic body. As family background became less important in career advancement than professional achievements, the seemingly unchanged circle of aristocrats underwent significant changes in attitude. As a result, if the Foreign Service did not turn into a civil institution, it became nonetheless professional and modernized in many ways. This sophisticated social-historical conclusion is one of the many in this book. They all remind us that neither social transformation nor modernization is a simple category in historiographical analysis. Both are the sum of processes of varying rapidity and rhythm.

The next chapter, which deals with the marital practices and constraints of Foreign Service officers, puts the Austro-Hungarian conditions in an international context. Contrary to most of the other European powers, the dualist state did not forbid officers from taking a foreigner as a spouse, as the main Ballhausplatz-tradition was explicitly loyalty to the emperor and not to national interests.

This unconditional loyalty to the dynasty and the ability to represent the Gesamtstaat abroad, regardless of a given bureaucrat’s other ties, was assured by professional education and common culture. Somogyi’s examination of the specific education in which officials in the foreign service had taken part is rich with findings. Indeed, her discussion suggests that national indifference survived not simply in blind spots where national activists exerted little influence. Rather, it was at least in part one element of a deliberately cultivated outlook and political program. It is useful to keep in mind that Hungarians were also part of this project.

Whether this project was successful is the main question of the next chapter and the book in general. To avoid simplistic answers, Somogyi sketches several personal variations and strategies to overcome loyalty conflicts. Reconciling different identities was not always a perplexing challenge. Many of the officers thought that strengthening the Hungarians’ position in the existing institutions was more effective than waging dubious symbolic struggles for more autonomy. The problem was not always as urgent for the different generations of bureaucrats either. Approaching World War I, however, we have to ask the question: was imperial identity a sustainable self-definition in the middle of national conflicts. Was this special elite a narrow and isolated group, or did they represent competent leadership over a multiethnic society? Could the state patriotism of this group have been a viable model for a wider public, or did this elite constitute an exception? Do we have to face the fact that the creation of an imperial identity was a failure, or do we have to seek the reasons for the Monarchy’s dissolution elsewhere? Do multiple identities work in times of crisis, or do they become prioritized and force everyone to choose? One could certainly have read more about these questions, even knowing that it is probably impossible to answer them. Somogyi does not enter into speculation. She remarks simply that she could not find any officer who would not have clarified that his first and most important duty was protecting Austria-Hungary’s integrity during World War I.

Éva Somogyi’s book investigates the most intriguing questions of current Habsburg studies based on micro-level examinations of exciting archival material. Her familiarity with both the institutional structure of the Empire and a number of personal details allows her dynamically to change scopes whenever needed, resulting in a monograph that is both precise and highly entertaining.

As a German translation is in the making, one can hope for a worthy international reception.

Veronika Eszik
Research Centre for the Humanities

Traumatársadalom: Az emlékezetpolitika történeti-szociológiai kritikája [The society of trauma: The historical-sociological critique of memory politics]. By Máté Zombory. Budapest: Kijárat, 2019. 248 pp.

Máté Zombory’s new book consists of an introduction and six chapters, most of which were originally published in different fora between 2012 and 2016 and have been partially revised since. The diverse studies included here share an agenda of dissecting problematic aspects of memory politics while reflecting on the larger political-moral transformation behind the growing impact of memory politics. Ultimately, the book aims to describe and critique what Zombory calls “our dominant moral economy” based on representations of victimhood, which he labels “the society of trauma” (p.38).

The volume as a whole offers testament to Zombory’s theoretical and interdisciplinary proclivities and his wide-ranging erudition, especially when it comes to the secondary literature published in English and French. While the individual studies offer numerous critical insights, they unfortunately also contain some rather misleading assertions and a number of unfounded generalizations.

Partially drawing on Samuel Moyn’s recent reinterpretation of human rights history, Zombory argues that it is on the ruins of future-oriented political experiments promising collective liberation that a new politics of moral sentiments directed at the remembrance and reduction of physical and psychological suffering could develop. As Western societies have transitioned from party-based representative democracies to media-based “populist democracies” since the 1970s, their attention has increasingly shifted to the suffering of innocent and passive victims. As Zombory perceptively notes in this context, the remembrance of the Holocaust may not have been truly globalized, but the moral imperative to recognize victims practically has (p.39).

Combined with the ever more frequent use of concepts suggesting sameness across time, such as memory, identity, and recognition, this new attention to victims, Zombory maintains, has resulted in an increasingly fierce competition for the public recognition of specific victim groups. Drawing on the writings of American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in particular, the original theorist of status competitions which know no upper limit, Zombory presents memory politics as the conspicuous and decontextualized representation of suffering where the public visibility of the sufferings of one’s group amounts to a form of prestige. The result of this is a hierarchical society of trauma, which is a sort of inverted society of the spectacle (Guy Debord).

The volume thereby articulates a more general criticism of reconciliation efforts in so-called “post-conflict societies.” The author maintains that, despite popular assertions to the contrary, conflicts over remembrance cannot be resolved within the “paradigm of recognition”: he points out that, unlike what propagators of reconciliation such as (perhaps most prominently) Aleida Assmann wish to make us believe, conflicts over remembrance are not merely epistemological, but are ultimately of a social nature. Zombory also adds, in a rather one-sided fashion which overlooks the possibility of mutual recognition, that there is something “inherently narcissistic” in the desire for recognition.

The introduction covers previous criticisms which began to be directed at “victim competition” in the 1990s. The first half of the volume (chapters one to three) addresses issues in the history of Holocaust remembrance and aims to dissect the key moral principles that acts of Holocaust remembrance tend to propagate. In the first of these chapters, Zombory covers mainstream approaches to, debates about, and critiques of the turn to remembrance and the rise of transnational discussions of the Holocaust in particular. The subsequent chapter focuses on an even larger and more general issue, the globalization of remembrance. It aims to describe norms, witnesses, and the representation of victims in transnational spaces of remembrance. As in the introduction, these two chapters summarize key arguments of established Western scholars without sufficiently clarifying the author’s contribution (beyond a sharp sociological critique).

If these early chapters essentially amounted to perceptive literature reviews addressed at a Hungarian audience, the third chapter adds an original case study regarding Shoshana Felman’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial and, more specifically, Yehiel De-Nur’s dramatic contribution to it in order to explore how one of its major propagators has applied her theory of cultural trauma. By offering a nuanced reading of Yehiel De-Nur’s (pen name Ka-Tsetnik 135633) various statements over time, Zombory convincingly shows how a dehumanizing depiction of actors may result from the forceful reduction of past subject experiences to the traumatic and current behavior to mere acts of repetition.

The second half of the volume in turn explores the entry of new actors into transnational spaces of memory politics in Europe and the ways in which these authors have adapted what Zombory calls the “moral paradigm” in Holocaust remembrance. Chapter Four reflects on the shared rules of memory competition to argue that, under the unequal conditions of EU enlargement, the political legitimacy of “accession countries” could be increased if they were able to assume the position of victim and present their history as a Leidensgeschichte. Zombory shows, very much in accordance with Jelena Subotić’s new book Yellow Star, Red Star, that the new nationalistic remembrance of communism in Eastern Europe was modelled on practices of Holocaust remembrance and claimed an additional layer of suffering as a regional specificity.

What Zombory unfortunately does not discuss here is that the critical impetus behind European Holocaust remembrance—which, contrary to what he appears to suggest, has not only been about the remembrance of innocent and passive victims, but has also constituted a profound grappling with patterns of exclusion and mass violence in modern society—could be largely lost in such new anti-communist attempts at renationalization made across Eastern Europe. Despite his own critical agenda, Zombory appears to take for granted the absence of such a critical impetus behind current memory cultures.

The last two chapters of the volume offer Hungarian case studies. Alongside chapter three, chapter five offers Zombory’s most detailed and convincing engagement with a specific discussion and debate regarding the recent past. Zombory aims to show that the House of Terror may have been repeatedly and fiercely criticized in Hungary, but both mainstream propagators and critics of this complex, confusing, even confounding initiative drew on shared moral notions. He explains through relevant examples that agreement with the House’s basic intention to commemorate the victims of communism and focus exclusively on the violently repressive nature of past regimes ultimately made it impossible for liberally-minded professional historians to meaningfully contest the conservative-anticommunist reinterpretation of history that the House powerfully displayed. Moreover, the chapter insightfully shows how the House’s creators and representatives cleverly used the process of Europeanization and even the unclear nature of their own project to defend themselves against various accusations and further their radically conservative goals in memory politics. Chapter six in turn draws on some of Zombory’s oral history interviews to discuss how discursive frames and counterstrategies regarding the German past have developed with regard to the German minority in Hungary since 1945.

There is much to admire about Máté Zombory’s critical insights and much to reflect on when it comes to his rather bold theses. He is correct to point out that participation in historical debates has increasingly come to depend on self-identification with victims and that, concurrently, possibilities to question the (over)abundance of political-moral efforts centered around the recognition of victimhood have diminished. He is also right to critique how the oft-declared “duty to remember” has at times yielded reductive-mythical images of the past. Indeed, the moralizing insistence on remembrance may have made complex and properly contextual historical discussions more difficult. These worrisome tendencies call for the kind of courageous scholarly intervention which Zombory’s polemical volume offers.

There is, however, also much to disagree with in these pages. The book repeatedly asserts that memory political interactions revolve around grievances, mutual accusations of non-recognition, and shaming through inequality, though it offers no empirical documentation in support of this claim. Zombory seems to assume, rather unusually and in fact contrary to mounting evidence, that the broader political culture around memory politics is by default non-democratic and political-moral agency aimed at the recognition of victims cannot possibly contribute to the cause of social justice. Rather tellingly, the volume presents an unduly homogenized image of Holocaust remembrance without discussing the highly varied and always contested Holocaust lessons various people have drawn (and which Michael Marrus, among others, has recently studied).

Last but not least, the book’s rather categorical assessment, according to which recent trends to prioritize victim narratives have fueled a solipsistic and narcissistic form of politics, obfuscates the key distinction between the recently emerged and highly specific realm of memory politics and politics as such. Ultimately, Traumatársadalom, insightful and inspiring though many of its claims and arguments indubitably are, aims to explain more than a better focused and more adequately documented exploration of memory political contests would have allowed.

Ferenc Laczó
Maastricht University

Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia: Tracing the Histories of an Ambiguous Concept in a Contested Land. By Simon Schlegel. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. 276 pp.

Simon Schlegel’s Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia poses a series of interrelated questions about the growth of ethnic boundaries and the rising importance of ethnicity in southern Bessarabia over the last two centuries. The region has proven a well-suited ethno-geographical laboratory or “nook” for researching how individuals and communities can “belong” to an ethnic minority (or majority). The book is structured chronologically, albeit with several theoretical or thematic interludes, offering a survey of state policies and actors that ruled Bessarabia beginning in early nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia and ending with the Maidan protest movement in early twenty-first-century Ukraine. The first part describes how ethnic categories superseded religious categories in the tsarist state’s synoptic view of its inhabitants. A chapter on Romanian Bessarabia during the interwar period and World War II showcases important new primary sources on the inscription of ethno-national identities through state-mandated but locally issued identity certificates. The following chapter, intended as a “theoretical insertion” or “interruption,” appraises diverging concepts of ethnicity and the ascription of identities and borders so as to better contextualize the previous chapters and set up the next. The book also covers the forty-seven years of Soviet rule in Bessarabia, showing how the shifting concept of ethnicity and language use became preconditions for social mobility; it then details the years since Ukrainian independence, which have been marked by the recurrence of ethnic rhetoric, entrepreneurs, and associations within a system of political clientelism. Schlegel concludes with two more theoretical chapters that function as a kind of coda, meditating on the ways that religion, memory, narrative, and folklore serve as “techniques” or “tools” to delimit ethnic groups and maintain ethnic boundaries. The book highlights the congruence of ethnic boundaries with fluid social boundaries created by local and regional politics, including corruption, clientelism, mismanagement, and economic hardship. Schlegel argues convincingly that putative ethnic differences or boundaries, as well as language barriers and disputes over history, are frequently epifocal to internecine conflicts.

Methodologically, the book is perhaps most at home in the genre of historical anthropology, “in which the readers start out with a tour through local history and then, as the account moves closer to the present find gradually more ethnographic insight, until they find themselves reading an ethnography” (p.31). Drawing on Fredrik Barth, James C. Scott, and the usual suspects in the literature on nationalism and ethnicity, with a passing nod to the Italian microhistorians, Schlegel weaves his social-anthropological case study into a much broader historical examination about the ways present-day ethnic boundaries and understandings of ethnicity are firmly, if not inextricably, rooted in the past. But the book is ever mindful that history, society, and identity oscillate through time and space, in a multiplicity of contexts, continually informing one another.

Most of Schlegel’s fieldwork and archival research was undertaken in the Odessa oblast, not far from the city-municipality of Izmail in southwestern Ukraine, from mid 2012 through 2013. Although the four villages selected for interviews were chosen for their collective ethnic diversity (Ukrainian, Moldovan or Romanian, Gagauz, and Bulgarian), all interviews were conducted in Russian. The archival research was also based solely on the Izmail State Archive. The book contains a handful of maps and images, the latter of which date from the author’s fieldwork in the area. Considering the book’s sweeping chronological scope and historical treatment of four successive regimes, the two-page index of subjects and names is inadequate. And while generally well written—Schlegel is dutiful in his role as a narrator of his own story—the book could have benefited from additional copyediting for punctuation. But these are minor imperfections in a worthy contribution to the scholarship on the region. That the author completed this in under three hundred pages is no small feat.

Self-reflective and both microhistorical and macrohistorical in scope, Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia focuses not so much on ethnic boundaries as actual dividing lines or demarcations but rather on the actors and motivations that create ethnic boundaries. Moreover, it spotlights the techniques used to maintain these boundaries across space and time, from one regime to the next. While historians of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania might gloss over some (if not much) of Schlegel’s wider historical narratives on various states and regimes, they should find fruitful analyses of these topics in the embedded anthropological framing of competing ethnicizing and territorializing paradigms. Experts on Russia and Ukraine might also find rich comparative material in the chapter on Romanian rule, as might scholars on Romania in the chapters on Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian rule, which comprise the bulk of the story. Likewise, anthropologists and social scientists researching this area will benefit from the book’s insistence on situating niche fieldwork and locales in the longue durée. The author’s social-anthropological approach to a historical subject therefore improves what would otherwise be a typical if also peripheral history, while the sweeping historical framework broadens the relevance of what would otherwise be a typical if also peripheral anthropological case study. In this respect, it brings to mind the pathbreaking books by Katherine Verdery and Kate Brown. Schlegel’s contribution is an adroit scholarly treatment of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries in the social, political, and historical palimpsest that is Southern Bessarabia.

R. Chris Davies
Lone Star College, Kingwood

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davies. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Xxvii + 249 pp.

Using the example of the Csángós, a Catholic group in Moldova, eastern Romania, whose origins and nationality are subject to debate, R. Chris Davies contributes to the historical literature on the sociological phenomenon of ethnicity. Following the path set out by Pieter Judson, Tara Zahra, and Jim Bjork (among others), he analyzes the struggle of national activism to define a group’s nationality and align it with either of the two rival nations. However, he cautiously mainly sidesteps the issue of how individuals really reacted to these attempts and concentrates less on the recently contested notion of national indifference. Instead, he deliberately focuses on the discourses and their sources, situated in the context of a radical change of nationalisms in interwar East and Central Europe. Thus, he presents a story triangulated, with Hungarian, Romanian nationalist, and Romanian Catholic intellectuals, whose efforts were instrumental to the fate of the group.

Davies’ main claim is that the idea of the Romanian origins and subsequent Magyarization of the Csángós, which is today the cornerstone of Romanian arguments in the debate over their national belonging, was canonized not by anti-Hungarian Romanian intellectuals but by Catholic priests among the Csángós themselves (Iosif Petru Pal, Dumitru Martinaş etc.), who feared that if they could not shed the stigma of Hungarian-ness in Ion Antonescus’s violently ethnocratic Romania, the fate of the Csángós would be deportation. In this effort, they found help and support from ultranationalist Romanian intellectuals who promoted a new, biologized definition of Romanian-ness (most importantly the serologist Petre Râmneanţu), and to make this new claim credible, they were ready to align themselves with extreme Romanian nationalism and even sometimes to join the Iron Guard. Thus, through their unholy alliance with materialist scientific practices (like blood group analyses) and mystical political Orthodoxy, which were both at odds with their Catholic faith, these clergymen, were helped by the turn of the tide in World War II. The resulting willingness of the Antonescu regime to present a less ugly face to the Allies changed the stance of the government, which earlier had deprived the Csángós of their citizenship. The regime fended off Hungarian efforts to achieve a population exchange, which would have meant moving the Csángós to enlarged Hungary in exchange for Romanian speakers from the territory of Hungary after the Second Vienna Awards.

To make this admittedly somewhat narrow story more relevant to the secondary literature on nationalism, Davies offers extensive contextualization, including intellectual and political developments in Hungary and Romania. After an overview of the most important concepts and theories, he provides an outline of the political and intellectual conflicts caused in interwar Romania by the efforts of a group of Orthodox intellectuals and politicians to define Romanian-ness as essentially equal to the Orthodox Christian Church. This effort certainly would have affected Catholics and, among them, the Csángós negatively. Nevertheless, as Davies argues, the late 1930s bore witness to a radical break with earlier conceptualizations of Romanian-ness, not least due to the introduction of what was thought to be cutting-edge science (eugenics, blood group analysis, etc.) to the toolkit of definitions concerning individual membership in a nation. Finally, the state endeavored to assign an unambiguous nationality to all of its citizens (and eventually depriving them of citizenship), as it wanted to purge the national body of anything considered (or defined as) alien and reinvigorate it from the source of the alleged authentic ethnic group.

In the meantime, many Hungarian intellectuals tried to cope with the losses of Trianon with a new concept of the nation which promised rebirth and reinvigoration on the basis of the peasantry, the allegedly purest layer of the national stock. Efforts to salvage the Csángós first aimed to prevent their linguistic assimilation and later to return them to the “homeland,” as was done with Székelys from Bukovina. This was part of a larger effort to redefine the people of Hungary in terms of ethnicity. Thus, the conflicting efforts came to a head regarding the Csángós during World War II and resulted in wider acceptance of their Romanian origins by Romanian academia.

Although sometimes the story seems to be a bit narrowly focused, it is highly readable, and it offers an excellent example of the ways in which national activists of all stripes competed for people whom they wanted to put on their account books. The broad contextualization helps to understand how all these efforts were situated within the contemporary milieu and trends, and the focus on Romanian Catholics and the Catholic Church instead of the Hungarian state or clergy actors is welcome, as it adds more than just nuance to the debate. But the characterization of the changes in nationalism at the end of the 1930s seems to gloss over significant affinities between trends in nationalism before and around that time, and it also obscures how policies and ideas were rooted in earlier contexts. Just to give one example, most of the Hungarian policies towards the Csángós were not based on a reconceptualization of the nation, but rather had roots which lay in undertakings of the late nineteenth century, which were later abandoned as inopportune in the context of the friendly relations between Romania and the Triple Alliance. Thus, more traditional ideas of the nation could often be surprisingly easily reconciled with the novel and more radical ones, as they bore affinities and this reconciliation also helped foster political alliances.

Finally, Davies claims that the Csángós are an example of how small groups which seemingly divide can connect and unite states which have been brought into perpetual dialogue over their fates (p.164). While this constitutes a provocative claim which I also find appealing, I do not find much substantiation for it in the case of the Csángós. The Csángós were a minor, almost negligible concern for both states and especially for Hungary for most of the 20 years of the interwar period, and during World War II, there were larger issues at stake and forces in play in bilateral Hungarian-Romanian relations which helped the two states avoid armed conflict. These forces could have helped averting the clash only until Romania switched sides and war with Hungary followed, irrespective of the fate of the Csángós was. This does not diminish the value of this book, which will be of interest to anyone, laymen included, interested in nationalism, obscure people, and the history of Romania and Hungary in the twentieth century.

Gábor Egry
Institute of Political History

The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. By Zsófia Lóránd. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 270 pp.

Zsófia Lóránd’s The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia is an intellectual history of feminist thought, artistic practice, and activism in Yugoslavia from the early 1970s to 1991. Published in 2018 in Palgrave Macmillan’s series “Genders and Sexualities in History,” it speaks to multiple scholarly audiences. To those interested in the global history of second wave feminism and its relationship to the state and the political left, it offers a challenging view from the semi-periphery. To those interested in the postwar history of political thought, it presents a compelling case for the intellectual prowess and versatility of feminist thought in state socialist Europe. And for those interested in the history of former Yugoslavia, it reconstructs in rich detail the biographies, works, and institutional connections of the members of new Yugoslav feminism, a group critical of the unfulfilled promises of the Yugoslav state in terms of women’s equality.

Several main theoretical and historiographical claims run through Lóránd’s account of the development of feminist thought and practice in Yugoslavia beginning in the early 1970s. First, drawing on the theoretical tradition of intellectual history and especially the insights of the Cambridge School, Michael Freeden, and Lucy Delap, Lóránd analyzes feminism as an ideology. The focus is on concepts, ideas, meanings, and the struggles around them and with other ideologies, most notably Marxism. To Sara Ruddick’s definition of feminism as an acknowledgement that gender divisions are socially constructed, detrimental to women, and should be changed, Lóránd adds emphasis on woman’s agency (p.18), which is at the core of the most recent debates on women’s organizing and feminism under state socialism.

Second, feminism is defined not as dissidence, but as “a critical discourse and a form of dissent” (p.9). Yugoslav feminists worked within the state to challenge one of its core claims, specifically the achievement of equality for women. This positioning distinguished them both from the state’s political mainstream (including the official women’s organizations) and from the Central European dissidents working against or outside the state, publishing in samizdat, or facing direct oppression.

Third, Lóránd works within a multilayered comparative framework which places new Yugoslav feminism in dialogue with the “second wave feminism” of the West but also with other oppositional discourses under state socialism. Most promisingly, her work lays out the conceptual and methodological framework for an intellectual history of feminism and women’s rights discourses in East Central Europe under state socialism. This project has already brought together numerous researchers from the region over several workshops and will result in a collection of source texts translated into English for the first time.

The Feminist Challenge is organized thematically and chronologically along mediums of critical expression, from the academia to art and literature to popular mass media to activism. Based on published materials, archival sources, and interviews, the chapters balance historical detail, analysis, and participants’ accounts of their experiences. There are inevitable overlaps and frequent cross-references among the chapters, but overall the book structure corresponds to the development of new Yugoslav feminism itself over the course of two decades.

The chapter on feminism in the social sciences and humanities introduces the arguments of (mostly) women working in the academia, who reflected on contemporary feminist ideas in the United States and Western Europe and engaged critically with the mainstream class-based approach to the “women’s question” under state socialism. Drawing on critical Marxism and French post-structuralism, their work resulted in conceptual innovation, most notably the integration of gender and sexism as key terms of the new feminist language they were developing, first in private around kitchen tables and then in public discourse.

In literature and art, feminist discussion revolved around the topics of creativity, motherhood, and the body. Lóránd introduces the concept of “writing of sisterhood” as different from écriture feminine, a major source of theoretical inspiration for feminist literature in Yugoslavia. This “technique of sympathetically reflecting on the lives and fates of other women through one own’s story” (p.107) is identified in works by Irna Vrkljan, Slavenka Drakulić, and Dubravka Ugrešić, among others. Lóránd also grapples successfully with the issue of female artists’ refusal to identify with feminism while nevertheless engaging with deeply feminist issues, as most famously was the case of Marina Abramović.

The chapter on feminism in the popular mass media unpacks the contradictions of publishing feminist texts in popular publications which offered a wide readership but at the same time encouraged self-censorship. The most striking example is that of the debate on pornography carried out in and around Start, a magazine published as a local version of Playboy. Yet another place where the tension between medium and content is apparent is women’s magazines and TV shows, where important feminist issues were brought up in a tamed language and appeared alongside patriarchal views of women’s roles. Genres like advice columns, for example, nevertheless opened up space to discuss private issues publicly, most notably sexuality and domestic violence.

It was precisely around the issues of sexuality and violence that feminist groups were reorganized in the 1980s. The chapter on feminist activism follows the discussions around women’s health and violence against women, the know-how gathered by plugging in to global networks, and eventually the establishing of SOS helplines first in Zagreb and then in Belgrade. “Through the discourse about VaW [violence against women],” argues Lóránd, “the place of feminism was explicitly rethought in a human rights framework,” opening a new era in which “women’s political participation and role in democracies were the focal point” (p.208). Not long thereafter, the landscape of feminist thought and activism was radically reshuffled by ethno-nationalism, war, and the breakdown of Yugoslavia, which is where the timeline of the book ends.

Zsófia Lóránd writes with clarity, nuance, and feminist commitment, and with this book, she offers a fundamentally important work of scholarship which persuasively argues that feminist thought needs to be recovered not just for the sake of historical justice, but also because it reshapes the very view of history that we currently have. The Feminist Challenge must also be praised for its many illustrations, which further ensure that the representatives of new Yugoslav feminism, their works, and their activities, which have been so masterfully presented in this book, are seen, in all meanings of the word.

Adela Hincu
Ilia State University, Tbilisi

Enyhülés és emancipáció [Détente and emancipation]. By Csaba Békés. Budapest: Osiris, MTA TK, 2019. 397 pp.

Csaba Békés’s new book offers a detailed analysis of Hungarian foreign policy in the Cold War, from 1945 until the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. It primarily aims to present a synthesis of Békés’s ideas and arguments that were put forward in his extensive scholarship of the past few decades, but it also introduces new claims on the basis of new source material. Given its ambition to provide a synthesis, the book’s emphasis remains on advancing broad arguments in relation to Hungary’s entanglement with the Cold War, systematically supported by empirical evidence. The manuscript follows a chronological structure and it presents an in-depth discussion of the key events in the history of Hungary’s international relations, starting with the Sovietization of the country after World War II and ending with the gradual collapse of the Kádár regime in the late 1980s. The individual chapters offer invaluable contributions to our understanding of the international dimensions of Hungarian historical events (such as the 1956 uprising and the events of 1989 in Hungary) and the role Hungary played in the shaping of international developments, most importantly the Prague Spring of 1968, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and the process of détente, in general.

The most laudable aspect of the book is that it brings together—in a coherent narrative—the most important and most original claims and theoretical reflections which Békés has constructed over the years concerning the Cold War and Hungary’s involvement in it. The two keywords that link the various arguments are the concepts that make up the title of the book: détente and emancipation. In the book, Békés proposes a new interpretation of one of the central notions of postwar international history and argues in support of the need for a new periodization of the Cold War. According to the central argument in the book, the process of détente started soon after Stalin’s death in 1953, and it remained the key paradigm that fundamentally shaped international relations until the collapse of the Soviet Union. This proposition breaks with the traditional view in historiography, according to which the emergence of détente was tied to the second wave of de-Stalinization in the early 1960s, and it also refutes interpretations that consider détente to have ended in the late 1970s as a result of international tensions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In critiquing views that break up the history of the Cold War into multiple phases, Békés claims that the Cold War could be divided into two main episodes. The period between 1945 and 1953 was characterized by blatant antagonism and irrational decision-making, whereas the epoch starting with 1953 (“the second Cold War”) was fundamentally shaped by détente and a more rational and pragmatic approach to international relations. While Békés does not diminish the significance of international crises—such as the Cuban missile crisis or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—he argues that a tacit acknowledgement of the necessity of cooperation after 1953 prevailed over incentives to escalate conflicts further through military means. Interpreting events from this perspective, Békés claims that conflicts within the Soviet bloc never risked subverting the international status quo, and while they provoked tensions, those should be defined as “quasi-conflicts,” as they did not result in the radical reconfiguration of the modus operandi between the two superpowers. The book suggests that there were very few actual conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States that had the potential to undermine the dominant paradigm of international relations: détente. It is argued, for example, that the antagonism provoked by the Afghanistan conflict merely put détente in a “standby mode.” In other words, the war did not lead to the total abandonment of the policy.

According to Békés, one of the main reasons behind the gradual (and constant) relaxation of tensions was the idea of “active foreign policy” advocated by the post-Stalin leadership in the Soviet Union. The notion triggered the transformation of the relationship between Moscow and the countries of the Soviet bloc, resulting in the slow but steady “emancipation” of the individual countries in the sphere of foreign policy. Khrushchev’s Soviet Union needed allies on the international scene rather more than it needed satellites, and this provoked the gradual decentralization of foreign policy on the peripheries of the Soviet empire. Békés argues that the main forum for negotiations, debates, and conflicts in Sovietized Eastern Europe was the Warsaw Pact. In contrast to traditional perceptions of the military alliance as a tool of Soviet supremacy and control in the region, Békés demonstrates that the organization actually contributed to the emancipation of the various countries and led to the formation of temporary, “virtual” coalitions in the bloc which pursued their own interests, independently of Moscow.

Emancipation and détente are the key themes through which developments in Hungarian foreign policy are interpreted in the period from 1945 to 1989. The book provides detailed and engaging analyses of key events and developments in the postwar era, with emphasis on late socialism in Kádár’s Hungary. The discussion revolves around the topic of agency in “the happiest barrack” and the gradual expansion of Hungary’s room for maneuver and political leeway as a member of the Soviet bloc. Békés convincingly supports his overall thesis with an incredibly diverse range of sources, and he demonstrates that the Kádár regime often took—occasionally remarkably bold—initiatives in the international arena and came to occupy the position of an intermediary in East-West relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Hungary’s mediating role in the Soviet bloc is explored in a chapter on Kádár’s diplomatic efforts to provide a political solution to the Prague Spring in 1968, while the significant growth of Hungary’s international reputation in the late socialist period is analyzed most vividly in the chapter on the country’s contribution to negotiations culminating in the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.

The book relies on a rich pool of source material to support its innovative and unconventional claims. The discussion is informed by a plethora of secondary sources, published mostly in Hungarian and in English, and evidence supporting Békés’s claims mostly comes from published as well as unpublished primary sources in multiple languages, including English, Hungarian, German, and Russian. Békés has also consulted an impressive array of archival sources, including collections in Hungary, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which contain material relevant to foreign policy and national security.

The extensive discussion of Hungary’s possibilities and constraints in international relations creates a solid foundation for Békés to advance an argument in relation to the multi-faceted (or multi-polar) nature of the late Cold War. Instead of offering a polarized analysis focusing on the theme of antagonism between the socialist East and the capitalist West, Békés claims that Hungarian foreign policy was dependent on three factors. Moscow’s role in shaping developments was inevitable throughout the period, but the book also argues that Hungary became increasingly dependent on access to Western markets and technology in the late socialist period. This dependence led to the adjustment of economic and political priorities and turned Hungary into one of the most ardent advocates of détente. At the same time, international dynamics within the Soviet bloc—conflicting agendas and “virtual coalitions”—imposed significant constraints on, but also provided new opportunities for Hungarian foreign policy.

While the book’s main emphasis is on the emancipation of Hungarian foreign policy after Stalin’s death, the notion of agency remains remarkably absent from the discussion of Stalinism and the Sovietization of Hungary after World War II. Indeed, the concept of Sovietization is not discussed in detail in the book and there is little attempt in the narrative to engage with the term at a more abstract level in light of recent historiography. The meaning of the term, which is remarkably vague in the first place, changed significantly over the course of the twentieth century, and it meant different things at different times. Although Békés proposes a simple typology of Sovietization (quasi-Sovietization and pre-Sovietization), the book does not reflect on alternative typologies suggested by other scholars or on the notion of “self-Sovietization,” which assigns a certain degree of agency to local actors in the implementation of the Soviet model in the countries of the bloc. The somewhat teleological perception of Sovietization in the book could have been refined in conversation with recent works on the subject (most recently, Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe), which highlight the importance of local politics and local actors in the immediate postwar years. Despite the slight under-assessment of the concept of Sovietization, the book remains an engaging read which offers a number of original contributions to the study of Hungarian foreign policy and, indeed, the history of the Cold War. This is a book that will remain an important point of reference in the future and should find a prominent place in university survey courses on the subject of postwar Hungarian and (East) European history, the history of the Cold War, or more specific courses on the history of the Kádár regime and the history of Hungarian foreign policy.

Balázs Apor
Trinity College Dublin

2018_2_Featured Review

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

FEATURED REVIEW

European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History. Edited by Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi. New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 401 pp.

The social construction of markers on which we rely to interpret the world has functioned as an inexhaustible source of raw material for historians and social scientists. Research in this field has become increasingly prevalent over the course of the past three decades. Space especially has emerged as one of the concepts closely interrogated in a wide variety of research projects. It is a fundamental device of orientation, and its constructed character is masked by its appearance as quintessentially a priori in character, always already “given.” By engaging critically with the semblance of naturalness, research can uncover a multiplicity of knowledge production mechanisms linked to the social construction of space.

There remain, however, aspects of such practices which have attracted limited attention so far, precisely because of the vastness of the material available for study. While notions of national territory and boundary-making have been analyzed repeatedly, regionalization, which in this context means the imposition of supranational divisions over continuities of physical expanse, has remained understudied. Discipline-specific treatises on the academic or political construction and instrumentalization of specific regions abound, but the existing literature has been less inquisitive regarding what may be said in general about the logics of regionalization as recurring modes of knowledge production.

The ambitions of this edited volume include making inroads into this latter, imperfectly charted meta-territory of academic and political language games. The research project organized by editors Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi adopted two different perspectives with an effect similar to organizing two concurrent expeditions towards the same hard-to-reach summit. The first half of the book presents interdisciplinary analyses of the construction of regionalized spaces in the mode of conceptual history. The concepts investigated here are Western Europe, Scandinavia/Norden, the Baltics, The Mediterranean, Southern Europe, Iberia, the Balkans/Southeastern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. The second part changes the perspective, offering disciplinary case studies of logics of regionalization operating in specific fields of academia (European History, Political Geography, Economics, Historical Demography, Linguistics, Literary History, and Art History). The two parts should ideally lead the reader towards the same destination, offering complementary analyses. These analyses would demonstrate how conceptualizations of space converge around certain ideologically (if not academically) overdetermined regions, on the one hand, and offer the reader a peek into the academic laboratories of regionalizing knowledge production, on the other. The latter would emerge as a meta-study of “how-to” construct regions (regionalizing knowledges), while one expects the former to contain case studies (regionalizing practices) that tie in with the meta-studies.

If one accepts this logic, European Regions and Boundaries may be summarized as an exceptionally rich and productive failure. Failure here does not refer to the quality of either the contributions or the work of the editors. Rather, failure here is a research outcome. It highlights an important imbalance in the production of spatial knowledge with regard to conceptualizing regions which causes the two parts of the book to be more corrective to each other than symbiotic in character. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century political, civilizational, and geopolitical frames have shaped and often determined the ways in which we think about regions. This is shown in the first half. The second half of the book demonstrates the extent to which these inherited notions of regions that populate even present-day collective imaginaries have either been deconstructed or superseded by critical and reflexive academic work within the individual disciplines. The first half is a reminder of the ideological determinants of spatial thinking, the second perhaps a cautious argument in favor of academia’s potential (at least in some cases) to recast its toolbox by generating novel and ideologically less burdened conceptualizations.

The first half presents a survey of regions as strategic concepts. Some of these regions have been strikingly underutilized in shaping public thinking throughout the Late Modern Era, the notion of Iberia, for instance (discussed by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas). Others have become thick and layered to the point of being impossible to disentangle. This is notably the case with the Balkans/Southeastern Europe (Mishkova), Central Europe (Trencsényi), and most importantly Western Europe (Stefan Berger). The latter emerges as a polyvalent signifier that can enter almost any discourse as a point of comparison, and, accordingly, the notion of the (or “a”) West resonates across almost all chapters. Berger’s perceptive analysis provides a solid footing, but the reader begins to understand the omnipresence of “some” concept of Western Europe only when repeatedly encountering it, with shifting meanings, in the subsequent papers as a point of reference and comparison. In the end, the (nuanced, yet fairly unequivocal) image that emerges is one of the West against the Rest. Dichotomies based on normative contrasts between the meaning of Western Europe and the concept of some other region appear as the rhetorical devices governing the discourses. Relying on these dichotomies, the regionalizing discourses disseminate notions of belatedness or “authenticity”, depending on whether they possess a westernizing or a more autochthonous bent. Regionalization is shown to function (in the clearest form perhaps in Frithjof B. Schenk’s chapter on Eastern Europe) as yet another battleground for the competing ideologies.

Despite the Archimedean position of the “West” in the conceptualization of macroregions, the thickest and most intriguing (hi)story emerges out of a parallel reading of several chapters on the shift in spatial thinking under the aegis of liberal ideology in the nineteenth century. These highly dialogical chapters on Eastern Europe, the North, and Eurasia (by Schenk, Marja Jalava and Bo Stråth, and Mark Bassin, respectively) significantly enrich our understanding of this complex process, which has had repercussions into the present. This is accomplished by drawing liberally on past scholarship, including Larry Wolff’s classic contribution on the construction of Eastern Europe in the “West” (Inventing Eastern Europe [1994]) and also on less frequently cited, yet groundbreaking texts, inter alia by Hans Lemberg (“Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas [1985]) and Ezequiel Adamovsky (Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France [2006]). The chapters offer an exceptionally nuanced account of how the triadic division of Europe was reduced into an often orientalizing East–West dualism in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. As both Jalava and Stråth and Schenk observe, the repositioning of Russia as an Eastern rather than a Nordic power opened up a way to a reconstruction of the concept of the North as a minor region with positive connotations, becoming synonymous with Scandinavia in the process (pp.36, 45–47, and 189–93). At the same time, the mapping of Russia onto the East also “colonized” understandings of Eastern Europe as a zone not only of backwardness, but also of political otherness, under the specter of tyranny (p.194). This added a juridico-political layer which reinforced the already established civilizational cleavage. While the chapters do not explore current European controversies about perceived threats to regional identities in any detail, this tradition of intracontinental othering has already been traced to the present and shown to influence current discourses of political identity in the European Union, most recently by Maria Mälksoo (“’Memory Must Be Defended’: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security,” Security Dialogue [2013]).

If the authors can be faulted for anything, it is perhaps the relative lack of attention given to nineteenth-century reflections originating from the newly constructed “East.” Schenk’s discussion of interwar conceptualizations of East Central European is an important quasi-digression in his text on Eastern Europe, and his subsequent account about region-focused research in the Eastern Bloc is both detailed and conceptually refined (pp.195–97 and 199–203). Adding to these, Balázs Trencsényi’s detailed chapter on twentieth-century notions of Central Europe further enriches the image of intellectuals belonging to a mesoregion (the non-Russian East, rebranded as East Central Europe). They are seen struggling to distance themselves and their homelands from the dominant image of the macroregion under which they have found themselves subsumed, while also increasingly resenting the orientalizing discourse they perceive as developed and deployed by the “West.” What is not discussed in either chapter is the nineteenth-century liberal reaction in the non-Russian parts of the new East, to which Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and other intellectuals contributed in droves. Before the birth of intellectual discourses about East Central European specificity, such as that of Oskar Halecki, the initial reaction to finding oneself relegated to the zone of backwardness and tyranny was to reject the classification (while acknowledging the fact of backwardness itself) and to construct discourses about belonging to the West by virtue of culture and often constitutional or legal traditions.

The tradition of negating the perennial character of one’s “home” region (Eastern Europe or the East) even made spearheads into Russia through the ideology of zapadniks. Yet, as Bassin’s essay makes clear, Russian spatial thinking was shaped to a far greater extent by the idea of Eurasia. Eurasia represents a rather novel construct when compared with the triadic and dualist Western divisions of Europe, and it was usually deployed, from the late nineteenth century on, as a trope challenging the orientalism inherent in the East/West dichotomy. It replaced (and is still used to replace) the expanse traditionally thought of as the East, providing it with an autochthonous and positive character (pp.211–13). With some of the ideas familiar from present-day Russian neoimperialist thought, the essay also works as a reminder of how Eurasia once enjoyed broad currency also in Western scholarship and spatial thinking in general. In the end, both Russia and its smaller Western neighbours, that is to say both the imperial half and the other half composed of nation-states managed to produce their respective emancipatory discourses. However, Eurasia and (East) Central Europe represent divergent elective affinities symptomatic of the thinking of the intellectuals who promoted and still promote these concepts. One of the chief virtues of the book is that it sheds light on how these identity discourses have unfolded in the interplay of often competing regionalizing logics.

The second part of the volume offers a different background narrative to the social construction of regions. Traditional “allies” of regionalizing discourses, first and foremost history (Stefan Troebst) and political geography/geopolitics (Virginie Mamadouh and Martin Müller), are revisited in discipline-specific analyses which suggest patterns of increasing reflexivity as a mode of “scientific evolution.” With regard to both of the aforementioned disciplines, the texts relate how in recent decades scholarly discourse has tended to move towards critical engagement with earlier entanglements in the production of spatial impositions, or, in plainer terms, with having functioned as a language of power. As the overlaps and synergies with the first half of the tome make evident, these disciplines were indeed responsible for sustaining and refining the bulk of conceptualizations that have structured social thinking about Europe’s regions in the past.

The other disciplines differ from history and political geography both with regard to their impact on collective imaginaries of space and their modes of engaging with intra-disciplinary legacies. While both history and political geography have engaged in the deconstruction of its earlier regionalizing modes, disciplines less impacted by linguistic and reflexive turns and less central to the production of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cognitive maps of European regions have tended simply to evolve away from earlier modes of regionalization. This movement has involved abandoning conceptualizations borrowed from prevailing ideologies and engaging in discipline-specific conceptualizations. Some chapters in the volume are thoroughly historicizing and offer ample insight into this process (for instance the chapter on historical demography by Attila Melegh). Others tend towards academic presentism and highlight the current prevalence of discipline-specific regionalizations (the chapter on economics by Georgy Ganev, for instance). Yet more straddle a medial position (the chapters on linguistics by Uwe Hinrichs, literary history by Alex Drace-Francis, and art history by Eric Storm). Despite this variation, the overarching realization that academic evolution has led to, inter alia, the discipline-specific and increasingly autonomous production and deployment of regionalizing discourse shines through most contributions.

The shared character of this trend nevertheless allows for considerable variation. Historical demography both reflects and diverges from received spatial knowledges, reproducing regional divisions familiar from historical and political thought (as in the case of LePlay), but as a discipline it has also “evolved away” from the traditional patterns of dividing Europe either into a triad or two opposing poles (pp.303–04 and 312–14). At the same time, these legacies have never quite disappeared. In Melegh’s text, they transect the discipline itself. A more traditional approach investigates existing regionalizations and considers whether demography reflects or lends support to them. Simultaneously, a broadly critical stream argues against projecting cultural-ideological regionalizations onto demographic data and vice-versa.

The chapter on linguistics does not reflect this kind of bifurcation. It describes a fairly linear evolution away from reliance on exogenous, culturalist notions of regions towards a procedural (as opposed to substantive) understanding of them. In this latter mode, the existence/operability of a certain regionalizing frame within the discipline is conditional on confirmation by linguistic markers, rather than being accepted as existing a priori. Similarly to the “critical stream” in demography, contemporary linguists (and also economists) have tended towards generating their own, intra-disciplinary concepts, which are less connected to the political and cultural legacies of earlier patterns in regionalizing knowledges.

Despite all of the above, a survey of the volume as a whole demonstrates first and foremost the confluence of research and ideology in the invention of regions. Traditional academic knowledges have greatly contributed to the construction of a value-laden, culturalist lexicon of regions on which most of us still routinely rely in referencing larger European spaces. Both in the humanities and the social sciences, practitioners have mapped onto the globe images of civilizational difference, neatly tucked in behind regional boundaries. The studies included in this selection enable the reader to trace these processes both across disciplines and across specific cases. Continuing and expanding on earlier work by some of the contributors (such as Bassin, Troebst, and Trencsényi), the volume respects the divergent disciplinary histories, paying the cost of this attention to detail and idiosyncrasies with an occasional loss of coherence or dialogue between the individual contributions. This is especially palpable towards the final chapters of the book. The present-day state of linguistics or economics seems to have little bearing on the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century genealogies of regions which the reader encounters in the first chapters. At the same time, this relative lack of coherence highlights the very justified emphasis on the collusion of other disciplines (history and political geography) with political languages of spatial division. Perhaps current regionalizing schemes prevailing in linguistics or economics could also be deconstructed as older onesschemes in interwar history and geopolitics have been deconstructed in this book, i.e. through engagement and self-reflective critique.

This volume accomplishes a great deal even if it stops short of this (i.e. offering a deconstruction of current regionalizing schemes used in linguistics or economics). It analyzes and subverts the late-nineteenth century regionalizing frames by highlighting the ideological contingencies underpinning them and adds to this a survey of contemporary, more reflexive and cautious, less sweeping trends of thinking about regions within the confines of individual disciplines. In this respect, the book amounts to a considerable reflexive achievement, and it is itself part of the cross-disciplinary trend towards the kind of greater academic autonomy its last half-dozen or so chapters aptly survey.

Gergely Romsics
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2019_2_Book reviews

Vpdfolume 8 Issue 2 CONTENTS

BOOK REVIEWS

A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe. Edited by Ferenc Hörcher and Thomas Lorman. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. 366 pp.

The enactment of the new Hungarian Basic Law has triggered a considerable amount of literature on the Hungarian constitution today and in the past. This volume belongs to the second category: it describes Hungarian constitutional history from a predominantly historical-political perspective, focusing mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the present Basic Law is to be interpreted in light of the “achievements of our historical constitution,” as it sets out in article R) section (3), constitutional history is not only l’art pour l’art, but has an at least potential impact on today’s constitutional practice. Unsurprisingly, most works on constitutional history are written by lawyers. This volume, however, is edited by a philosopher (Hörcher) and a historian (Lorman), and most of the authors are British or Hungarian historians.

The connection between today’s Basic Law and the development of Hungarian historical constitutionalism is made in the first chapter of the book. The subsequent eight chapters describe and analyze Hungary’s constitution from the late Middle Ages until 1946. Special attention is given to the reform debates in the eighteenth century and their influence on the Parliament of 1790/91, the early nineteenth century and the “revolutionary” laws of 1848, constitutional theory and practice after the Settlement of 1867, the interwar period, and the reestablishment of Hungarian constitutionalism in 1946, including the transition into the socialist constitution of 1949. After these descriptive and interpretative parts, the final two chapters look at the modern Basic Law and ask how a development of several centuries can or cannot be incorporated into present-day law, as well as whether it is desirable to do so at all.

The first two chapters show that the “constitution” did not start as such. Until the late eighteenth century, we only find a constant struggle for power between the crown on the one side and the nobility on the other. Alongside this continuous political dualism, the Tripartitum by István Werbőczy caused legal thinking to stagnate on a late medieval level so that no constitutional impulses could come from legal science. This changed when the late eighteenth century discovered “[ancient] constitution” ([ősi] alkotmány) as a term and an inter alia legal concept, retroactively construing a “historical constitution” for the country, mainly as a source of legitimacy for the ruling elites and their ancient privileges, such as the exemption from taxation, as well as for the Catholic church. Thus, the ancient constitution became an argument primarily designed to preserve and legitimize social and religious inequality. Even the 1848 laws did not bring about a radical change, as Hörcher’s analysis of that legislation and its “father,” Lajos Kossuth, explains.

A certain focus lies on the constitutional history of the time after the Compromise (1867–1919), which is justified because that epoch, alongside 1946, is the primary point of reference of the allusion to “our historical constitution” in today’s Basic Law. The Compromise era shows a failure of the democratic ideals of 1848 and the prevalence, in contrast, of late feudal structures defended by a nobility clinging to their antediluvian privileges. In defense of these privileges, the “ancient constitution” played an important role, because it was endowed with historical-national prestige, but as it was not laid down in a charter, it did not have a clearly defined content, and this allowed the governments of the day to say whatever they pleased (whatever best suited their needs in a given situation) about constitutional rules. This book also shows that Hungarian governments never failed to set aside a constitutional or statutory rule if they felt that it hampered their political ambitions. One prominent example of this is the Nationalities Act of 1868.

After 1920, Hungary pursued an insecure middle passage between the need to change (in part because of the state’s independence) and the desire to preserve the old constitutional system or at least the image of it, branded with the misleading term “legal continuity.” Here, it becomes clear how much the ideology of an “ancient constitution” can prevent necessary adaptation to new circumstances. On the other hand, the “Small Constitution” of 1946 is presented as a relatively successful effort to modernize the ancient constitution without abandoning entirely the tradition it represented. Balázs Fekete argues this case quite convincingly and thus persuasively proves the dominant view wrong according to which act 1946:I terminated historical constitutional continuity.

The last two chapters by Kálmán Pócza and Ferenc Hörcher try to determine the extent to which the historical processes described in the previous chapters can be used in the interpretation of the Basic Law of 2011. They approach the question from a politological point of view, thus circumventing the majority opinion of legal science according to which the Basic Law’s reference to “the achievements of our historical constitution” is at best symbolic. Pócza uses a theoretical approach, which does, as such, not give an immediate answer to the question, but it shows paths for further research which may make the historical constitution useful for today’s constitutional and legal purposes and requirements. Finally, Hörcher and Pócza ask whether incorporating ancient law into a modern constitution is useful and desirable. They assemble the pros and cons of the usefulness of such an enterprise and refer to future insights from the perspective of desirability.

The book contains several appendixes with the English translations of several crucial constitutional documents from 1222 until 2011. Some of these documents have now been published for the first time in English.

This book neither gives a comprehensive description of the “ancient constitution” nor does it analyze the “achievements of our historical constitution” from the point of view of modern constitutional law. It does serve, however, as a starting point for a predominantly politological analysis of what the “ancient constitution” can mean to a modern political-constitutional culture. As such, it is of interest not only to political scientists, but also to lawyers who get the opportunity to take a step back and look at an overall picture extending beyond the limitations of legal discourse. Finally, a reading public interested in the general political structures of Hungary will find a wealth of information in this volume.

Herbert Küpper
Institut für Ostrecht, Munich

The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the 15th Century. By Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, 48. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 337 pp.

Despite the abundance of literature on the crusades, The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the 15th Century serves as an important monograph which will further an understanding of the complexity of the crusade movement in the late Middle Ages. With very few exceptions, the historiography tends to reflect a Western perspective on the crusade movement, centered on France, England, the Papacy, and the Italian merchant cities. Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea’s monograph, which has been published as part of the Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, shifts focus to a less familiar crusade frontier, the Northern Black Sea region. Described by Gheorghe Bratianu as a “plaque tournante” of international commerce in the late Middle Ages, after 1204, the Black Sea area became an important crossroad in the Euro-Asian commercial system. Thereby, Latin Christendom expanded towards the east, but its interests clashed eventually with Ottoman expansion in the region. However, the struggle for hegemony was complex, and involved it Christian and Muslim powers alike who, despite their religious differences, at times built alliances in their struggles against factions within the two larger spheres. Thus, on many occasions, “Christians allied with Muslims against Christians, and Muslims allied with Christians against Muslims” (p.15).

The framework of Pilat and Cristea’s research highlights how Ottoman power and the Ottoman empire’s expansion collided with the Italian merchant cities and Hungary and Poland’s economic and strategic interests in the Black Sea region. The authors adopt a chronological approach from the Fourth Crusade (1204) to the 1503 general peace of Buda between Christendom and the sultan. The first two chapters of the book focus on the struggle for commercial supremacy and hegemony between the Porte and its commercial rivals in the area (Venice, Genoa, Hungary, and Poland). With a meticulous sense of detail, the authors describe the political and commercial realities which led to the advance of the Ottomans in Central Eastern Europe. Despite the crusade efforts and plans, from “1479 onwards the trade in the Black Sea was rigorously controlled by the Porte,” ending the role of the Black Sea “as a cornerstone of international trade in the Later Middle Ages” (p.63).

In the subsequent two chapters, the authors focus on the papal crusade policy in the Black Sea region in the fifteenth century and the change of the local ruler’s politics after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. There is also discussion of the religious aspects in the efforts of subsequent popes to use the “union of the Churches” as a sine qua non commitment of the Byzantine emperor to send military aid to the empire. Nonetheless neither the emperor nor the Patriarch of Constantinople had the authority to impose the union anywhere other than in the Byzantine empire. Therefore, the rejection of the Florentine Union had not only religious consequences in Central Eastern Europe, but also political particularities with permanent ramifications. Mehmed II’s conquest of the Byzantine capital created new political and economic realities to which the regional powers needed to adapt. Given the fact that both Hungary and Poland had major commercial interests in the area, the objective of the Holy See was to establish good relations between the two major players in Central Eastern Europe. Therefore, Pilat and Cristea argue that “good relations between these two Eastern polities were absolutely necessary for accomplishing the general crusade against the Ottomans” (p.134).

In the last two chapters, the authors examine the consolidation of Ottoman power in the Black Sea and the failed attempts to recover the two important strongholds in the region: Kilia and Akkerman. The expansion of the empire’s frontiers brought more challenges to the neighboring states: the strategic location of the two cities allowed raids in their territory. Pilat and Cristea argue that this conquest caused “restlessness, and the pope’s calling was received with much more interest” (p.223). Despite the strategic value of Kilia and Akkerman, the proposals for a reconquest of these two cities in a crusade-like campaign were pure fantasy. As the authors underline, the failure of this crusade policy was due to the “divergent political interests of the Christian states,” which “finally led to the consolidation of Ottoman domination in the northern Black Sea region” (p.230).

One important element that is constantly underlined by the authors is the relationship between crusading and local political power. The local rulers used the crusades to legitimize their political and commercial goals, and as the authors astutely emphasize, these ambitions conflicted with the crusading ideology. This conflict is reflected by the struggle to maintain a long-lasting political alliance, as every power had divergent interests and hegemony claims over the trade routes in the Black Sea. As Pilat and Cristea note, “before the Ottoman threat, the crusade represented a state of mind and an ideal, whose purpose was the recovery of the Holy Land, but at the same time the crusade was an extremely powerful political instrument in periods of crisis” (p.288). Through the examples of John Hunyadi, Mathias Corvinus, Stephen the Great, and John Olbracht, we are introduced to the crusade rhetoric of the fifteenth century. This was fueled by the need for Christian solidarity, the defense of the faith, and a growing fear inspired by the Turks. A different perspective from other theaters emerges: the complex relationship between the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. For the latter, a crusade was not the same enterprise as it was for the Catholics in the West. The Orthodox princes were not interested in the spiritual rewards offered by the popes. They considered the crusade “an expression of Christian solidarity” (p.292), and they only accepted the guidance of the pope to obtain financial support and military aid from the West.

Pilat and Cristea’s book is well researched, and they are versed in the history and the interactions in the northwestern Black Sea area. The use of secondary literature written in different languages (Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Italian, French, English) is impressive, as the large amount of documents and narrative sources used to shape this study. Though national historiographies tend to present the history of the later crusades in Central Eastern Europe in a contradictory (and sometimes quite biased) manner the authors have succeeded in untangling this massive corpus of secondary literature. With a rigorous insistence on maintaining a clear perspective and careful attention to fine detail, they guide their reader through the intertwined political, religious, and economic specter of Central Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century. Though the abundance of detail and information in the book may make it less appealing or less accessible to the larger reading public, The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the 15th Century constitutes an original contribution to our understanding of the crusades in the frontier zones, and it establishes certain guidelines which future scholars will not be able to ignore.

Cornel Bontea
University of Montreal

L’économie des couvents mendiants en Europe centrale: Bohême, Hongrie, Pologne, v. 1220–v. 1550. Edited by Marie-Madeleine de Cevins and Ludovic Viallet. Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018. 447 pp.

The need for a new approach to the history of mendicant orders has increased in recent decades. This volume presents a new generation of historians interested in this field of research and active all across Central Europe. The selection of contributors is the result of the MARGEC – Marginalité, économie et christianisme. La vie materiélles des couvents mendiants en Europe centrale (v.1220–v.1550) project, developed between 2012 and 2016 under the supervision of French historian Marie-Madeleine de Cevins, who coordinated the volume together with Ludovic Viallet. At the core of their interest in mendicant orders lies the legacy of Jacques Le Goff, who was among the first to identify the presence of one or the other orders in the development of urban life in the Middle Ages. This approach has represented a way of seeing the mendicant orders as agents of change, rather than narrating their histories from within.

The volume was devised to contain four sections, each of which comprises thematic studies. Thus, the authors contributing to the first part, Entre stabilité et précarité: le défi de la pauvreté [Between stability and precarity: the challenge of poverty], marshal a series of examples showcasing the contradictions within various European mendicant convents, the dynamics of which indicated a shift from the ideal of poverty. The second section, Les Mendiants et la terre, ou le défi de la propriété [The mendicants and their landed estates, or the challenge of ownership], examines the mendicant establishments that went on to attain landed property outside their urban communities through donations or acquisition. The studies included in the third part, Autour des frères: soutiens matériels et flux immatériels [Around the friars: financial benefactors and flow of intangible assets], emphasize the nature of benefactors and strive to identify them, primarily on the basis of accounts of support granted for the development of mendicant convents. The last section, Les Mendiants dans l’économie du salut [The mendicants and the economy of salvation], closes the volume with a series of examples of the religious privileges awarded to the mendicants by the Holy See, namely the right to grant indulgences or to bury members of the lay community within the convents’ premises. The book also contains a name index, a place index, and a list of the contributing authors, thus making it easier for the reader to find passages which are more relevant to particular interests.

The studies in the first section examine some cases of convents “struggling” to keep in line with their respective rule or their ideal of poverty. The areas of mendicant presence chosen by the authors contributing to this section are the ones assumed by the volume’s coordinators, namely to a large extent from Central Europe, for instance the articles by Dominika Brudzy (“Poverty Put to the Test in both Dominican Friaries of Sandomierz up to the Sixteenth Century”), Rafał Kubicki (“The Economic Situation of Mendicants in Royal Prussia in the Fifteenth and First Half of the Sixteenth Century”), and Martin Ollé and Rudolf Procházka (“The Cloister in Early Franciscan Architecture in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries”). This part includes also two case studies on the mendicants’ history in medieval England and Ireland, as well as two other interconnected studies concerning the level of education and culture gained by the friars within the mendicant convents. Marie Charbonnel’s paper describes the development of libraries belonging to these convents in Central Europe, and Kerzy Kaliszuk considers the example of Poland in the Middle Ages.

The second section, Les Mendiants et la terre, ou le défi de la propriété, seems more homogenous from the spatial perspective, the areas of interest being more related to one another, whether the studies in question examine the case of mendicants’ landed estates in the Hungarian realm (Beatrix Fülöpp-Romhányi), in rural Bohemia (Petr Hlaváč), in Brno (Adrien Quéret-Podesta), or in Prague (Christian-Frederik Felskau). The papers focus on the ways in which landed estates were acquired. They also identify the benefactors, who were members of the nobility or the royal family. The section stands out with a study on the nature of donations given to mendicants in medieval Poland based on the example of the Poor Clares’ convent in Strzelin (Olga Miriam Przybyłowicz), this being the only paper dedicated to a mendicant women’s order.

The section chapter, Autour des frères: souteins matériels et flux immatériels, builds on the first two, bringing further information about the mendicants’ benefactors, including examples concerning the Franciscan convents in Silesia and Upper Lusatia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Ludovic Viallet), the Franciscans in Bohemia in the early sixteenth century (Petr Hlaváček), and the donation-based economy of the Dominicans in Sieradz, Poland (Grzegorz Wierzchowski) and the Franciscans in Zadar, Croatia (Sanja Miljan, Suzana Miljan). For the region of Prussia, many donations to the mendicant orders were made by the Teutonic Order in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Piotr Oliński). The involvement of benefactors and patrons was visible even in the furnishing provided for the churches of the mendicant orders all over Central Europe (Marie Charbonnel).

The last section, Les Mendiants dans l’économie du salut, emphasizes or brings forth elements of the histories of some of the orders which led to conflictive relations with the regular clergy, mostly due to the privileges they received from the outset: the right to grant indulgences and to bury laymen within the premises of their convents. The examples included in this section of the volume reflect these particularities in the cases of Central Europe between 1225 and 1275 (Étienne Doublier) in general and, more narrowly, in the Hungarian realm in the late Middle Ages (Gergely Kiss) or in Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic of today (Adrian Quéret-Podesta). Beatrix Fülöpp-Romhányi’s study stands out. She emphasizes the importance of the interdisciplinary approach with examples of pertinent findings from the field of archaeology, which are combined with insights based on written sources. This section ends with another contribution by Stéphanie Vocanson-Manzi regarding the Franciscan involvement in the burials of laymen in fourteenth-century Lausanne.

From the very outset, the editors aimed to include a significant number of scholars in the development of the project and in the composition of this volume. In my view, one of their greatest achievement is encouraging and presenting a new generation of historians, young researchers, whose work is dedicated to the history of mendicant orders in Central Europe. The project and, more specifically, this book will do a great deal to suggest avenues for further inquiry to the next generation of historians.

Corina Hopârtean
Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sibiu

Secular Power and Sacral Authority in Medieval East-Central Europe. Edited by Kosana Jovanović and Suzana Miljan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 186 pp.

The past decade has seen a significant number of works dedicated to Central Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages published in English. The volume under review here is another sign that the trend is being “institutionalized,” putting Central Eastern Europe more firmly on the map of Medieval Studies. The volume has its roots in the international conference Second Medieval Workshop, which was held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia) on October 10 and 11, 2014. The aim of the series of conferences is to provide young scholars with a forum in which to present their work. However, the volume also reveals a side which is usually left unmentioned, namely the work of more experienced scholars whose assistance is invaluable to young scholars. The Foreword by the editors is followed by János M. Bak’s paper (“Folklore of the Medieval Kings of Hungary: Preliminary Research Report”), which tries to address the question of what one can say about how the kings’ subjects responded to and were influenced by the royal symbolic communication. In order to answer this question, Bak turns to the memoria of rulers of Hungary–Croatia preserved in folklore. Likewise, the paper by Katalin Szende and Ivan Jurković (“Variations on Nobility in Central and South-Eastern Europe: An Introduction”) should be seen as another example of the support given by more experienced scholars. In this essay, the authors give an overview of eleven papers that follow, focusing on the social group which dominates most of the papers: the nobility. Judit Gál (“The Changes of Office of Ban of Slavonia after the Mongol Invasion in Hungary (1242–1267)”) looks at the changes in the royal policy regarding the bans of tocius Sclavonie in the period after the Mongol Invasion, especially in their connections to the towns of Split and Trogir, in whose internal (communal) developments the author finds the reason for the more focused attention given to them by Bela IV. Maja Cepetić Rogić (“The Reconstruction and Role of Roads in the Formation of a Medieval Cultural Landscape: The Example of Episcopal Estates of Dubrava, Ivanić and Čazma”) and Nikolina Antonić (“Late Medieval Village in Turopolje (Slavonia): The Example of Donja Lomnica”), rely both on written sources and, heavily, on archeological works in their inquiries. The former focuses on how the roads of Roman Antiquity influenced the road network in one part of Medieval Slavonia and, in turn, how these roads determined the sites and structures of settlements. The latter looks at the archeological remains at one site in Turopolje, which in the Middle Ages belonged to the group of castle warriors, and on the basis of this, sheds light on the material conditions of the lives of members of this group of conditional nobility. The same social group, also from Medieval Slavonia, is in the focus of the contribution by Éva B. Halász (“From Castle-Warrior to Nobleman: Case Study of a Family of Slavonian Lesser Nobility”), which looks at the castle warriors from Križevci through the prism of social mobility. Kristian Bertović (“Economic Development and Transformation of the Pauline Monasteries near Senj under the Frankapan Patronage”) looks at two Pauline Monasteries, Holy Savior in Ljubotina and St. Helen, and their relations, expressed mostly through nexus of land donations, with their social environment, the most significant elements of which were the citizens of Senj and the Frankopan magnate family. István Kádas (“The Society of the Noble Judges in Northeastern Hungary during the Reign of King Sigismund (1387–1437) presents a comparative study of a group within the nobility which held the office of noble judge in Abaúj, Gömör, and Sáros Counties. Kádas convincingly argues that we can speak of a well-defined group within the county nobility. However, the author shows significant differences in the social relations of the nobility, especially concerning familiaritas (either as vicecomites or in the service of the magnates), which he traces to the differences in the overall structure of the nobility in respective counties. These insights call into question the conclusions reached in some earlier studies, which tried to represent these differences as widely regional. Valentina Zovko (“Development of Ragusan Diplomatic Service in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century: Father and Son at the Court of Duke Sandalj Hranić”) traces changes in Ragusan diplomacy from a Medieval framework towards the development of proto-Modern practices, through the embassies of Marin de Gondula and his son Benedict to Duke Sandalj Hranić of Bosnia. She looks at the duration of their services, their expenses, their methods of persuasion, and the nature of their communication with Ragusan authorities. Silvie Vančurova (“Croatian Students at the University of Prague in the Fifteenth Century”) shows the receptions of the ideas of Jan Hus among Prague students from Croatia, or at least among those few who can be identified as such for certain, but she warns that there are no indications that these students managed to spread Hus’ ideas after returning to their homes more widely. Neven Isailović’s paper (“A Contribution to Medieval Croatian Diplomatics: Cyrillic Charters of Croatian Nobility from the Franciscan Monastery on Trsat in Rijeka”) traces the use of the Cyrillic script in Medieval Croatia and offers diplomatic analyses of several charters preserved in Rijeka. Tomislav Matić (“Peter of Crkvica, a Man Who Could Be Trusted: The Career of a Middle-Ranking Cleric and Diplomat in the Kingdom of Hungary in Mid-Fifteenth Century”) presents a case of a member of the lower nobility who, as a cleric, served John Hunyadi and John Vitez, and his role as a small cog in the wheel of high politics. Miloš Ivanović (“The Nobility of the Despotate of Serbia between Ottoman Empire and Hungary (1457–1459)”) looks at the political decision of the Serbian nobility clinched between two powers, the Ottomans and the Kingdom of Hungary–Croatia. He contextualizes their alliances. The papers collected here offer clear examples of the work of young authors with the skills necessary to pursue the science of history, well accomplished in dealing with sources and familiar with the relevant secondary literature. However, it is hard not to notice unevenness among the various articles, which can perhaps be seen as a reflection of different stages of their research. Some show ability to address larger issues (Kádas first and foremost, but also Zvoko and Ivanović), while some papers tend to be restricted to micro problems, and in these the main frame of the volume, Central Eastern Europe, and its various distinctive aspects, tend to disappear in the background. With more experience, these budding historians may overcome this minor shortcoming.

Antun Nekić
University of Zadar

Hit, hatalom, humanizmus: Bártfa reformációja és művelődése Leonhard Stöckel korában [Faith, power, and Humanism: The Reformation and culture in Bártfa/Bartfeld in the age of Leonhard Stöckel]. By Barnabás Guitman. Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 2017. 260 pp.

This book by Barnabás Guitman was published in 2017 as a revised and expanded version of his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 2009 at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. In his preface, Guitman notes that there are very few works of secondary literature in Hungarian which offer detailed and penetrating presentations of the denominational shifts which took place in the course of the early Reformation in the cities of the Kingdom of Hungary and the very significant social changes which accompanied these shifts. Guitman’s book unquestionably addresses this lacuna in the scholarship. The preface offers an explanation of the relationships between the three key terms in the title. Guitman notes that the relationship between faith and power was much more a matter of stark contrast in the period in question than it was in the periods before the Reformation. Yet, as he also observes in connection with Humanism, the question of the early Reformation cannot be limited simply to denominational history. One must also place at least as much emphasis on aspects of cultural history. Guitman seeks to examine these aspects in a wider European context, and he does just this, deftly contextualizing the issues in question into tendencies in social and denominational history in Europe. One strength of his work which merits particular mention is his use, alongside sources on the Kingdom of Hungary, of German, Silesian, and Czech sources as well.

In the chapter which reflects on the sources and the works of secondary literature on which the book is based, Guitman offers a thorough survey of the relevant primary and secondary literature. He also explains its thematic and geographical organization. This presentation of the relevant groups of sources offers clear evidence of the rich array of works on which Guitman has based his research, and it also provides a useful survey for other scholars who are dealing with the period in question. I would add only that, perhaps as a continuation of this line of inquiry, Guitman hopefully will continue his work and expand on the source material on which he has drawn with the inclusion of documents from other significant institutions which preserve sources. At the same time, the survey of the Hungarian secondary literature on urban history, alas, is not exhaustive.

The presentation of the secondary literature on the Reformation culminates with an assessment of the theory of confessionalization associated with Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard. Alongside this theory, Guitman also presents arguments which have called it into question in his discussion of the works and lectures by Heinreich Richard Schmidt, Péter Tusor, and Gábor Kármán. As far as the relevance of this theory to an examination of the early Reformation processes in Bártfa is concerned, according to the introduction, the reader will find an answer to this question in the last chapter. The theoretical system in the historiography and Guitman’s own research (and the conclusions drawn in both) are organically connected in the discussion of the theory of confessionalization, though the applicability of this theory to the early Reformation is a question of subjective selection.

Guitman briefly touches on how changes in confessional identity played a role in the emergence of conflicts in foreign relations at the time, and because of the dynamics of informal denominational networks, the influence of these informal networks extended beyond state borders.

After the summary of the theoretical background, we are given insights into religious life in Bártfa at the time, as well as the pious societies, relations between the city and the Church, and economic life. It is worth noting that, the title of the subchapter notwithstanding (“Characteristic features of the late Medieval city”), Guitman reflects primarily on early modern processes. Drawing on the theories of Hamm and Weber, Guitman provocatively interconnects questions concerning economics and mindset. The burghers’ fervent religiousness, expectations placed on the Church, and the urban community’s growing demand for independence (a Pan-European phenomenon) had a strong influence on relations between the city councils and the Church institutions found in the cities. Regrettably, in his discussion of this, Guitman uses the term hospital (“kórház”) when the term spital (“ispotály”) would have been more accurate.

With an examination of cultural developments in the city in the early sixteenth century, Guitman offers an engaging presentation of the activities of the Humanists who came to Bártfa through a discussion of the issue of schooling in the cities of upper Hungary. The detailed consideration of their work offers insights into the theme of the book more narrowly understood. The presentation of the relationship between Bártfa and Valentin Eck is organically connected to this. Guitman offers an important analysis which addresses a lacuna in the secondary literature, since many questions come up concerning Eck’s life and political career. We do not know all the details concerning why Eck ended up coming to the city, and Guitman himself only mentions the intercession of Elek Thurzó. It is quite certain, in any event, that Eck’s presence led to a stronger relationship between Krakow and Bártfa. For Guitman, the real significance of Eck’s work lies in the fact that the school in Bártfa developed into an outstanding representative of Humanist thought when Eck served as rector, and in doing so, it provided an excellent foundation for the later work of Leonhard Stöckel.

The next section of the book, which is a coherent whole from the perspective of its content, addresses the first period of the Reformation in Bártfa. Dividing his narrative into clear points, Guitman examines the relationships between the influences of the media (by which I mean the explosion of information at the time) and the personal networks among the Reformation thinkers and Humanists who were active in the region. He refers to the process of confessionalization mentioned in the introduction. This process can be said to have begun in a given area with the consolidation of a given tendency of the Reformation.

Drawing on the example of the Augustinians, Guitman offers a cross-section of the coexistence of the community (or communities) of monks and the city, as well as of their conflicts at the time of the proto-Reformation. He reaches back to one of the points of the earlier subchapter and shows how, as is commonly known among historians of the era, these conflicts stretched into the early Reformation, and in the case of many cities, they played a decisive role in the acceptance of the Reformation. Guitman emphasizes the earlier mentioned significance of the social network of the schoolmasters, preachers, and notaries who had some knowledge of Humanist teachings. In connection with the case of the Augustinians, he briefly sheds some light on the functionings of the power centers (such as the episcopal faculty) and the social forces (such as the Catholic nobility) lying outside the city, though the reader is given little more than some insights into their unsuccessful attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of the city in the early Reformation.

In his discussion of the reformers who were active in Bártfa, Guitman examines first and foremost the work of Wolfgang Schustel, the city chaplain. He draws on the extensive research of Zoltán Csepregi and raises precise questions concerning Schustel’s life and career. However, we are given no answer to the question of the relevance of the detailed discussion of Schustel’s family background to his work in Bártfa. The title of the subchapter, “Wolfgang Schustel, Bártfa’s first Reformation thinker?” suggests a certain ambivalence concerning the assessment of Schustel’s role and work. On the basis of the sources used by Guitman, there was palpable tension surrounding Schustel after 1527. Schustel’s conflict with parish priest Kristóf offers insights into numerous general phenomena which can be seen as important moments in the history of the cities at the time. The leaders of the city sided with Schustel and opposed the unaccommodating “master Kristóf.” King of Hungary, John Zápolya, who at the time exerted less and less influence in the region, tried to intercede on Kristóf’s behalf. Bártfa asked the magistrate of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) for advice on how to address the deadlock. Given the upheaval created by the civil war, it was essential for the city to remain aware of the latest developments in order to ensure its safety and security, so correspondence among many parties provided important information concerning events beyond the city.

Guitman, however, fails even in the remaining section of the chapter to identify the reason for the uncertainty suggested in the title of the subchapter. He notes that, at the turn of the 1520s and 1530s, Schustel urged reform in the teachings of the Church many times in his letters to the city council, and although Guitman does conclude (drawing again on Csepregi) that, in the end, Schustel did not succeed in having all of his suggestions adopted, the suggestions he made indicate that his ideas were clearly shaped by the spirit of the Reformation. Ultimately, Guitman identifies Schustel not as a “Reformer” (i.e. an unambiguous representative of the Reformation), but rather as a “preacher who represented the spirit of the Reformation.” At the end of the subchapter, Guitman again distances his discussion a bit from the urban community and quite astutely emphasizes that the causes of the conflicts between the burghers of Bártfa and the local Catholic institutions were not exclusively questions of religious reform or theological difference. Rather, relations between the different linguistic communities also played a role, as did political and economic interests.

After Schustel’s departure, in the search for a new preacher who would be acceptable for the city, the network among Humanists and preachers who were active representatives of the spirit of the Reformation played a decisive role, as Guitman touches on earlier in the book several times. The magistrate was not to be deterred in this effort, neither by the continuous interventions of Ferdinand’s military leaders in the region nor by the interventions of the ruler’s military leaders. In the end, with the mediation of the city of Besztercebánya (today Banská Bystrica, Slovakia), the position of preacher was taken by Michael Radaschin, who had studied in Wittenberg and who in all likelihood also knew Leonhard Stöckel. Radaschin was in Bártfa by 1544 at the latest, and he was active as the pastor there for 22 years. In their work together, Radaschin and Stöckel, who was the school rector, played a decisive role in the history of the city in the sixteenth century.

The Synod of 1546 in Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia) was a significant event in the course of which commitment to the Augsburg Confession and Melanchton’s Loci Communes was declared. Guitman persuasively argues that Stöckel was not among the authors of the 1559–1560 version of the Confessio Pentapolitana. With regards to the Confessio pentapolitana, the secondary literature in German (for instance Gottfried Seebaβ and Max Josef Suda) often notes merely that the authors drew on the Augsburg Confession. With acute critical acumen, Guitman quite rightly draws attention, in contrast, to the differences.

The chapter entitled “Theological debates and rivals,” begins with a lengthy presentation of the Prussian Reformation, which is only indirectly related to Guitman’s topic, more narrowly understood. The discussion of the work of Lauterwald in Eperjes, however, constitutes an integral part of the questions addressed in the book.

The chapter in which Guitman examines the writings of Leonhard Stöckel also begins with a lengthy discussion of antecedents. From the perspective of Stöckel’s work, considering the intellectual and theological influences to which he was exposed early on and his later relationships, the detailed presentation of relations in Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland) is entirely justified. As a kind of analogue to the situation in Bártfa, relations in Breslau offer insights into the ways in which the city, which had also embarked down the path of the Reformation, transformed its educational institutions. The mentality of Wittenberg had already exerted a strong influence on Stöckel, and in the early 1530s he also enrolled at a university considered one of the citadels of the Reformation.

In 1538, Stöckel returned to the city of his birth. The work he did as rector in Bártfa drew to a large extent on the experiences he had had during his years in school. The studies he pursued with Humanists like Valentin Eck, Leonhard Cox, and Johann Agricola (from his time in Eisleben) were a decisive part of these experiences. Stöckel was strongly influenced by Melanchton in his efforts to transform the relationship between the Church and the secular powers. With the consent and support of the Bártfa councilors, he put the school under the authority of the city, organized the incomes set aside for education, and separated them from the parochial sources. The school and its instructors, however, thus were more dependent on the city leaders than they had ever been before.

Guitman offers an excellent overview of everyday life in the Bártfa school by presenting the daily schedules of the students and teachers. He contends that, within a relatively short period of time, the school in Bártfa had become one of the most frequented institutions in the country. Both burgher families and families belonging to the nobility were eager to send their children to the school, and within a few years, the school had acquired an impressive reputation even beyond the borders of the country. Students came from Transylvania, Silesia, Poland, Moravia, Austria, and even Prussia and Russia. As a consequence of his dedicated organizational work, which won him wide renown, Stöckel was given the title Praeceptor Hungariae by his contemporaries.

In the next subchapter, Guitman shifts focus and examines Stöckel’s work in the school by analyzing his pedagogical writings. In the composition of his works, Stöckel followed very much in the path of Erasmus. His commentaries on the Gospels were not necessarily written with concrete pedagogical goals, though his books of sermons were definitely composed with teaching in mind. Not surprisingly, in his explanations of Scripture, he clearly supports Lutheran teachings. Guitman raises the important question of the consistent use of Latin. He suggests that Stöckel may have had two goals: first, given the universal nature of Latin as a language of the Church and of education, he wanted the teachings of Christ to reach the widest possible audience and, second, Stöckel was better able to make use of the rhetorical and aesthetic toolbox of Latin than he would have been of the vernacular languages. In connection with Stöckel’s work as a teacher, Guitman touches briefly on theatrical art in the school and also on two of the less well-known students who attended the institution, Jacob Heraclides and Georg Henisch.

In the last larger thematic unit of his book, Guitman offers a thorough overview of Stöckel’s writings in defense of the faith, writings in which the question of the danger posed by the Ottoman Empire is given considerable emphasis. Guitman provides a detailed discussion of the experiences of the cities of upper Hungary with the Turks, again touching on the more important aspects of the relationship between the central power and the cities (for instance communication and military questions). Stepping out of this system of relationships, he presents Luther’s views on the Ottomans as well. In connection with the image of the Ottomans in Stöckel’s writings, Guitman draws attention to the points at which the Bártfa rector’s views concerning the Turks do not overlap entirely with those of Luther. He praises Stöckel for remaining in Bártfa in the 1540s and 1550s, even though he would have been able to return to Breslau, which was safer. Guitman shows a gift for thorough source analysis in his discussion of the description of the martyrs of Libetbánya (today Ľubietová, Slovakia), descriptions attributed at the level of the base text to Stöckel. He also subjects the contentions made in the source to critical analysis.

In summary, Guitman has offered his reader a thematically lucid and coherent book in which he presents conclusions which are based on extensive knowledge and study of the secondary literature and archival sources, conclusions which in many cases bring to a close debate which have gone on for decades now or which convincingly dismiss fundamentally mistaken views. He uses the appropriate terminology, and his style is flowing and clear. The system according to which he has organized his references is also clear and easy to follow. He is consistent in his use of the basic principles of transcription and terminology presented in the introduction. The tables included in the appendices offer persuasive support for various parts of the main text. The second, third, fourth, and fifth tables in particular offer an excellent summary of the central themes of the book, more narrowly understood. Guitman essentially accomplishes the task he sets for himself in his introduction, according to which he seeks to put the issue of the Church and schooling in Bártfa into the larger European context. In the end, the central idea presented in the introduction could most certainly be continued, for with his book, Guitman has done a great deal to further a deeper knowledge and more nuanced understanding of the denominational and accompanying social changes which took place in the course of the early Reformation in the cities of the Kingdom of Hungary.

Attila Tózsa-Rigó
University of Miskolc

Untertanen des Sultans oder des Kaisers: Struktur und Organisationsformen der beider Wiener griechischen Gemeinden von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis 1918. By Anna Ransmayr. Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2018. 764 pp.

Introduced to a wider, international academic public through the publication of Traian Stoianovich’s seminal article “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant” in 1960 in the Journal of Economic History, the immigration of Greek and other Orthodox merchants from the Ottoman Balkans into the Habsburg Empire during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries has been a field of interest for different historiographic traditions. First and foremost, it has been significant for histories of the modern Balkan nation states which in a retrospective and often arbitrary way have identified these states as migrant merchants’ homelands, and it has been particularly important for the Greek historiography, in which historical diaspora studies have a long tradition and are still a pool of vibrant scholarly production. On the host countries’ side, it was the Romanian and especially the Hungarian historiography that incorporated the history of the Greek merchant colonies into narratives of their Habsburg past. Historians such as Iván Hajnóczy, Endre Horváth, Ödön Füves, and Olga Cicanci have made significant contributions to the history of the Greek merchant diaspora in the Habsburg lands by bringing to light a rich corpus of archival material and generating wider interest in the subject, along with numerous publications. The topic found much less resonance among Austrian historians, despite the prominent position of Vienna in the network of the Greek merchant settlements in the Habsburg Empire and the significant presence of the Greek entrepreneurs in the economic life of the city throughout the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as visible as the material imprints of this presence in the commercial heart of the old city are (“Griechenviertel,” Holy Trinity Church, Saint George Church), the Greeks are just as invisible from the historiographic narratives on the multireligious and multiethnic nineteenth-century Viennese bourgeoisie.

Anna Ransmayr’s monograph Untertanen des Sultans oder des Kaisers, an edited version of a dissertation defended in 2017 at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna, is the first comprehensive history of the Greeks in Vienna in German. Based on the existing scholarly production in Greek and the relevant contributions in German, Ransmayr moves the research further in two ways. She does so, first, by making use of sources from the archives of the two Greek communities in Vienna, to which there was no access before 2005–2007, and, second, she extends the time scope of the research to 1918, i.e. well beyond the conventional (in the relevant accounts) limit of the second half of the nineteenth century.

The book consists of six chapters (conclusions included) which could be grouped into two major thematic parts. The first examines the institutional history of the two Greek communities in Vienna, while the second deals with the demographic and social structure of the Viennese Greeks and their settlement patterns, as well as with issues of their identities, affiliations, and self-recognition. A voluminous section containing edited archival sources on the history of the two Greek communities is also included.

The book’s center of gravity lies in the first part, which constitutes the author’s key contribution to the history of the Greeks in Vienna. Although the use of new sources from the communal archives does not change the overall picture we have had so far, it nevertheless substantially complements our knowledge and supports older cases with new evidence. In this direction, Ransmayr’s contribution in challenging the essentialist perception of the communities as embodiments of a national character is particularly important, as she not only documents the older position, according to which the organization of the Orthodox immigrants in communities was imposed by the Habsburg authorities, but also shows clearly that both Greek communities themselves were specific Habsburg institutions.

However, the use of new sources has primarily enabled the author to write the institutional history of a small immigrant cluster, in which the reader can detect the major processes associated with the transition from empires to nation states in Southeast and Central Europe and their impacts on diasporic groups’ and imperial subjects’ loyalties and identities. Through a thorough examination of the sources, Ransmayr follows the institutional organization of the Greeks in Vienna from the foundation of the first Orthodox church and the granting of imperial privileges to the Saint George’s brotherhood of the Ottoman Greek Orthodox merchants of the city and the Holy Trinity’s community of the Habsburg naturalized Greek and Vlach Orthodox communities in 1776 and 1783 respectively, until their demise, which, not accidentally, coincides with the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The book offers a coherent account of the transition from an “imperial” pattern of community organization based on the criteria of common religion and allegiance to a sovereignty (Sultan, or Kaiser) to another, in which ethnic affiliation gains weight, without, however, calling imperial loyalty into question. Signs of this transition are to be observed as early as the first half of the eighteenth century, with the exclusion of the Serbs from the administration of the Saint George’s chapel, and intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the creation of national states in the Balkans and the presence of other Orthodox populations in Vienna combined with the rapid decline of the Greeks in the city led to an increasing ethnicization of the identity discourse. But as the book shows, the ethnicization process of the communities was far from being linear and without tensions. In so far as it was not imposed from above, the existence of two Greek-Orthodox communities, one for the Ottoman and one for the Habsburg subjects, set its seal institutionally, too, on the differing economic and social orientations within the Greek diaspora. Instead of a linear course, the third chapter of the book describes how two imperial institutions, such as the Greek communities, tried to adapt to the new national realities and political loyalties in the places of origin and how the Habsburg authorities reacted to them.

In sum, the book can be read as a case study both of the history of the Greek diaspora and the history of the religious and ethnic groups of the Habsburg monarchy. Greater theorization of the findings and a closer connection with the relevant historiographic debates in Greece, Austria, and Hungary would better serve the venture. In any case, it is an excellently documented book which fills a historiographical gap and is worth reading.

Vaso Seirinidou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 

Reformations in Hungary in the Age of the Ottoman Conquest. By Pál Ács. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. 333 pp.

It is always a pleasure to see a good volume appear on the history and culture of Hungary in English. Fortunately, in recent years, we have more and more specialized English books on subjects which have always had broad appeal in Europe, including the Reformation and the Ottoman occupation. The Reformations in Hungary in the Age of the Ottoman Conquest offers selected essays on both of these major themes. It is the first English-language volume by the renowned historian of Hungarian literature and culture, Pál Ács, who is senior research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Curiously, Ács, who is originally a scholar of Hungarian literature, teaches presently as an honorary professor of history proper at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest).

Ács is a man of essays. He has written over 200 published scholarly articles, and several of his previous books are collected volumes of studies. He unquestionably has an original interest in a wide range of different themes and topics. With the curiosity of a humanist antiquarian, he searches for stimulating threads of the past, which lead him to exciting stories, figures, and historical problems. Consequently, it is not easy to find a single common narrative for the eighteen studies in the volume. As Ács notes in his introduction, it is impossible to grasp reality entirely, even less the “reality” of the past. However, if we can solidly support our views, organize our subject matter, and narrate it well, we may convince others of our way of comprehending “reality” as experienced by historical agents. Yet there is a major common ground to the author’s varied interests, and this is the question of how late Renaissance men (especially ethnic Hungarian intellectuals of the sixteenth century) reacted to two major challenges of their times: the Reformation (or the Reformations in the plural) and the Ottoman presence in divided Hungary. While the Reformation concerned the spiritual and intellectual life of Hungarians, the Ottoman presence influenced their essential experience of culture and otherness, as well as their security and prosperity. Alongside these two major themes, the Reformation (part two) and the Ottoman presence (part three), two shorter parts deal with the question of Erasmian humanism (part one) and seventeenth-century Catholic renewal (part four).

Part one, entitled “Erasmian Challenges,” offers a general introduction to Erasmus’s Hungarian influence and two case studies. It underlines the ways Erasmus paradoxically contributed to the advancement of the Hungarian language. In Ács’s analysis, Erasmus most importantly represented a new model of the independent learned man, especially the one who desired spiritual renewal but had ambivalent feelings about the Reformation. Erasmus taught them the philosophy of Christ, which was neither Catholic nor Lutheran but was purportedly based purely on the Bible, above all on the New Testament. If this new Christian philosophy was to reach the individual and teach him morality, it needed to be translated into the vernacular. This was realized by the first Bible translators, who wished to create a book, as János Sylvester, the Hungarian translator of the New Testament, put it, “in which the Savior Christ himself speaks in Hungarian.”

Benedek Komjáti, another translator, translated only Saint Paul’s letters. Appearing in 1533, his was the first Hungarian vernacular book. As Ács reveals (in chapter three), the translation was based on the edition and interpretation of Erasmus. It thus merits our attention for several reasons. One of these is the relationship between vernacularism and female readership (the patron of the work was the widow Katalin Frangepán), a relationship familiar from Western contexts but little studied by Hungarian scholars. Ács does not pursue this question either. For him, Komjáti’s translation matters both from the perspective of the new “print Hungarian,” that is, the problem of written Hungarian, and from the perspective of a new linguistic community defined by its language, which Komjáti’s book was about to create self-consciously. One of Komjáti’s questions was how Hungarians ought to react to the military and political disaster created by the Ottoman occupation. In Ács’s reading, one possible answer to this question was the book itself: Hungarians could find their way out of the political crisis through spiritual and subsequent cultural and literary renewal, following in the footsteps of Christ, as explained by Erasmus via the teachings of Saint Paul. Yet Komjáti also had a more specific answer, which related his work to the ideas of many sixteenth-century Protestants, namely that Hungarians could become God’s newly chosen people.

An aspect of this Jewish–Hungarian parallel is the subject of the complex and exciting study on the Protestant reception of a characteristically Catholic hagiographic story on the martyrdom of the Holy Maccabees in Hungary. This is the subject of chapter two, which emphasizes Erasmus’s influence on this reception history but which could also easily be placed in part two of the volume, entitled “Protestant Reformations in Cultural Contexts.”

Part two also has an introductory chapter, in which Ács argues that the Renaissance and the Reformations had similar intellectual goals, namely the recovery of a lost golden age. One of the theses of the chapter concerns the interrelatedness of the different denominational movements in the sixteenth century. Ács claims that distinct confessional cultures in Hungary only began to develop in the seventeenth century, when the initial goal of the different Reformations (Christian unity) was essentially abandoned.

Chapter seven deals with an early work by Mátyás Dévai entitled On the Sleeping of Saints. Dévai, who was a leading figure of ethnic Hungarian Lutheranism, studied in Wittenberg and compiled his work in 1531, shortly after his return to Hungary. This text was lost, but since Dévai discussed the question again six years later, we can reconstruct the original. The major context in which the article places Dévai’s work was the Protestant discussion of the fate of the human soul after death and before Doomsday. This was obviously a tricky question. One could gain much popularity by rejecting the notion of Purgatory as a human construction, but there were many pitfalls to avoid concerning Hell, resurrection, and the mortality/immortality of the soul. Oddly, Dévai was interested in the debate only to the extent that it gave support to arguments against the cult of the saints. If the saints’ souls were sleeping after their death, they could not be invoked by the living. For Dévai, this was also the case with the Virgin Mary, Hungary’s patron saint, and this constituted a radical, unpatriotic, and unpopular claim. The problem with Dévai’s theory of soul-sleeping was that it was dangerously close to the Anabaptist doctrine of the death of the soul. Consequently, Dévai modified his earlier theory and tempered its claims. Nonetheless, he continued to target the cult of the saints, which says much of the context of the early Reformation in Hungary, which involved violent attacks by the people against images of the saints.

Part three of the book (“The Changing Image of Ottoman Turks”) collects studies from Ács’s more recent and very fruitful research on the Ottomans. Some of the articles have already inspired further research, especially the ones that concern geographical areas where mixed and fluid identities were the order of the day. As a Hungarian researcher, Ács is in a privileged position to observe historical agents moving between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, yet the way he composes his narratives on the basis of less familiar or hidden information sheds light on the most intuitive and creative aspects of his scholarship.

Chapter eleven puts the story of Alvise Gritti in context. Having grown up in Constantinople, Gritti was the illegitimate son of a doge of Venice. He had so much influence in Constantinople that even Sultan Suleyman followed his politics for a while. This chapter explains the less studied international and Ottoman dynamics which resulted first in Gritti’s sudden rise in Transylvania and then his eventual fall and brutal death in 1534.

The following three chapters all deal with Ottoman renegades with Hungarian contacts or origins. Chapter twelve calls attention to Ibrahim, the Ottoman brother-in-law of the humanist diplomat Andreas Dudith. It caused an enormous scandal when Dudith, as the bishop of Pécs, married a Polish noblewoman in 1567. The scandal would have been even greater if people had known that his new wife’s uncle was a renegade, one of the most powerful and dreaded dragomans of the age. There were now two members in the same family serving two inimical emperors. It is thanks to Ács’s research that we know about this unparalleled relationship, however scarce the information concerning their personal contacts may be (Ibrahim’s supposed financial help of Dudith’s family is not substantiated).

Chapter thirteen uncovers the origin and activity of an Austrian and a Hungarian renegade, Tarjumans Mahmud and Murad, who were apparently captured at the same time in or after the Battle of Mohács. They were both educated men, proficient in several languages, and authors of different works, Murad of a Muslim catechism, Mahmud of a historical work on Hungary (Tarih-I Ungarus), in which he might have relied on the assistance of Murad. As the article shows, these two dragomans knew each other well and kept in touch. Murad (who allegedly spoke Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Latin, Hungarian, and Croatian) also translated historical works, most famously an Ottoman chronicle into bad Latin for the use of the humanist Johann Löwenklau, the protagonist of a later chapter. Even more exciting is the involvement of these two dragomans in Christian religious disputes. It appears that the famous Antitrinitarian Adam Neuser, who converted to Islam in Constantinople, was hosted by Mahmud. It also appears that the same Mahmud, probably as much a latitudinarian as Neuser, openly supported the Unitarians against the Calvinists in a dispute in Transylvania, sentencing the Calvinist György Alvinczi to death with the excuse that he made derisory comments about the Quran.

Chapter fourteen is similarly suggestive on the history of Ottoman–Christian relations. It demonstrates the Hungarian origin and knowledge of the protagonist Sehsuvar Bey, one of the most dreaded and cruelest Ottoman soldiers of occupied Hungary. Sehsuvar did all he could in order to earn the trust of the Constantinople court fighting against Hungarians as a Hungarian renegade, still he remained repeatedly frustrated in his career hopes. His is the story of the overcompensation of the neophyte, a story which we know all too well from other historical contexts.

Equally fascinating is chapter fifteen on the humanist Johann Löwenklau, whose Greek and Byzantine interests developed by the end of the century into interests about the Ottomans. Once again, we learn here about the intriguing connection between religious heterodoxy and intellectual openness. The article explores Löwenklau’s Ottoman scholarship and places it in the contexts of a growing humanist interest in the East and an earlier Protestant interest in a religious mission to Ottoman areas. Ács argues that Löwenklau’s activity should be understood as the result of these two intersecting interests.

Chapter sixteen explores the Oriental travels of István Kakas, the wealthiest and at the same time one of the most erudite citizens of Cluj/Kolozsvár. How Kakas ended up as the leader of a diplomatic mission to the Persian Shah ‘Abbas I in 1602 is a question that places the whole expedition into an entirely unexpected context. We find out that the mission, starting from Rudolf II’s Prague, had much less to do with the military designs of the Habsburg Empire staying in war with the Ottomans since 1591 than with the plans of adventuring English traders eager to create new intercontinental networks and commercial routes.

Finally, part four, “The Catholic Reforming Movements in the Early 17th Century,” is rather sketchy compared to the previous ones, and the promise of the title is only partially fulfilled. On the one hand, we would need an introductory chapter here too; on the other, chapter seventeen, which is about a poem by one the most remarkable aristocrats of the period, Pál Esterházy, says more about Baroque secular Hungary than Catholic movements. In contrast, the last study on Péter Pázmány’s Catholicism is highly suggestive of new potential approaches towards Catholic Renewal. Pázmány’s historical interpretation appears to have provided new answers to real intellectual needs, answers that Protestant historical works failed to offer. While the enormous success of seventeenth-century Catholic Counter-Reformation is most commonly explained with reference to the efficiency of the Catholic Church and its power relations in the context of a Catholic empire, this chapter suggests that their success might also partly be explained with reference to their religious message. In a country fighting for its survival, the Protestant dogma of Predestination might not have been a strong motivating force and might have failed to correspond to the needs of a generation that struggled to find a way out of political crisis and liberate occupied Hungary.

The merits of the book are far greater than the very few points I have mentioned, sometimes with critical remarks. It offers a valuable contribution to historical knowledge about early modern Hungary’s culture, literature, and religion for non-Hungarian scholars interested in the region.

Gábor Almási
Eötvös Loránd University

De l’exotisme à la modernité: Un siècle de voyage français en Hongrie (1818–1910). By Catherine Horel. Montrouge: Éditions du Bourg, 2018. 225 pp.

Catherine Horel, an outstanding French historian whose research touches on the history of Central Europe from an array of perspectives, is rightly considered one of the finest international scholars of Hungarian history. She has published a great deal of articles based on her impressive research on topics including the Hungarian Holocaust and the history of Central Europe. Not long ago, she won acclaim for her scholarly biography of Miklós Horthy. In her most recent book, she offers an exhaustive presentation and penetrating analyses of the texts of French travel writers who journeyed to Hungary between 1818 and 1910. The antecedents to this topic in her work stretch back relatively far. In several earlier articles, Horel dealt with this subject, so her new book can be seen as a synthesis of the findings of a longer research endeavor.

In the introduction, which is comparatively long, Horel defines the theme and outlines her methods. The period in question could be called, just for the sake of simplicity, “the short nineteenth century,” which began with the travels of the famous French geologist François Sulpice Beudant to Hungary and came to a close with the first decade of the twentieth century which bore witness to the birth of the automobile which revolutionized travel (the visit to Hungary of a tourist by the name of Pierre Marge, who traveled by car, offers a symbolic end to the era). The period, which lasted essentially from the end of the Napoleonic wars until the outbreak of World War I, was remarkably varied from the perspective of both French and Hungarian history. It was an era of reforms and modern ideals, as well as the emergence of modern nationalisms, revolutions and freedom fights, and the various compromises with which these events often drew to a close. It was also a time in which, alongside the shared interest felt by the two nations in each other’s culture and plights, fundamental differences began to appear, as well as the distorting effects of false images. The authors of the travel accounts came from numerous layers of the intelligentsia of the era, including scholars, members of the nobility who were performing either military or diplomatic functions, conservative representatives of the Church, émigré aristocrats, and enlightened journalists. The quantity and, of course, the nature of the information they left for future generations were shaped by the variety of backgrounds from which they came. Travel at the time was still part of a lifestyle that was accessible only to the social elites, the aristocracy, the nobility, the upper middle classes, and the intelligentsia. In her monograph, Horel attempts to call attention to the distinctive features of the travel writings of the French authors who journeyed to and through Hungary by presenting the most characteristic texts in her body of source material.

In the first chapter of the book, Horel examines the stereotypes which were prevalent in the era (some of which persist to the present day). Alongside the romantic image of the blue Danube and the “Puszta,” she focuses on the cities, the dynamic development of which can be seen as one of the signs and symptoms of urbanization in Hungary at the time. In the second section of the book, Horel discusses another group of stereotypes, the elements of so-called Hungarian national character. Her discussion touches on ideas concerning the origins of the Hungarians and the cultural history of the idea of Hungarian hospitality, as well as religious and political questions. As a kind of counterpoint to the notions of Hungarian national character, Horel also presents the images given by the French travel writers of the national minorities and the larger religious and ethnic minorities living in Hungary, including the Croats, the Romanians, the Slovaks, the Germans, the Serbs, the Ruthenians, the Jews, and the Roma.

The protagonist of the second chapter is Budapest, the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary as of 1873 and a city which rivaled Vienna as a political and cultural center. As Horel has already published a very successful monograph on Budapest in French, it is hard to offer the French reader something new about the city, which was one of the most dynamically changing metropolises of Europe, so we are given more of a sample of the nineteenth-century French sources. Horel likes to let the sources speak for themselves, as they are. She uses copious citations, which she complements with insightful notes and useful explanations. In this central part of the book, we bear witness to the birth of the Budapest mythos, which is still very alive today for the average French tourist.

In the last chapter, Horel uses a structure which resembles a triptych to present the French mirror image of political relations in Hungary. In the first section, she discusses the great patriots (primarily Lajos Kossuth and Ferenc Deák) of the Reform Era and the Vormärz. The second section offers an examination of the problems of the 1848 Revolution and War of Independence from the perspective of France. Here, Horel draws attention to the failure of the approach and policies adopted by the Hungarian independence movement to the national minorities and also to social problems in Hungary at the time. Horel presents the era of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy created by the Compromise of 1867 by examining shifting sentiment among the travel writers. On the one hand, Horel offers her reader glimpses of outbursts of sympathy for Hungarians in some of the narratives, but at the same time, in her summary of the geopolitical realities of the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, she notes the failure of the attempts by France to pursue a pro-Hungary foreign policy. In the summary of the book, she continues this line of thinking, presenting the changes which are discernible in the images of Hungarians in the narratives of French travel writers over the course of this short nineteenth century. Among the major fateful shifts in these images was the fundamental transformation of the romantic notion of Hungary and the Hungarians and the change which took place as, when it came to reports on the peoples of Central Europe, the narratives of travelers and discoverers, which were largely literary in nature, were replaced towards the end of the era by the descriptions given by French geographers and Slavophile journalists and writers. An array of carefully selected illustrations and the detailed bibliography also make Horel’s book an enjoyable read.

This captivatingly written and persuasively argued work of scholarship has numerous merits, but there are perhaps a few minor shortcomings which also deserve mention. Horel’s use of the term “French” may be a bit confusing for the reader. In the case of most of the travel writers in her account, the term refers simply to France as country of origin, but in the case of the Swiss authors, it means “French speaking.” It might have been worth clarifying this minor ambiguity in the introduction. Also, though she makes very precise use of an exhaustive range of sources, one or two important sources are still missing from her account. It made have been worth including, for example, the travel narrative by Cyprien Polydore, a parish priest from Périgueux (Voyage en Allemagne, en Autriche-Hongrie et en Italie. [1888]) who traveled through the country by train and who offered a fascinating example of a travel narrative by a deeply religious pilgrim. It also would have been useful had Horel offered some reflection on works in the secondary literature on the subject written in the recent past by Hungarian scholars, for instance the works by historian and literary scholar Géza Szász, a member of the faculty at the University of Szeged.

Ferenc Tóth
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800–1850: Stammering the Nation. By Konstantina Zanou. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 248 pp.

At a time when the Mediterranean Sea is in the focus of international audiences, especially because of flows of migrants from the global south towards Europe, it seems that the Mediterranean space has begun to meet with new interest in scientific research, as well. Numerous studies which in recent years have re-analyzed this area from the perspective of its history have focused primarily on the scope, frequency, and diversity of mutual transfers, exchanges, entanglements, and interactions along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The monograph by Kostantina Zanou, Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia University and a historian specialized in the history of nineteenth-century Mediterranean, is part of this research. Zanou’s work, however, is not a general overview of the history of the Mediterranean. The main characters of her book are not the countries, empires, and nations still featured in much of the traditional historical narratives, but rather the life stories of people who lived amid (and some of them through) the historical changes that this region witnessed in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when the Venetian Republic collapsed after a long period of almost complete domination in this part of the world. It was also the period in which the first germs of nationalism, an ideology which in only a few decades did away with century-old empires and gave rise to semi-nation-states in their stead, emerged on the horizon. The book does not focus on the entire Mediterranean space. The geographical analytical framework is the seven Ionian Islands in the southeastern corner of the Adriatic Sea, which were situated at the crossroads of the Venetian and Ottoman worlds and which during that time shifted sovereignties among the French, British, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. The changing geopolitical conditions are intertwined with multiple histories of individuals into a novel attempt to describe these complex processes from a point of view which combines microhistory with macrohistory. As she writes, Zanou is attempting “to look at the big picture through the small details” (p.2). Particularly the intellectuals, who became heralds of the nation and the national idea in the individual national movements (especially the Greek and Italian) are examined in a new light which reveals their other role: non-national or, rather, trans-national patriots whose perceptions of themselves different significantly from the perceptions posthumously imposed on them by nation builders. In their diasporic wanderings and experience as exiles, they represented a bridge between cultures and languages, marking a time and space not yet codified into national paradigms.

The introduction brilliantly presents the essential focus on Zanou’s inquiry and outlines the direction of the analysis, which then extends over four parts. These parts are based primarily on the personal profiles of intellectuals such as Ugo Foscolo, Andreas Kalvos, Dionysios Solomos, Mario Pieri, Andrea Papadopoulo Vretto, and Andrea Mustoxidi, which intertwine in the text with many other characters, ranging from noted politicians and prominent diplomats, such as Ioannis Kapodistrias, and influential scholars, like Adamantios Koraes, to perhaps less familiar names, such as Alexandros Vogorides, Christodoloulos Clonares, Spiridion Vlandi, and Spiridion Naranzi, mostly from the Ionian environment, who in different ways and on different levels left a mark on much broader regions.

The second part in particular, in which Zanou describes the strategic presence of Russia in the southern Adriatic and the role that Orthodox Christianity played in patching up the “plot gaps” in national ideology, is one of the main strengths of the book. By the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean had become part of the Russian political horizon. Even at the time of the Russo-Turkish war between 1768 and 1774, the Russian navy successfully countered the Turkish forces and further reinforced its presence and role in the period to follow. Despite the superiority of the British and the growing appetites of Italian irredentism and Austro-German expansionism in the Balkans, from the nineteenth century on, Russia was an important international force in shaping the Mediterranean environment. The study reveals the complexity and diversity of options and choices available to the protagonists of this book over a relatively short period of time in the wake of the collapse of la Serenissima and Napoleon’s ambitions for the eastern Mediterranean. By examining the choices made by the figures who are the protagonists of her narrative, Zanou leads the reader to an understanding of the Ionian version of patriotism. Although it mainly deals with the intertwining of Italian and Greek cultural and political milieus, the work is not (nor does it aspire to be) a study of Italian and Greek literary cooperation in the pre-national era. The personages represent paradigmatic figures compatible with a broader Mediterranean environment, standing alongside Niccolò Tommaseo, likely the best-known Kulturträger of mutual transnational dialogue along the Adriatic shores during the period in question. Based on assorted archives and personal legacies, as well as secondary literature in several languages, Zanou thus provides the reader with new perspectives on the issue of the Greek Revolution and its actors, philhellenism, European post-Enlightenment society, the concrete traps of post-imperial governance, different understandings of patria and patriotism, the intermingling of religion and nationalism, and the significance of linguistic diversity in Europe at the time.

The questions regarding how the disintegrating empires, changing sovereignties, emerging states, shifting loyalties, and imagined national communities were reflected in the writings of these southern Adriatic intellectuals evolve into fulcrums of European history. This becomes especially clear in the conclusion, which shows that nationalism in practice proved much more complex and problematic than nationalism as a set of theoretical concepts. In this context, the Ionian Islands were no exception. Rather, they could be seen more as a European paradigm of the changes that marked global developments. Thus, this book will be engaging not only for the ever more numerous enthusiasts who have taken an interest in the Adriatic region in recent years, but also for readers looking for a novel, fresh perspective on Europe and the Mediterranean during a crucial period of their histories.

Borut Klabjan
European University Institute

Wien 1918: Agonie der Kaiserstadt. By Edgar Haider. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 418 pp.

The hundred-year anniversary of the end of World War I has witnessed the publication of a number of studies in Austria and abroad that explore the nature of the 1918 regime change in Central Europe. In the vein of his previous portrait of the imperial capital at the start of the war (Wien 1914: Alltag am Rande des Abgrunds, [2013]), in his latest work, Edgard Haider chronicles life in Vienna four years later, in 1918. Other recent books might offer more detailed archival research on the collapse of the Empire viewed from its capital city, but Haider’s study provides a very enjoyable tour through the streets, cafés, parks, and palaces of Vienna. Based mostly on newspaper sources (as well as published diaries and memoirs), it gives an atmospheric account of the last year of the war and uncovers many distinctive aspects of urban life in wartime, such as traditional celebrations, burial customs, lighting, housecleaning, fashion, and rubbish collection.

While not organized strictly chronologically, the structure loosely follows the unfolding of the calendar year with its main festivals and seasons, starting with the celebration of New Year’s Eve and ending with preparations for Christmas. The first chapters provide some context on the international and internal situation of the monarchy and on the Habsburg dynasty. The core chapters of the book, however, deal with everyday life in wartime Vienna, detailing the impact of the conflict in various areas. The hunger crisis of the last years of the war plays a major role in this narrative, as dwindling food supplies shaped new behaviours and daily rhythms, from constant queuing to trips to the countryside and changes in eating habits. Haider relates episodes which can be seen as symptoms of the crisis: the disappearance of sausages as a snack and their replacement with corn on the cob or the shooting of a polar bear in a zoo by a man who considered them not worth feeding, as humans were starving. Haider also presents the health consequences of malnutrition for children and the difficult living conditions created by the shortage of housing. Other descriptions give a sense of the transformations in street life, as Haider paints overcrowded tramways, the fate of bourgeois buildings, missing door handles, and empty shop windows. The most interesting chapter focuses on the celebration and adaptation of regular rituals (carnival, lent, Easter, summer vacations, confirmations) in times of war and penury, contrasting them with pre-war customs. In the middle of the book, a form of excursus discusses the death of several key artists of the Viennese Modern Age, whose passing can be seen as a sign of the end of an era (for instance Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, and Koloman Moser, all of whom died in 1918). This section, however, also includes artists such as Ferdinand Hodler and Peter Rosegger whose relationship to Vienna is more tenuous and feels more disconnected from the rest of the book. Finally, the volume comes to a close with two more general chapters depicting the end of the monarchy and the birth of the Austrian Republic. The political transformations are also embodied in the fabric of the city: the chaos of these few weeks is illustrated through the confusion at railway stations and the removal of imperial insignias.

The book, which has neither an introduction nor a conclusion, functions more as a series of well-chosen vignettes (without much transition from one to the next) than as a scholarly argument. Richly illustrated, it also includes many enjoyable newspaper excerpts, cited at length, which give a nice feel for contemporary humour and language. Some of them are particularly delightful, such as the feuilleton on the all-encompassing Ersatz products by Ludwig Hirschfeld (pp.127–130). The glossary of period and Viennese terms at the end of the book is in this respect a very useful addition to help the reader appreciate the original sources. The result is an impressionistic picture of Vienna in 1918, filtered through a slightly nostalgic lens and covering a wide range of topics related to the urban experience. It highlights the profound repercussions of the war for all of Vienna’s inhabitants regardless of class, as the events and aftermath of the war left hardly any corner of urban activity untouched. However, this work does not present many new elements on the collapse of Austria–Hungary for specialists in the field. The main political and military developments of the period are probably better covered elsewhere, as are the social and economic consequences of the war for Vienna’s population. Also, the specificities of the year 1918 as opposed to 1917 or 1919 (in terms of hunger levels, for example) do not appear as clearly as they should, given the focus on that particular year. Overall, Wien 1918 gives insights into the mood on Viennese streets one century ago with an eye for improbable and revealing details. It provides more atmosphere than analysis, but it nicely complements other works on the topic.

Claire Morelon
University of Padua

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