Gábor Egry

Navigating the Straits. Changing Borders, Changing Rules and Practices of Ethnicity and Loyalty in Romania after 1918

This study investigates the emergence of Greater Romania from below, paying attention to certain aspects of ethnicity and nationalizing. The establishment of the new state, with its rules and practices, was a slow process that left considerable room for local groups and individuals to negotiate their positions vis-à-vis the nationalizing efforts. The analysis of how citizenship options were used to individual advantage, the conflicts that arose regarding the nationalizing of border zones and their inhabitants, and the local differences of symbolic conquests reveal the importance of local contexts and their social elements. From the perspective of these events the realities of Greater Romania are best described as an overarching legal fiction that disguised a series of local settlements and compromises regarding the nationalizing attempts. Encounters usually interpreted as expressions of national indifference were also driven by ethnicity, only the meaning and content of ethnicity remained permanently contested. One can detect two types of “nationally indifferent” behavior. One was prevalent primarily among the middle class, a claim for the right to define one’s ethnicity, and another was characteristic of the lower urban social strata and the peasantry, where it could have meant real indifference not only to the norms of proper behavior, but also to the categories used by the state, but not negligence of differences.

Keywords: ethnicity, nationalizing, national indifference, Romania, Transylvania

The railway mechanic Alexandru (Sándor) Czitrom arrived in Romania from Hungary in a period in which the traffic was supposed to be heavier in the opposite direction. Czitrom crossed the line between the territories under Hungarian and Romanian control in November 1919 and headed to Bucharest. His police file did not preserve the details regarding how he ended up in the city of Pascani in Moldova working in the important railway facilities. The state security police became suspicious of his presence only in 1924, but the final decision on his expulsion as a suspected spy had not yet been made even in 1930. However, the police recorded some interesting data on Czitrom, an ethnic Jew according to the official categorization, a Hungarian citizen who still spoke bad Romanian and—as the police file registered—a man who had crossed the border both at Oradea (Nagyvárad in Hungarian) and Predeal—a mountain resort south of Braşov (Brassó, Kronstadt in German).1

Some of these details—unusual as they are in the light of the dominant perception of the period—raise intriguing questions concerning individual strategies in the changing world of post-World War I Central and Eastern Europe. Czitrom—who spoke Hungarian but no Hebrew or Yiddish—traveled to a country where he became part of one of the minorities, yet he made no effort to acquire citizenship, worked at a strategically important company in a strategically exposed facility for at least a decade (there is no information on his fate after 1930) despite suspicions regarding his loyalty, and—and this reveals something interesting about the perspectives of the Romanian nation state—entered the country twice during one journey, at border crossings that did not exist at that time.2 According to the general perception of Greater Romania, it was a nationalizing state that encountered and overcame regionalist and minority resistance to its efforts.3 Czitrom’s journey, however, points to the existence of a certain space for individuals who were not complying with the rules of nationalizing and still were able to negotiate their position. Furthermore, it reveals the difficulties faced by the state (more precisely of its agents) in its efforts to act in accordance with its self-perception, while even its seemingly fixed and stable borders were becoming fluid and insecure.

The change of borders between states and sovereignty over vast territories in the wake of World War I, accompanied by the resulting mass migration, generated a rather fluid situation in territories that previously had belonged to Hungary. It did not simply mean a change of state authorities and legal frameworks, bringing new rules, norms and expectations. In addition to the adaptation efforts that were necessary as a result of the changes, the gap between old and new, between legal norms and executive capacity, between imaginary societies and the realities on the spot opened up new possibilities to exploit—after a long war that already has taught people how to gain individual advantages in the face of an ever-growing state apparatus.

The focus of this study will be the adaptation process and this gap, and how the historical actors made use of it in Greater Romania. Individual and local cases showing how certain actors exploited the opening space and how certain social aspects—primarily ethnicity and national categorization—found expression. The overall framework of these cases remains a triadic relationship between nationalizing states and minorities,4 with the slight modification that here the third pole of the relationship is not just one minority, but a periphery of both centers with many competing elites, often acting against their national centers.5 But the main question does not concern the centers and state actors, but rather individuals and local communities who were trying (often forced to try) to negotiate their position after the collapse of one state and the slow emergence of another, with different rules, norms and expectations. It is also my aim to point out what is visible in terms of social agency, values and social structures beyond mere ethnic or national attempts to create a national state at every level.

Floating Borders

The transposition of the Romanian–Hungarian border and the change of sovereignty over more than 100,000 square kilometers of territory did not simply mean a new division of the geographic space and the reconfiguration of contacts between people, cultures and economies or simply new laws and rules of ethnicity and loyalty.6 One of the most important legal aspects of the change for individuals was citizenship, an institution that conferred rights and entitlements in one country but restricted movement and rights in the other. Without the possibility of dual citizenship, the issue created an exclusive bond, assigning each person to a single country, but the Trianon Treaty (1920) provided for a longer period during which individuals could make a choice and opt to move to the other country. In this case—theoretically—they were allowed to take with them their belongings and sell their real estate. It was not a complete ethnicization of citizenship, but as a substitute for the plebiscite demanded by the Hungarian actors its primary aim was to enable people to leave behind minority status and join their nation states. The idea was that more and not fewer national states would emerge as a result of this, and thus it bound citizenship more strongly to ethnicity.7

The most discussed aspect of the citizenship issue in the scholarship is the migration of Hungarians from the ceded territories to the rump country.8 This is usually seen as forced or semi-voluntary movement at best, the result of the rapid and mass-scale loss of jobs among those employed in the state administration and public services. Despite the high standards of these publications, this uni-dimensional perspective bears strong affinities with the interwar propaganda and completely neglects any movement to Romania—apart from the case of leftist political émigrés—, or the possibility of moving between the two countries. Even if we lack a systematic survey of the latter phenomena, some individual cases point to the existence of a space offered by the system of citizenship options and the scarce resources of the state to control the population effectively. Some of these are very similar to the Greek–Bulgarian cases discussed by Theodora Dragostinova,9 which show how people tried to negotiate their citizenship choices according to what seemed advantageous and how they used arguments based on their perceptions of what decision-makers expected with regards to their ethnicity.

One such case was “discovered” by the police in 1923 in a village in Sălăj (in Hungarian Szilágy) county, relatively close to the border. The 25-year-old Károly Rácz was interrogated by the police because it turned out that he had opted for Hungary in 1921, when he had been conscripted in the Romanian army, but never actually attempted to move there. Rácz explained his behavior with reference to the influence of Samu Bartha, the Calvinist schoolteacher in the village, who also tried to avoid conscription by renouncing his Romanian citizenship. According to Rácz, Bartha prompted others to follow his example.10 Bartha basically verified part of the story, though he denied having instigated others. But the details reveal an elaborate way of avoiding conscription without losing the potential benefits of being in Romania and not jobless in Hungary. He admitted to renouncing citizenship as early as 1920 in order to avoid being called up for military service. He was given one year to leave the country, but he appeared again in front of the enlistment committee the following May. There he revoked the option and was granted a reprieve until he graduated as schoolteacher. According to his version, the officer in charge of the committee had promised to send the documents by post, but they never arrived. Nevertheless, he was convinced he was a Romanian citizen.11 Even if Bartha was caught red handed in this awkward situation, the decision of the authorities was very protracted; he was only expulsed in September 1924,12 returning later every year as a visitor.

While Bartha obviously tried to gain something from the shift of borders and his decision to remain in one place, the case of Ákos Hirsch, a restaurateur in Aiud (Nagyenyed in Hungarian), exemplifies the potential to move physically between Hungary and Romania. Hirsch was charged with having insulted and beaten an official, an agent of the local State Security Police (Siguranţa) under very dubious circumstances.13 When the investigation started the police realized that Hirsch had neither Romanian citizenship nor a proper residence permit—despite running a restaurant for two years. The investigation discovered that Hirsch had served in the Honvéd regiment in Aiud and had returned from the war in November 1918. A year later he moved to Budapest, as he had not found a job. In Budapest he joined his brother, a bank director, who employed him as a traveling agent. However, he missed the deadline to apply for Hungarian citizenship and even though he lived in Budapest undisturbed until 1926, that year he was asked by the police to “clarify” his legal status. (He suspected a denunciation.) The police instructed him to collect the necessary documentation to apply for citizenship—most importantly a certificate from Aiud, proving his birth and residence there. To travel to Romania he needed a passport, but the Hungarian authorities refused to issue one, as he was not able to prove his Hungarian citizenship. The Romanian consulate also refused to issue him passport on the grounds that he lacked documentation proving his Romanian citizenship.14

Nevertheless, the police—with the help of a personal acquaintance from Aiud—gave him permission to cross the border—valid for 5 days in order to gain the documents. Hirsch entered Romania on June 14, 1926, but did not seem to bother himself too much with the time limits set by the police. It took him six days to reach Aiud. He claimed that it was his friends who had advised him to remain there, where according to them he would have less difficulty finding a job than in Budapest. Here his lack of identification documents was seen as an advantage. At least it would make it harder for the Romanian army to find Hirsch, whom they sought as deserter, at least this was the reasoning. After a police inspection in September, he reported himself at the local branch of the police and was given a certificate and residency permit. The Siguranţa also asked him for clarification, and after a detailed explanation of his situation the local chief ensured him that he could remain in Aiud until he received a different order. A year later he even successfully acquired a soldier’s book and reservist status. The situation only changed after his conflict with the police agent, which led to his expulsion in 1929.15

Although he was expelled from the country, Hirsch’s case—which is only one of many16—points to the potential to use the gaps in bureaucratic control and probably the rivalry between different state organs. He was already under the radar in Budapest—probably avoiding the many duties of a citizen. He admitted to capitalizing deliberately on his lack of documentation in Romania to avoid military service, and it is highly probable that he managed to bribe the Siguranţa chief. This set up enabled him to play a relatively prominent role in the local community, taking over the management of a popular restaurant from his earlier employer, hardly the act of someone hiding from the authorities. Had he not made the mistake of not bribing the insulted police agent, he probably would have been able to remain in Aiud for many more years. However, as soon as he was exposed, his dubious status worked against him. He was Jewish, a non-citizen, and had lived for a long time in Hungary—all factors that proved his non-Romanian nature and made him suspicious. But the most important conclusion to be drawn from these cases concerns not the potential of repressive action from the side of the state, but the surprisingly large room for individuals to exploit the citizenship regimes, the border, and not least of all the apparent incapacity of the state to exert the control it claimed to have over its inhabitants, citizens and territory. It is hard to fail to notice that the lack of coordination among different authorities also played a significant role in the success of individual ventures.

Dangerous Border Zones

In light of such cases, even the spy or irredentist hysteria of the interwar period seems a bit more understandable. All the more so, because in many senses it was just a perpetuation of the hysteric actions of the state during World War I. In particular following the Romanian invasion of Transylvania, the Hungarian authorities tended to treat many Romanian as suspicious, and even if judiciary organs often successfully restored the position of the wrongly accused, the population was definitely instructed to see members of other ethnic groups as enemies, without differentiation.17 Sometimes individuals became victims of this hysteria well after the war, like Sándor Kulcsár from the Szeklerland [Székely Land], who was collecting donations in January and February 1925 in the region around Turda (Torda in Hungarian) and Aiud for a new Calvinist church in his home village. Here he encountered Inocan Clemente, an old Romanian peasant, who—sensing danger in the presence of a foreigner—pretended to be a Hungarian. After their long discussion on Kulcsár and his mission, when Kulcsár also spoke of his confused views on international politics, Clemente concocted a weird story of a large scale conspiracy, rooted in Kulcsár’s village. Even if the gendarmes in the Szeklerland warned against this pure nonsense, Kulcsár was forced to “admit” to being part of an irredentist network.18 Not only was geographic and ethnic “foreignness” turned into proof of a crime, but Clemente used his knowledge of Hungarian to lure Kulcsár into a trap, highlighting how national belonging became an issue of secrecy, confidence and security for many “ordinary people” with the events of the war and its aftermath.

However, foreigners and strangers were not necessarily specific persons, they could have been everywhere, in particular in the border zones. These areas were usually seen as exposed to the danger of denationalization or even already having suffered the process of denationalization, which from Bucharest’s perspective meant a de-Romanianization. Such assumptions were usually based on a series of individual encounters, revealing differences between Old Kingdom and Transylvanian Romanians, Hungarians and Romanians.19 One of the most notable cases was that of Vasile Gioara, who, having begun but not completing his secondary school studies, arrived in the northwestern corner of Greater Romania on December 1, 1922. After finding employment at the local court he supplemented his earnings by teaching Romanian to minority officials—quite successfully according to his self-evaluation. Half a year later he was accused of stealing underwear from a local merchant. During the investigation he was abused and insulted, and also beaten up by the accuser and the Romanian gendarmes. Even if Sieni (Szinérváralja in Hungarian) was a marketplace with a Romanian majority and a local center of Romanian cultural and political activity during the dual monarchy of Austria–Hungary, he saw around him Hungarians and Jews and Romanians whose “souls” had been completely Magyarized, i.e. they had pro-Hungarian sentiments or were at most a “mixture” of ethnicities. In a complaint and request submitted to Queen Mary, in order to emphasize how foreign these regions were in Romania he contended that there were only three Old Kingdom Romanians in Sieni, and according to him the population assumed that Old Kingdom rule would soon disappear.20

Lack of proper knowledge and the failure of locals to meet expectations of travelers concerning how proper Hungarians or Romanians should behave were not specific to Romanians. Hungarian travelers were sometimes misled too. Mihály Török, an inhabitant of Budapest and an engineer by profession, was so enraged by his fellow traveler between Oradea and Cluj (Kolozsvár) that he submitted a complaint at the border police after returning from Cluj in 1939. He described a conversation with a certain Antal Kornél, a decent person who talked to him all the way. However decent the companion was, Török concluded that he must have been a Romanophile Hungarian, since during their journey he narrated the Romanian version of Transylvanian history. The fact that such a Hungarian can exist outraged the official in the Prime Minister’s office who read the report, but before having Antal Kornél expelled he requested information on his person. It turned out that he was in fact not Antal Kornél, but Cornel Anton, a Romanian lawyer from Lugoj (Lugos in Hungarian), an old member of the Romanian National Party.21 He spoke perfect Hungarian (as demonstrated by the fact that Török had not noticed any accent) because he was socialized before World War I and kept close contacts with the local Hungarian middle class. Furthermore, indirectly reinforcing the claim of many Romanians that these areas were denationalized, his wife—a “dame of fashion”22—loved to wear clothes bought from Budapest tailors. This was the reason for his frequent trips to the Hungarian capital.

These individual cases exemplify how fixed expectations of proper ethnic behavior encountered realities on the ground. But the result was not a reassessment of what it meant to be Romanian or Hungarian (for example accepting proper national history, speaking Romanian, favoring co-ethnics over others etc.), but rather an even stronger desire to transform people into proper nationals. It was similar in the case of many state organs, and these attitudes often mutually reflected each other. At least people very soon learned what their superiors expected from them, and even when they acted differently, they usually tried to justify their behavior with explanations garbed in the proper national language.23 On the other hand, the closeness of the border and the distance from Bucharest provided for a certain freedom from the power of the center, at least in the early years of Greater Romania. This was expressed by defiant gestures, such as that of Matei Gheorghe, a judge in Oradea. He was presiding over a case in which the court wanted to auction the house of the accused in order to pay the costs of defense. In the face of protest from the accused, the judge told him not to nurture any hope of avoiding his fate, he—the judge—had earlier dealt with ministers from Budapest, who were all counts, not nobodies like General Avarescu (the prime minister), and nonetheless he had not given ground. Maybe—the judge advised—it would be better for him to seek refuge in Hungary.

But the dangerous nature of border zones made state organs intervene often enough to encounter again and again the resistance generated by their lack of knowledge of local contexts. The most telling example of this kind of conflict is probably the attempt of the army general staff to ban every single firefighter organization in Transylvania. The soldiers argued that these organizations were popular in Transylvanian towns and villages, but even though they were recruited from among the locals they offered charitable services only in limited cases. Furthermore, during the period of Hungarian rule they had served as a means of Hungarian propaganda, so Romanians had been excluded from these associations in the Romanian villages. They continued to function in 1919–1921, with the exception of Satu Mare (Szatmárnémeti), where well known Hungarian irredentists reestablished the association only in September 1921. They spread the network of associations into pure Hungarian villages, especially along the border. For the army staff this often false information seemed to prove irrefutably that these organizations were the backbone of a dangerous irredentist organization that posed a threat to the security of Romania, all the more so because in the villages they were useless without the necessary facilities.24

The order caused a scandal, practically all of the prefects in Transylvania protested. It was revoked, but the general staff received a long letter from the mayor of Caransebeş (Karánsebes in Hungarian), a German–Romanian city. The anger of the official is palpable in every word of the text, in which he contests everything presumed by the general staff. He was infuriated by the categorization of the firefighters as irredentists, especially as Caransebeş had been free of Hungarians when they had established the association in the mid-nineteenth century, and during its fifty years of its existence it had been dominated by Germans and Romanians. But he also protested the allegation of uselessness and portrayed the association as the embodiment of utmost altruism and humanist heroism.25 “Every good son of the country should have a place among the voluntary firefighters, irrespective of his language”—concluded the letter. Given this courageous defense, it is not surprising that the Caransebeş Voluntary Firefighter Association still existed a decade later and its members still used Hungarian as their internal language, both in formal and informal situations.26

Despite occasional setbacks, like the firefighter problem, the border zone remained an area of constant danger to the security of the state in the official imaginary. It was transformed in this sense not only by the threat from abroad, but also by perceptions of its inhabitants, who in general were seen as not Romanians or “bad” Romanians. On the other hand, somewhat surprisingly, Hungarian officials tended to invoke a similar view of the respective area, with the difference that for them it was the nationalizing activity of Romania that represented danger. It threatened the national consciousness of Hungarians, and as a result it threatened to separate Hungarians from Hungary. However, the greater the danger posed by these zones, the less well they were known. Increasingly they came to be seen by both sides as alien areas that needed to be transformed into safe and secure sites of national existence—places to reconquer. In this struggle, language and loyalty became crucial for everyone, setting expectations that too often remained unfulfilled. This kind of simultaneous—spatial and social—liminality and the permanent tension between the self-confident nationalizing attempts on the one hand and the very different local realities on the other contributed to the emergence of a space that enabled individuals and locals to find a different modus vivendi, often more relaxed than the legal fictions of Greater Romania.

Symbolic Conquests and Uneasy Peaces: The Renaming of Streets

In order to transform the border zone, its symbolic conquest seemed part of the solution. Especially as the symbolic reconfiguration of the whole province had already started in 1919. The changes of memorials and statues, the building of “national” edifices, the new language regimes in the cities—these were all aimed at demonstrating Romanian presence and conferring a sense of Romanian homeland to the otherwise alien areas. The desired result was a new urban and rural space that would fulfill expectations in this regard, losing its foreign character. Many small details were taken care of, many devices used to achieve this goal, shop signs in Hungarian or German were replaced with Romanians or bilingual ones, street names were changed, statues and memorials were replaced, administrative buildings were furnished with warnings: We only speak Romanian! But again, local realities often visibly contradicted nationalizing projects. Shop signs, inscriptions, and advertisements were grammatically incorrect even after two decades, prompting repeated complaints from the local authorities.27 Statues were hard to finance based only on private donations, and often polite state pressure was ineffective.28 The use of Romanian street names was sometimes deemed impractical, for example when public health issues were at stake and the authorities did not want to risk the outbreak of an epidemic.29

The conflict between full fledged nationalizing projects and individual efforts or local realities was as frequent in this respect as in the cases above. The importance of local contexts is best shown by a comparison of street renaming practices across Transylvania. In some cities it started in 1919, and the regional inspectorate of the Ministry of Interior urged localities in May 1920 to finish renaming. They also gave instructions regarding the new street names. Historical names, such as the names of members of the royal family or significant personalities of Romania from past and present, were seen as the best choice. For practical reasons they also ordered the indication of the old street names in minority languages.30 Despite the central instructions, the outcome of the process of renaming varied in every locality, reflecting not only the different nationalist inclinations of the new Romanian leaders, but also their own relationship with the local space and society.

The two extremes were Cluj and Oradea.31 In the former a commission consisting of 12 people proposed eighteen street names for immediate change. After long planning, every street was renamed in March 1920.32 The prefect signed the decree on March 15, 1920, the Hungarian national day, stressing the symbolic importance of the act. The result was peculiar, as neither Hungarian personalities nor original street names were preserved, but the new system of street names was an almost exact mirror image of the Hungarian nomenclature. Not only did the main arteries retain the names of the Romanian counterparts of the Hungarian dignitaries after whom the streets had been originally named (for instance the street leading from the railway station, Francis Joseph, was renamed King Ferdinand), but in every other case the committee tried to find the corresponding Romanian personality or institution. Honvéd Street (the Hungarian word for “home defense,” or the military) was renamed strada Dorobanţilor, after a Romanian infantry unit. Gróf Kun (Count Kun) street, named after the founder of a famous secondary school in Oraştie (Szászváros), was renamed Gojdu, after Emanoil Gojdu, a nineteenth-century lawyer from Pest-Buda, who established a foundation supporting Romanian students in the Hungarian capital. Hunyadi Street, named after the fifteenth-century military leader and a hero in the wars with the Ottoman Empire, was renamed Stefan cel Mare, the Prince of Moldova, who also fought against the Turks in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The symbolic text of the city remained very similar, but was completely re-nationalized. It preserved the local specificities, the geographic distribution of different types of names in a city where Romanians were not numerous enough to have had an impact on such decisions, but simply “flipping” it, from Hungarian to Romanian.

Simultaneously, the new leaders of Oradea embarked on a street renaming project, but with a more limited scope.33 Their list consisted of only fifty streets, and the names were clearly selected with less sophistication and consideration. The city council even retained some Hungarian names, for example Ferenc Deák or Kálmán Rimanóczy, and proposed other ones that were very much at odds with the “nationalization of street names”, as the decision claimed. As street names, Saint Ladislaus or Calvin would not convey “Romanianness.” Nevertheless, the changes were enough to erect a new symbolic space, fundamentally different from the pre-World War I space, highlighting the city’s alleged Romanianness, but leaving a hodgepodge of symbolic geography, with large areas still bearing Hungarian street names.

But these extremes were far from being the mainstream solution, especially as both Cluj and Oradea were basically Hungarian cities, with predominantly Hungarian and assimilated Jewish populations. Other cases reveal much more clearly how the local Romanian elites—if there was one—navigated between nationalizing efforts and local traditions. In Făgăraş (Fogaras in Hungarian), a small county seat with a Romanian majority, surrounded by Romanian and German villages, and featuring a seventeenth-century fortress, the new city council finished the renaming spontaneously as soon as October 1919. Thus they could refute the abovementioned request of the Ministry concerning the indication of the old street names in the language of the minorities. Their argumentation frankly expressed the nationalizing aim: there were too many chauvinist Hungarian names among them, contrary to the spirit of the new Romanian state.34 However, the new system of street names was still not entirely Romanian and—and this was probably even more important—it addressed some symbolic deficiencies of the Hungarians. The strategy of the council was to merge the local, traditional Romanian street names with more symbolic new ones. Often they re-baptized the streets, simply making the local name official (like Tobacconists Street or strada Galatului). In other cases they just translated and preserved the nationally neutral one (Mill Street, strada Inului, Livezii – Meadow Street). There were the usual additions of Romanian national figures, although here the selection was made from Transylvanian and cultural figures, neglecting the politicians and the personalities of the Old Kingdom. And finally, two street names referred to the German and Hungarian minorities, strada Luterana (Lutheran Street) and strada Săcuilor (Szekler’s [Székely] Street). The latter was the object of the symbolic elevation of the Hungarians. A street with this name had existed before the war, but its local Romanian name was—probably not without reason—Ţigania de Jos, Lower Gypsy quarter. Now the council renamed this street Cemetery Street and transferred the name Szekler’s [Székely] street to another street in a more decent part of the city.35

A bit surprisingly, the Romanian elite from Lugoj, which had strong civic traditions and enjoyed a relatively high, middle-class social status (exemplified by Cornel Anton), executed the central order almost to the letter, adding only a small number of local Romanian personalities to the new nomenclature of streets,36 unlike their counterparts from Caransebeş, where the street names reflected the strong local consciousness already shown by the mayor’s letter concerning the voluntary firefighters. Here the new names consisted of only a handful of personalities, mainly local ones, and the council usually translated the original, mostly neutral names into Romanian. It was all the more simple, as quite a few Romanians had figured among the earlier street names too, due to the strong Romanian presence in the city before the war.37 Probably the most conscious effort to employ street names in the attempt to transform the border zone from a foreign area into a “Romanian” zone was made in Sânnicolau Mare (Nagyszentmiklós in Hungarian, Groß Sankt Nikolaus in German), a city with a 40 percent Romanian, 20 percent Hungarian, 30 percent German and 10 percent Serbian speaking population. Here the local Romanian schoolteacher, who drafted the proposal, suggested exclusively Romanian historic figures. He argued that street names are means of educating the people, and the city should be made Romanian. He thought that everyday encounters with street names would make the inhabitants learn Romanian history.38

Another different pattern emerged in localities without significant Romanian populations, where the local administration was not taken over by Romanians. All around the Banat in German villages the main thrust of street renaming was to replace the Magyarizing street names, which in general dated from the last two decades of dualism, with the ones they had born precedingly, and these proposals were usually approved by the county administration.39

In general the first factor influencing the outcome and nature of the renaming process was the presence and size of a Romanian middle class that would be able to take over the administration of the cities easily. Their stance regarding the expectations of Bucharest and the Ruling Council (Consiliul Dirgent) and regarding the minorities partly depended on the pre-history of the change of sovereignty. In Făgărăş, where Hungarian–Romanian political competition had even led to violence in the late dualist period, the relatively strong Romanians implemented a more exclusivist symbolic map than their counterparts in Caransebeş, where the Hungarian challenge was weaker earlier. Meanwhile in Lugoj, a city similar to Făgărăş the new nomenclature was more nationalistic and laid more emphasis on Old Kingdom personalities. It was probably a result of the stronger Hungarian presence than in Caransebeş and the protracted change of sovereignty, both of which made external help indispensable.40 In the case of Cluj and Oradea, neither of which had had any socially or symbolically significant Romanian presence before 1918, the symbolic importance of Cluj and the closeness of the border to Oradea could have been decisive in determining the outcome of the street renaming.

Nevertheless, the transformation of city nomenclatures brought about neither the inevitable reconfiguration of mental maps nor the practical use of the new street names. Even if publicly the new names were used, often only due to the pressure of the administration, individuals could choose either set of names, and many users, irrespective of their nationality, often shifted between new and old names in everyday usage.41 Despite the efforts of the authorities, the postal service rarely refused to deliver letters and parcels with non-Romanian addresses, including street names. This practice lasted well into World War II, when the Făgăraş State Security Service reported the arrival of “irredentist” postal materials that were labeled with pre-World War I addresses.42

It is worth noting, without going into detail, that local factors also affected the fate of statues and memorials. In cities that were seen as crucial for the nationalizing project Hungarian signs were soon removed and replaced with Romanian ones. In other places—here Caransebeş, where the local citizenry defended the statue of Francis Joseph from being removed,43 again is a good example—the local civic culture deflected these efforts. Once again there were localities in which either the weight of Romanians or the connections binding different groups of the local society led to a more balanced topography of memorials, like in Oradea.44

As in the case of the efforts to pacify the allegedly dangerous border zone, expectations regarding symbolic practices and rituals on the one hand and local realities on the other often contradicted each other. The demand and obligation to flag houses at festive occasions with pennants kept in a proper state was inherited from pre-World War I Hungary and kept intact by the Romanian administration. (Even the Hungarian legal provision remained in force.)45 Nevertheless, to execute such an order was always problematic. Not only did the inhabitants rarely care for the flags, there were again informal local arrangements that reduced the burden on the population. In this regard, Hungarians or Germans were relieved of this burdensome duty, but so were Romanians, even if the authorities devoted more attention to the deviant practices of minorities. In the city of Abrud (Abrudbánya in Hungarian), at the heart of the symbolic Romanian area of Ţară Moţilor, the display of flags was limited to the main arteries. As Vlad Florian, a gendarme (!), explained in 1941 when he was indicted for having failed to display a flag on his house on Constitution Day, he did not even have a pennant, as local custom did not expect this from inhabitants of secondary streets.46

In other cases the unfamiliarity of Old Kingdom Romanians with Transylvania caused misunderstandings. Hungarian and German priests tended to refuse to officiate masses on the occasion of Romanian national holidays, including Kings Day.47 Nevertheless, when the prefect of Timişoara (Temesvár) proposed the indictment of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Bishop, Gyula Glattfelder, on charges of slander against the nation, the Ministry of Justice refused. The county chief objected, contending that Glattfelder had refused to celebrate a mass on the name day of the king, but he always did hold mass to honor Hungary’s first king, Saint Stephen. The experts in the ministry concluded that the “prefect has no idea of the principles of the Catholic religion” and this practice is “neither an insult nor the expression of malevolence.”48

In the end, full-fledged Romanianization of the dangerous border zone was exchanged for a series of local compromises, sometimes uneasy balances between competing claims. Shop signs written in incorrect Romanian and accompanied by flawless Hungarian and German inscriptions, Hungarian and German memorials and statues scattered over the cities, or the extremely varied use of different street names were all signs of the partial failure of nationalizing efforts, at least temporarily. However, what emerged was not a stable and lasting solution, but rather an uneasy peace that was too influenced by local and regional factors and definitely contradicted the legal fiction of the state. It rested on informal arrangements, on how certain local or regional actors tried to find a space between the nationalizing claims of the central state and the possibilities on the ground, and it was too easily swept away by any sudden turn of fortunes.

Loyal Servants

In this confusing world of strangers and suspicions loyalty became crucial for the success of nationalizing projects. But as we have seen not many ideal typical Romanians (or Hungarians) were to be found, while public services nonetheless had to be provided. As the new administration faced a serious lack of human resources, it was often forced to retain even people who refused to take the oath or pledge of obedience demanded in 1919. This was particularly true in public services where professional knowledge and experience was necessary for smooth operation. This situation inevitably raised some questions, such as how to ensure one’s loyalty or how to prove suspicions regarding some officials.

It was impossible to make ethnic belonging a decisive criterion, at least at the time. Thus language use emerged as the crucial factor, much as it had in dualist Hungary. This was in line with the symbolic efforts and the emerging language regime too, making it an obvious choice. Nevertheless, given the high number of public servants without sufficient knowledge of Romanian and the lack of resources to provide them with opportunities to learn the official language,49 in the first few years an effort to learn the basics of Romanian turned out to be enough. After the mid-1920s, the situation was informally settled. Minority officials could remain at their posts with a basic knowledge of Romanian.

Nevertheless, this issue was easy to raise and soon became a favorite method of contesting someone’s loyalty. The case of the Post Office in Reşiţa (Resicabánya in Hungarian) is a telling example in this regard. Here the district administration was taken over by Cornel Grofşorean, a Romanian notability from Severin County (Krassó-Szörény in Hungarian). His office communicated with the seat of the county, Caransebeş, by post and over the telephone, the latter of which was also managed by the post office. The postmaster was Antal Heinrich, and the officials who were mentioned in the case were Anna Velcselán (or Velcelan) and Emilia Papp (or Pop). After a series of conflicts, Grofşorean submitted a complaint against Heinrich and the officials in early 1920. He described an occasion on which his call to the county seat was supposedly sabotaged by Velcselán, who had not been available for 20-30 minutes. According to Grofşorean, Heinrich showed opposition from the first day of Romanian administration. He refused to install Romanian inscriptions, put a Romanian sign over the entrance, display the Romanian flag, or learn Romanian. He infused his subordinates with this spirit, who also refused to sign the pledge of obedience, and Velcselán, whose name was Romanian, was filled with pro-Hungarian sentiment,50 just like Emilia Papp, who traveled to Budapest after refusing the oath.

It is hardly surprising that the testimonies of Heinrich and Velcselán painted a different picture of the case, emphasizing the brutish and uncivilized behavior of Grofşorean and his companions, who even called Velcselán a “bitch.”51 Heinrich’s superior, V. Cornea, the regional postal director, refused to accept Grofşorean’s accusations and denied his claim to replace Heinrich with a Romanian. His main argument was the lack of sufficient Romanian personnel, since the post demanded educated professionals. Nevertheless, the whole encounter offers insight into the different interpretations of (dis)loyalty when someone’s ethnicity was not considered “sufficient.” Grofşorean’s claims and accusations offer a list of criteria, of which the use of Romanian was only one, followed by the refusal of the pledge, the use of Hungarian letterhead and the Hungarian uniform, the lack of Romanian flags on the edifice of the post, and not least of all the lack of enthusiasm in the post. Furthermore, he perceived Velcselán and probably also Papp as renegade Romanians.

These claims were countered with a multiplicity of arguments. Firstly, Heinrich stressed his professional loyalty to the postal service and emphasized that every time Grofşorean requested something he had not refused to do it, but rather had dutifully consulted his superiors in order to avoid a conflict of loyalties before fulfilling the demands. Secondly, they highlighted how Grofşorean maintained an uncivilized regime, how he or his colleagues used swearwords and shouted at female employees. Probably it was also quite pointed when Velcselán mentioned that she responded in Hungarian because Grofşorean’s office had requested the connection with Caransebeş in this language, turning one of his accusations against him. Thirdly, Cornea highlighted that, contrary to Grofşorean’s assumption, Emilia Papp was the daughter of an Orthodox priest, thus completely reliable and beyond all doubt concerning her loyalty.

But all of these arguments still accepted Grofşorean’s implicit assumption that ethnicity has something to do with loyalty. However, Heinrich’s closing argument shed light on a different concept, a civic one, deriving from the traditional Landespatriotismus of Banat Swabians. Closing his report, he refuted Grofşorean’s charge that he would have been an “angry Hungarian chauvinist” before the war, especially as he was descended from German parents and he had never abandoned his German roots, even when he had been called upon to Magyarize his family name. But—he continued—this self-consciousness made it comprehensible that he did not become an “angry Romanian chauvinist” either. “I want to be a loyal citizen of my new country, I want to work in my homeland, but I do not want to make politics,” he wrote, pointing to honest work as a public servant, the introduction of Romanian language instruction at the post office and the fulfillment of his responsibilities as a reservist lieutenant as proof of his loyalty.

Nevertheless, ethnicity remained the key to loyalty, and language use, as its most easily detectable aspect, became the central criterion of its assessment. Hence the frequent reference in reports to the practice of speaking Hungarian as a sign of disloyalty, especially among those whom the observers saw as Romanians.52 But if being Romanian equaled being loyal, then nationality could serve as the foundation for many types of different claims—opening up a specific model of justification. In this argumentation, Romanianness meant sharing the sufferings of the nation and its glory, irrespective of the real life stories of individuals.

An excellent example is given by the complaint of the members of the Timişoara police from 1922.53 In this document the rank and file and non-commissioned officers of the police listed their material hardships and grievances, the low salary, the lack of suitable winter clothing, and poor housing. They asked the Minister of Interior to intervene. In order to make their demand more justified, they detailed how they were suffering under Hungarian rule and how they expected the new, free Romania to provide them with a better standard of living. However, they painstakingly added the details of their service records to the petition, thereby revealing that most of them had been employed at the city police under Hungarian rule—not really proof of having been oppressed.

This kind of argumentative strategy did not even require Romanian ethnicity from the petitioners. Under certain circumstances communities organized around other characteristics of identity could also employ it. For example, people living on the outskirts of the city Turda, who were often harassed by armed groups in 1918–1919, requested a new gendarme post in order to ensure their protection. In their petition they invoked the role their forbears had played in the glorious days of Horea, Cloşca and Avram Iancu—typical historical references for Transylvanian Romanians.54 However, among the petitioners one finds a significant number of Hungarian names, and as the region was mixed in the ethnic sense it is reasonable to think that not all of the petitioners were Romanian, much as in the case of an initiative to erect a statue for Avram Iancu in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely in Hungarian), a predominantly Hungarian speaking city.55

Taking ethnicity and using as an argument was primarily a practical issue, but it also betrays a more relaxed attitude towards nationality, as was the case among the middle class.56 Still, it is worth noting that while in most cases national indifference or amphibiousness is detected in the form of rejection of strong ethnic statements or overly rigid expectations,57 subscribing to an exclusivist national argumentation could also suit and simultaneously disguise such attitudes as well. Both non-compliance and compliance with expectations could serve the purpose of negotiating the exact form and content of nationalizing projects, opening up an unexpectedly large room for individuals in their quest for a place between nationalizing states.

Conclusions

In this study I attempted to discover how individuals and local societies negotiated their places vis-à-vis nationalizing projects in interwar Transylvania, especially in the first few years of Romanian administration. The new border brought a new citizenship regime, a fear of instability, and insecurity among the part of the state that was represented by the new agents of state power, who were often unfamiliar with local contexts. The former enabled individuals to capitalize on the changes, escape state control and gain personal advantages. The latter often materialized in ill-devised attempts to restructure society. The common characteristic of both aspects was a failure to meet or conform to expectations that were based on a normative view of ethnicity: how members of certain ethnic groups “should” behave.

Something similar accompanied the attempts of symbolic conquest, and the half-success of these projects certainly reinforced the permanent state of war felt in the centers. Under these circumstances loyalty gained significance beyond its usual importance and was fused with ethnicity in the eyes of many, making it a useful tool of argumentation used to obtain personal advantages. However, it was possible to cross supposed ethnic boundaries and use this ethnic argumentation on behalf of members of different nationalities too.

In the light of this situation, the realities of Greater Romania are best described as an overarching legal fiction that disguised a series of local settlements and compromises regarding the nationalizing attempts. The local situation often deviated from what the legal framework would have implied and what its initiators would have imagined—contributing to the failure to meet their expectations.

What does this story tell us about ethnicity? Given the importance of nationalizing in Greater Romania, any deviation is easy to interpret as a sign of national indifference or amphibiousness. Paradoxically, the state the national nature of which is often challenged by later analytical approaches acted with similar premises, trying to “correct” faulty national behavior according to what they saw as properly Romanian, for instance by writing Romanian names into declarations that were later signed differently by the individuals who were supposed to submit them.58 Such gestures suggest that it was not necessarily the existence or acceptance of categories like Romanian, Hungarian or German that was being challenged, but rather its content that was being contested. Differences seen as ethnic peculiarities played a significant role in most of the cases outlined above, but the dividing lines were not necessarily identical with the lines imagined by state actors. Furthermore, the content of ethnic categories was usually related to specific social groups, mainly the middle class,59 who were as eager to reassert their ethnicity as they were ready to transgress the borders set by actors from outside. In this process of negotiation they were often helped by the structures crystallized during the dualist era, and the readiness for compromise also depended on the symbolic importance of localities.

Taking into account this social aspect of ethnicity, at least two different types of nationally indifferent or amphibious behavior emerge. One was prevalent primarily among the middle class, where it was rather a claim for the power to define one’s ethnicity, and another was characteristic of the lower urban social strata and the peasantry, where it could have meant real neglect or indifference not only to the norms of proper behavior, but also to the categories used by the state. Nevertheless, it was still not necessarily a lack of the sense of difference along ethnic lines.

Beyond the wider phenomena of indifference, the key to an understanding of why Greater Romania was a series of local compromises and negotiated (although often changing) balances is familiarity with the society of the region. Given the scarcity of resources at its disposal, the state often was confronted with the limits of its power, and in such situations local elites were able to influence realities. It also brought about a redefinition of loyalty that was less focused on ethnicity as the official one and provided for an integration of people from the ranks of minorities who were ready to accept the basics of the existence of the new state.

Archival Sources

Arhivele Naţionale Istorice Centrale [Central Hisorical Archives of the National Archives]

Consiliul Dirigent, Secţia Administraţia Judeţene şi Comunale [Ruling Council, Department of County and Communal Administration]

Consiliul Dirigent II, Secţia Siguranţa Generală [Ruling Council, Department of General Security]

Direcţia Generală a Poliţiei [General Directorate of the Police]

Ministerul Justitiei Direcţia Judiciară [Judiciary Directorate of the Ministry of Justice]

Ministerul Propagandei Naţionale, Presa Interna [Ministry of Propaganda, Homeland Press]

Ministerul de Interne, Cabinetul Ministerului [Ministry of Interior, Cabinet of the Minister]

Arhivele Naţionale Secţia Judeţenă [Braşov County Section of the National Archives]

Prefectură Braşov, Serviciul Adminsitrativ [Braşov County Prefecture, Administrative Department]

Prefectură Judeţului Braşov, Cabinetul Prefectului [Braşov County Prefecture, Cabinet of the Prefect]

Prefectură Judeţului Făgăraş, Serviciul Administrativ [Făgăraş County Prefecture, Administrative Department]

Arhivele Naţionale Secţia Judeţeană Cluj [Cluj County Section of the National Archives]

Inspectoratul de Poliţiei Cluj [Police Inspectorate of Cluj]

Arhivele Naţionale Secţia Judeţeană Mureş [Mureş County Section of the National Archives]

Prefectură Judeţului Mureş [Mureş County Prefecture]

Arhivele Naţionale Secţia Judeţeană Timiş [Timiş County Section of the National Archives]

Legiunea Jandarmilor Severin [Severin County Legion of the Gendarmerie]

Prefectură Judeţului Severin [Severin County Prefecture]

Chestura Poliţiei Municipiului Timişoara [Municipal Police, Timişoara]

Prefectură Timiş-Torontal [Timiş-Torontal County Prefecture]

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MOL) [Central Archives of the Hungarian National Archives]

K 28 Miniszterelnökség Nemzetiségi Ügyosztály

Bibliography

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Egry, Gábor. “Keresztező párhuzamosok. Etnicitás és középosztálybeli kultúra a két világháború közti Erdélyben” [Intersecting Parallels. Ethnicity and Middle-Class Culture in Interwar Transylvania]. In Határokon túl. Tanulmányok Mark Pittaway (1971–2010) emlékére [Beyond Borders. Studies In Memoriam Mark Pittaway (1971–2010)], edited by Eszter Bartha and Zsuzsanna Varga, 282–301. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2012.

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Note on Nomenclature: City and Place Names

I have used place names in this article either in their English form—if one exists—or in the form officially adopted by the states in control (Romania) during the time period in question. For the first reference to each place, I give alternative versions of the place name for that location. Here are the most frequently mentioned city and other place names in their various forms, for quick reference.

Abrud (Hungarian: Abrudbánya)

Aiud (Hungarian: Nagyenyed)

Banat (Hungarian: Bánság, German: Banat)

Braşov (Hungarian: Brassó, German: Kronstadt)

Caransebeş (Hungarian: Karánsebes, German: Karansebesch)

Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvár)

Făgăraş (Hungarian:Fogaras)

Lugoj (Hungarian: Lugos)

Oradea (Hungarian: Nagyvárad)

Oraştie (Hungarian: Szászváros, German: Broos)

Reşiţa (Hungarian: Resicabánya, German: Reschitza)

Satu Mare (Hungarian: Szatmárnémeti)

Sălăj (Hungarian: Szilágy)

Sânnicolau Mare (Hungarian: Nagyszentmiklós, German: Groß-Sankt Niklaus)

Severin (Hungarian: Krassó-Szörény)

Sieni (Hungarian: Szinérváralja)

Târgu Mureş (Hungarian: Marosvásárhely)

Timişoara (Hungarian: Temesvár, German: Temeschwar)

Turda (Hungarian: Torda)

Stefano Bottoni

National Projects, Regional Identities, Everyday Compromises Szeklerland in Greater Romania (1919–1940)1

This article analyzes the social and cultural impact of the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy on the overwhelmingly Hungarian-inhabited Szekler region. Although the half-million strong Szekler community found itself in the geographical center of Greater Romania, most people considered the Versailles peace settlement temporary. This created a paradoxical situation, for as the Szekler minority began to develop separately from the culture of post-Trianon Hungary, Hungarian intellectuals and former civil servants living within the borders of post-1918 Romania started to promote a cult of a supposedly “pure” and untouched Szeklerness. The first part of the article places the question of Szekler identity-building in a general theoretical framework and briefly sketches the political, social and demographic background of the community. The second part will analyze specific strategies of identity building that were pursued from outside the Szeklerland (e.g. the Szekler renaissance under the Horthy regime in Hungary) and from above (e.g. the constructions of “Szeklerness” by the intelligentsias in both Hungary and the Szeklerland). Finally, I will assess the influence of early Transylvanism on the building of Szekler identities in the interwar period.

Keywords: Szekler, Greater Romania, local nationalism, ethnic identity, autonomy plans

After the end of World War I the creation of Greater Romania forced the most compact Hungarian-speaking Transylvanian community to find its place in the Romanian nation-state. Since the political history of the Hungarian minority in the interwar period and the Romanian–Hungarian conflict over Transylvania have been covered extensively in the historiography,2 this paper will instead concentrate on the representation of the Szekler community by elites both inside and outside the Szeklerland. A peasant community at the periphery of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy enjoying a broad level of autonomy in the Middle Ages, the Szeklers faced the challenges of modernization and the centralization of Hungarian state-power from the nineteenth century onwards. When Transylvania was separated from Hungary after World War I, the Szeklers found themselves in the geographical center of another country, Greater Romania, but they remained a “majority minority” in their home counties. These unprecedented historical circumstances stimulated an intellectual debate on the long-term fate of this group, which could not be defined as a separate minority from the Transylvanian Hungarians, yet had its own specific social history and a different sense of belonging to the Hungarian nation.3

Following John Hutchinson’s model of cultural nationalism, one could argue that the Szekler modern self was constructed starting from the last decades of the nineteenth century against the centralizing tendencies of both the Hungarian and the Romanian elites, through a process of conscious isolation and “self-orientalization,” which resulted in a deeply interiorized and assumed remoteness.4 Recently, a new wave of interest has risen in the international scholarship regarding Szekler identity and competing Hungarian and Romanian nationalisms. Young students of the origins of modern Szekler identity point out that the very core of these identification codes could go back to widely-circulating nineteenth-century narratives regarding “remote borderlands”,5 while Eric B. Weaver analyses the evolution of the national discourse on the Hungarian minority communities during the interwar period.6 Taking László Kürti’s book as their point of departure (a book which represented a potentially very valuable contribution, but which failed to identify clearly the perspective from which Transylvania constitutes a remote borderland—i.e. a Romanian, Hungarian, or European perspective—and also neglected to examine the impact of changing political context on the province’s imagery), these authors concentrate on the myth-producing role of Hungarian cultural elites, such as ethnographers, anthropologists, writers and artists—who envisioned the Szekler region as an ideal, isolated and “pure” land.7

The first part of the article places the question of Szekler identity-building in a general theoretical framework, and briefly sketches the political, social and demographic background of the community. The second part will analyze specific strategies of identity building that were pursued from outside the Szeklerland (e.g. the renaissance of myths related to the Szekler past under the Horthy regime in Hungary) and from above (e.g. the constructions of “Szeklerness” by the intelligentsias in both Hungary and the Szeklerland). Finally, I will assess the influence of early Transylvanism on the building of Szekler identities in the interwar period, and furthermore explain why plans for and conceptions of Szekler autonomy failed to arouse any significant public interest in either Romania or Hungary, leaving only one solution on which there was any consensus in Hungarian public: a border revision that would make Hungarian-inhabited areas of Transylvania part of Hungary.

The Szekler Question in a Historical Perspective

The Szekler question is a complicated and highly disputed issue. In a regional perspective, their massive presence in territorial Romania since 1918 was at the heart of a political and diplomatic battle with Hungary over the possession of Transylvania. The issue of identity is at least as crucial if one is to place the Szekler issue into the more general framework of competing nationalisms. Over the last century professional historians and archaeologists, ethnographers, novelists, journalists, and politicians have put forth a number of theories on the origins and ethnic belonging of the Szeklers.8 As with most public debates on Transylvania, as well as the case of the Hungarian-speaking Csángós of Moldavia, the issue of ethnic and national identity corresponded to concrete political aims pursued both by the Romanian and the Hungarian elites.9 Competing theories on the origins of the Szeklers could therefore be used to justify their administrative belonging to Hungary and then Romania. Although standard Hungarian accounts disagreed on the ancient ethnic origins of this population, these accounts maintained that the Szeklers belonged culturally and biologically to the Hungarian nation. Challenging this, many Romanian authors argued that the Szeklers had little or nothing to do with the Hungarians, as they were, in fact, denationalized Romanians who formed a separate ethnic group with longstanding economic ties to the Romanian Old Kingdom.10

Whatever the predominant ethnic background of the Szeklers might have been, their historical experience as a community did not entirely fit into either of the competing nation-buildings projects.11 In the Middle Ages, Szekler identity had an egalitarian content, and the social pyramid was more democratic than in any other Transylvanian estate.12 In the Middle Ages a considerable number of the Szeklers lost their personal freedoms and became servants.13 As a consequence of the progressive decline of their traditional institutions and the functional crisis of the ancient model of warrior society in the age of empires and emerging nation-states, Szekler political identity dissolved into the Hungarian political identity.14

Unlike the German-speaking Saxons, who preserved very homogeneous, closed ethnic and religious communities, Szekler societies evolved from a privileges-based feudal nationalism to local identification codes, which did not conflict with the “standard” Hungarian identity narrative, but operated in growing symbiosis with it.15 With the Revolution of 1848/49 the Szeklers became part of the modern Hungarian nation: now they not only spoke the “reformed” literary Hungarian, but also made conscious use of Hungarian national symbols, such as the tricolor flag and the national anthem.

From an administrative and economic point of view, however, the Szeklerland could not keep up with the rapid economic development taking place in Budapest—and in the non-Hungarian areas of Transylvania and present-day Slovakia—and therefore remained an internal periphery within the Habsburg Monarchy. Around 1910, an overpopulation of almost 100,000 plagued this mostly rural region, where a cold climate limited the amount of arable land in comparison with forests and grazing grounds. Difficulties were worsened by structural contingencies such as delayed urbanization and the poor railway system, but also the economic crisis provoked by the customs war between Hungary and Romania (1891/93).16

The cultural level within the Szeklerland, measured in terms of literacy and school attendance, was higher than in other peripheries within the Austro–Hungarian monarchy. However, the political influence of the Szeklers was disproportionally lower because local voters tended to support the opposition parties struggling for greater independence and opposing the 1867 Compromise with Vienna. At the same time, its position as a borderland exposed the Szekler region to the economic and cultural influences exerted by the Romanian Old Kingdom. The “purest” Hungarians, as depicted by Hungarian official propaganda, were those geographically the furthest removed from Budapest. These outlying Hungarians could easily become a military target as well, as the 1916 Romanian offensive against Transylvania showed, which led to the short-lived occupation of the Szeklerland. But even in peacetime, as a political unit, the Szeklerland was negatively affected by its traditional micro-scale autonomy (the szék system), and conditions worsened because of the lack of a true political center. Although the largest Szekler town, Marosvásárhely/Târgu-Mureş, was overwhelmingly Hungarian (with an increasing Jewish presence), it was situated in the western corner of the Szeklerland. In addition, the Szeklerland’s western countryside (extending towards Kolozsvár/Cluj and the ancient Saxon Segesvár/Sighişoara/Schässburg was predominantly Romanian-inhabited.17

The popular dissatisfaction with the Hungarian political elite and the liberal economic policies it pursued found expression primarily in a massive wave of migration. Between 1880 and 1940 over 150,000 people left the Szeklerland. Half of them did so under Hungarian rule. Between 1901 and 1915, over 45,000 Szeklers emigrated, mainly to Romania (around 20,000 Hungarians lived in pre-World War I Bucharest) and the United States.18 In 1902 some 150 local politicians and scholars gathered in Tusnádfürdő/Băile Tuşnad for a “Szekler Congress.” In an unusually open and lively debate, participants criticized the economic policies of the ruling Hungarian elite, called for the restoration of Székely autonomous institutions, and asked Budapest to pay more attention to this strategic region.19 However, their claims were in many ways contradictory: while they complained about centralization they also called for increased state intervention in the economic life of the region. This basic variance—being economically dependent on Budapest or Bucharest yet pursuing greater cultural and regional independence—would remain a feature of Szekler politics throughout the twentieth century.

The Szeklerland in Greater Romania: Demographic Trends and Social Grievances

The incorporation of the Szeklerland into Greater Romania produced a threefold crisis – demographic, political and cultural. According to the 1910 census, 637,000 persons lived the territory of the ancient széks in the south-eastern corner of Transylvania.20 The exact number of Szeklers who came under Romanian rule after 1919 is not easy to assess because, in the decades preceding World War I an accelerated process of assimilation of ethnic Romanians into the Hungarian state and society had taken place in a number of Transylvanian counties. The unforeseen and contested territorial changes following World War I caused serious long-term demographic losses in Transylvania (around 200,000 persons up to 1924). The level of migration from the Szeklerland towards Hungary was high, particularly among teachers, civil servants, policemen and military staff. The loss of significant portions of the urban middle class had two major effects on the social structure of the Szekler population. The more immediate and dramatic one was a halting of the urbanization process. Sepsiszentgyörgy/Sfântu Gheorghe, an industrial center 30 km north of Brassó/Braşov/Kronstadt, had 9,000 inhabitants in 1910, and had gained only 1,000 more by 1930. Other small cities suffered even greater losses.21 The only city that increased in population, from 26,000 to over 38,000 thousands inhabitants, was the ancient Szekler capital, Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, although several thousand of these newcomers were Romanian public officials replacing their Hungarian predecessors. During the 1920s and the 30s, the high birth rate and the impossibility of emigrating to countries other than Hungary contributed the demographic recovery of the Szeklerland’s total population, which reached 636,112 in 1930 and nearly 700,000 on the eve of the 1940 border revision. The total population fell slightly in Háromszék/Trei Scaune and Udvarhely/Odorhei counties, remained stable in Csík/Ciuc County, and increased in Maros/Mureş County, where significant Romanian immigration was occurring.22

Emigration, motivated more by social and economic needs than ethnic harassment, remained the only solution to chronic rural overpopulation. Throughout the interwar period almost 10 percent of the regional population was estimated to have left the Szeklerland, at least temporarily.23 The majority of Szekler emigrants did not choose Hungary, as had the cultural élite in the early 1920s. Rather, they settled down in the capital, Bucharest, and other industrial centers. The 1930 census found 24,000 ethnic Hungarians living stably in Bucharest, but internal statistics issued by the Roman Catholic and Calvinist parishes showed nearly 50,000 Hungarian churchgoers out of a total population of 700,000 in the Romanian capital.24 In the 1930s, Bucharest probably had the largest Szekler community in the country, while thanks to Szekler migration to the southern Transylvanian city of Brassó/Braşov, the Hungarians—who were traditionally marginalized by the dominant Saxons and the dynamically expanding Romanians—became by 1930 the largest ethnic group in the city, forming the bulk of the city’s industrial population.

The strong tendency towards assimilation of minorities who had moved to Bucharest had psychological motivations: people coming from a mono-ethnic world, such as the Szeklers, were not provided with cultural mechanisms of “ethnic immunity.” Being Hungarian was for them natural, as the milieu in which they had grown up was exclusively Hungarian speaking, as opposed to the Hungarians living scattered in Southern Transylvania and the Banat, who were exposed to Romanians and Germans, among other ethnic and religious communities. Once these Szeklers settled in a foreign environment and lost contact with their home community, they tended to assimilate quickly and easily. Bucharest, the vibrant capital of an enlarged country, was to them alien and attractive at the same time. Relinquishing a weak national identity opened up channels for social mobility and personal affirmation.

After the creation of Greater Romania, many minorities who could claim some Romanian ancestry found it more convenient to declare themselves Romanian, or else were encouraged by the authorities to do so through the so-called “name analysis.”25 A state-sponsored campaign was launched to win back individuals who had Romanian-sounding names and belonged to the Orthodox or the Greek Catholic Churches. Under the influence of official Romanian propaganda, about 25,000 persons who supposedly belonged to the Romanian neam [race] but had been denationalized or “Szeklerized” over the course of the previous two centuries had their ethnic affiliation changed in the years in which the Romanian census was taken (1920 and 1930) and were subsequently registered as Romanians.26

More important, the internal composition of Szekler society suddenly changed. The old political and economic élites almost disappeared. Unlike Körösvidék/Crişana and central Transylvania (Mezőség/Câmpia Transilvaniei), where Hungarians had been a powerful landowning class until Romania’s radical land reform of 1921, most landowners in the Szeklerland were simple farmers participating in a system based on community property (közbirtokosság), which was in fact the only consistent remnant of the old feudal Szekler autonomy. The egalitarian and democratic-minded land reform carried out in Greater Romania aimed to strengthen the economic positions of the ethnic Romanian peasantry, especially in the newly acquired provinces.27 Collective property belonging to the Szekler community was confiscated, such as nearly 35,000 acres of Csíki Magánjavak [Private Properties of Ciuc], depriving the relatively egalitarian society of its main economic resources.28

Romanian Minority Policy: Failed Assimilation, Short-Lived Compromises

Throughout the interwar period the Szeklerland and the status of the Hungarian/Szekler community became a permanent source of tension between Romania and Hungary. The Szekler issue was frequently exploited for diplomatic purposes by the Budapest governments struggling for border revision. As will be explained in this section, the Hungarian authorities actively stimulated Szekler cultural identity-production but did not support plans for autonomy or independence.29 Furthermore, the integration of the Szeklerland was a major topic of debate within Romanian political forces. Along with the other new Central European nation-states, in December 1919 Greater Romania signed the Minority Protections Treaty, which provided linguistic rights in relation to education and the administration of towns and districts in which a considerable proportion of the population belonged to racial, religious or linguistic minority. The treaty also envisaged local cultural autonomy for the Saxon and Szekler communities in regard to matters of education and religion. However, failed implementation of this commitment embittered the international quarrel over the status of non-Romanians in Transylvania. Regarding their ethnic kin in Transylvania, Germany and Hungary repeatedly confronted Romania at the League of Nations. Between 1925 and 1938, Szekler representatives also took part in a supranational political organization, the European Congress of Nationalities.30

Romanian policy toward the Szeklers in the interwar period was driven by a confused mixture of different approaches (cultural assimilation versus legal discrimination) that essentially explains the long-term failure to integrate the region and its population into the new Romanian national state. The administrative centralization that followed the dismantling of the Transylvanian provisional autonomous government, the Consiliul Dirigent in 1920 relied on the widely shared acknowledgment that it would be impossible to rule this region without making use of centrally planned nationalizing techniques and reordering the region’s ethnic composition. All Romanian parties – except the Communists and (less vehemently) the Social Democrats, who saw the Paris peace settlement as an imperialist imposition by the Great Powers – were aware that the Szeklerland, a seemingly isolated area, would otherwise remain an “internal periphery,” mostly peaceful but deeply hostile to Greater Romania and committed to a return to Hungarian rule. Integration at all costs became therefore an imperative for the Romanian political élite. As Irina Livezeanu has noted, the initiatives that were undertaken with the intention of dealing with the Szeklers rested on the assumption that many Szeklers were actually “hidden” Romanians. In the early 1920s the Romanian demographer Sabin Manuilă suggested to the Minister of Education that what was needed was “not a policy of aggression, but one of peaceful assimilation. The sacrosanct dogma toward the Szeklers should be that of assimilation.”31

This “separation” approach – whereby Szeklers were culturally and ethnically dissociated from other Hungarians – was also employed to encourage the ethno-national dissimilation of other minorities living among Hungarians in Transylvania: this included promotion of the German-speaking Swabian identity among Magyarized communities living in the northwestern part of Transylvania and the cultivation of a competitive, loyal Romanian Jewish identity among the mostly Hungarian-speaking Transylvanian Jews.32 Romanian policy toward minorities in the 1920s also gave bureaucratic priority to these “cultural zones.” Better salaries, land and other benefits were granted to Romanian teachers willing to take jobs in the multilingual counties that formed an arc from one end of the country to the other: from Szatmárnémeti/Satu Mare in northwest Romania, the Szeklerland in eastern Transylvania, and down to Dobrudja on the coast of the Black Sea.33 However, unlike other small ethnic communities—including the Hungarians and Swabians living in the Banat, or the Russians of Bessarabia—the Szeklers did not live in the periphery of the country, but constituted an absolute majority of a quite large area situated in Romania’s new geographical center. As a result, “Their compact presence over whole districts challenged the legitimacy of Romanian territorial claims.”34

One of the very few common features of the conflicting policies carried out by the governments led by the National Liberal and the National Peasant parties between 1920 and 1938 was the attempt to unify the country. Methods and approaches to the Szekler questions of the Transylvanian Peasant Party (Partidul Naţional Ţărănesc or PNŢ), led by Transylvanian-born personalities such as Iuliu Maniu and Alexandru Vaida-Voievod, who had both started their political careers in the late 1890s and had good personal relationships with members of the former Hungarian ruling class, differed only slightly from the explicitly centralizing Liberal Party elite of the capital. It is not surprising that while the Szeklers made up the majority within their own territory, they were always denied self-government on a municipal or county level in the interwar period. The centralization of Greater Romania was justified first and foremost by reasons of national security and the need for stability. The introduction of the French model based on the prefects, who were named by the ruling party and represented its interests, was part of a strategy to concentrate power in trustworthy hands (ethnic Romanians and those Szeklers who had declared themselves Romanian after 1919, the so-called “renegades”) and to prevent “aliens” from playing any significant role in political decision-making.

This policy, ruthlessly pursued by the Liberal governments of the 1920s, proved successful only in the short run. Micro-level ethnic tensions were frequent, but neither the ruling Romanian nor the defeated Hungarian governments were willing to escalate this to the level of street violence. Furthermore, the local population preferred to resort to political instruments (complaints to central authorities in Bucharest, reports to the Hungarian government and the League of Nations, support for international propaganda carried on the Transylvanian question).

Despite facing many forms of discrimination, a large number of Szeklers could, as Romanian citizens, take part in Romanian national elections. Szeklers voted overwhelmingly for the Hungarian National Party (HNP – Országos Magyar Párt), electing a remarkable number of Szekler-born MPs who battled their Romanian colleagues in order to defend their ethnic community.35 Nevertheless, the HNP, representing a nationwide minority, was not committed to regional autonomy or special rights for the Szeklers. In the 1920s the Szeklers’ specific cultural and economic issues were sacrificed to the general interests of the Transylvanian Hungarians. The HNP signed a secret pact of understanding with the People’s Party (Partidul Popular),36 led by General Averescu, in 1923, and also limited electoral cartels with the National Liberals (1926) and the German Party (1927), before turning back to its original strategy of independence once the royal dictatorship was decreed in 1938.

One consequence of Romanian centralization was a sacrifice of the principle of representation. Unlike the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy—where despite the fact that general elections could easily be manipulated, the real and lively center of local political life was in the city councils and the county assemblies—Greater Romania offered little possibility for settling local issues through institutional compromises. In the period between 1920 and 1938, local elections were held only twice. In 1926 the HNP, which had formed a coalition with the ruling National Liberal Party, came first in 30 out of 49 Transylvanian towns and in all Szekler urban centers.37 Most of the newly elected city councils, however, were dissolved after a short time and replaced by an executive body (comisia interimară) appointed by the central authorities, working side-by-side with the prefect. The successive attempts to mitigate this extreme centralization failed. In 1929 Iuliu Maniu’s “Transylvanian” cabinet introduced a decentralizing administrative reform inspired by the Austro–Hungarian pattern. This moderate measure allowed for the creation of many Hungarian-led local councils in Transylvania after the administrative elections in March 1930, in which the Hungarians were allied with the National Peasant Party.38 However, immediately after Maniu’s government resigned in 1931, the new cabinet led by Nicolae Iorga repealed the reform and replaced all elected bodies.39

While in the 1920s there had been a lively debate among Romanian political actors on decentralization, during the 1930s the issue of internal security prevailed. After the 1938 administrative and constitutional reform issued by King Carol II within the framework of a new, corporatist idea of state power, the older seventy-one counties were merged into ten macro-regions, regardless of ethnic and cultural borders. The four Szekler counties were divided into two regions in which Hungarians came to be a minority.40 The royal dictatorship, facing revisionist waves across central Europe, tried to compensate the Hungarian minority by re-enforcing their citizenship rights (of which more than 225,000 Jews were deprived after 1938) and by granting them some collective rights through a minority statute. However, the belated reversal of previous discriminatory policies could not be regarded by Hungarians as an honest gesture.

Greater Romania alienated the Transylvanian Hungarians and the Szekler community because of discrimination, widespread corruption, legal inconsistency and bureaucratic chaos. As Hungarian authors privately recognized, smuggling and institutionalized bribing could help one “survive Romania,” but the harsh anti-Hungarian rhetoric of almost every Romanian government cabinet made it impossible for Szekler élites (with the exception of the so-called few “renegades,” who ostensibly got full access to the political sphere) to accept their integration into the new, nationalizing Romanian state. When these Szekler elites tried to promote regional interests or reach consensus with Romanian political élites, Romanian authorities often made a purely instrumental, short-sighted use of these attempts.

Most of the discriminative measures had counterproductive effects. As a result of nation-building policies—for example the 1925 educational reform—the first Romanian-born generation from the Szeklerland grew up in a condition of almost complete illiteracy. This was due not to the lack of schools, which did affect literacy in Bessarabia and Moldavia, but to the perverse effect of poorly elaborated nationalism. Pupils taking part in the compulsory state-run school system were forced to pursue their studies in Romanian even if they did not understand the state’s official language. The state was unwilling to acknowledge that so many of its citizens could not speak Romanian, and it made no real efforts to create the cultural basis for political loyalty.41

Autonomy Plans Versus Territorial Revisionism

In the first few years after the end of World War I, Szekler political elites who had not chosen to repatriate to Hungary followed the line of passive resistance suggested by the Hungarian government. Political boycott of Romanian institutions was motivated by the widespread illusion that belonging to Romania was a temporary condition. General hope for border revision unified people of quite different social, religious and political backgrounds and persuasions. Implicit support for Hungarian diplomatic efforts and internal resistance to Romanianization were the basis for the moderate policy followed by the Kolozsvár/Cluj-based HNP, an ideologically eclectic party formed in 1922 with the aim of representing the whole of Transylvanian Hungarian society despite having only narrow, albeit influential, social support.

Old aristocratic elites from Kolozsvár/Cluj, the Banat and the southern Transylvanian diaspora were overrepresented within the party and proved quite insensitive to the Szekler demands for autonomy. Social and cultural differences further deepened the internal cleavages within the Hungarian community. A growing ideological polarization could be observed as of the early 1930s. Albeit the 1933 founded left-wing Magyar Dolgozók Szövetsége (MADOSZ) did not enjoy great popular support, atheism and involvement in the illegal Communist Party were not rare among members of the younger generation of Szekler, whose socialization was no longer inextricably linked to the old “Hungarian world,” despite the influence of religious cults, especially the Roman Catholic Church.42 Bolshevism promised not only a social but also a national revolution for minorities in Romania. Without any direct reference to the Szeklers, the Communist Party called for the people’s rights of secession, and denounced the Treaty of Trianon (1920) as an imperialist peace. Among the first generation of communist activists and sympathizers, there were a significant number of Szekler-born individuals who had migrated to Bucharest, Brassó/Braşov and other industrial centers.43 Vasile Luca, who became finance minister and a Politburo member after 1945, was a typical product of this new integrative pattern. Born in 1898 as László Luka in a small village, he did his political apprenticeship in Brassó/Braşov in the 1920s, first as a syndical leader and then a Communist boss. As a committed internationalist, he downplayed his ethnic identity, which manifested itself only occasionally in personal conflicts with ethnic Romanian Party members. Though he did not think of the Hungarian/Szekler community in “national” terms, he always helped his village and preserved human sympathy for local Szekler/Hungarian people.44 Nevertheless, the influence of communism (and more broadly, of the left-wing parties) on the Szekler community should not be overestimated. The class-based, supra-national integration offered by the communist project to Szeklers joining the Romanian workers’ movement did not become a dominant feature among Szekler migrants and was strongly challenged in small traditionally-minded communities.

More influential was the claim for administrative and cultural autonomy coming from some radical left-wing intellectuals and politicians. In the early 1920s autonomy plans were issued only by the so-called Transylvanianist movement, and only for the Transylvanian region as a whole, as an alternative to political passivity.45 Defining Transylvania as the common land of three constituent peoples, Romanians, Germans and Hungarians, marked an attempt to break up the nation-state logic by emphasizing common roots and long-standing coexistence. It also helped the Hungarian intellectual elites to “define a life-strategy for the members of the community.”46 But as prominent Hungarian writer János Székely was to admit in 1990, this call for a unity of Transylvanian peoples, who allegedly shared common values such as tolerance and goodwill, was no more than a compensatory ideology, echoing Aurel Popovici’s federal plans during the late Dual Monarchy, and it was met with the same negative reception among the respective ethnic majority.

Some intellectuals and politicians went further and imagined a new autonomous framework for the Szeklerland alone within the Romanian state. The HNP took, as starting point of Hungarian complaints, two non-binding legal texts, the December 1, 1918 Resolutions of Gyulafehérvár/Alba Iulia47 and the Paris Minorities Treaty.48 But a group of Szekler politicians attempted to go even further in 1918–22 by giving a modern political content to the Szekler identity for the first time. In November 1918 in both Budapest and Kolozsvár/Cluj, a Szekler National Council was created under the leadership of Benedek Jancsó, Dénes Sebess and Gábor Ugron. Although they declared their loyalty to the Hungarian state, they nevertheless showed a readiness for action in the name of a so-called “Szekler Independent Republic”, a new body modeled on the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, to be created after a mass rally in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş. Their argument for an independent state was based on the political autonomy enjoyed before 1848 by the székely natio and on the cultural and social differences between them and the “standard” Hungarians.49 Although Romanian authorities had prohibited the planned meeting in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, the journalist and politician Árpád Paál from Székelyudvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc endeavored to give the Szekler independence plans a theoretical framework.50 In a December 1918 edition of the newspaper Székely Közélet, he outlined his project for a Szekler Republic. After being arrested and kept under strict surveillance by the Romanian police, he issued a longer draft called Emlékirat a semleges független államról [Memorandum on the Neutral Independent State]. Paál, who was starting his long and controversial career as a fellow of radical democrats Oszkár Jászi and Mihály Károlyi, was at that time under the influence of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (Tanácsköztársaság) in 1919. For Paál, the image of the Szekler state reflected the popular image of radical egalitarianism: a socialized economy, the increased role of the collective property and a universal social insurance system.51

After the fall of the Bolshevik Republic in Hungary and the beginning of conservative consolidation led by Admiral Miklós Horthy and Prime Minister István Bethlen, such radical political experiments lost popular support. In September 1920 Paál traveled throughout Szeklerland to organize a petition signed by 40 cities and villages addressed to the Romanian government and the League of Nations, but he had no adherents.52 Nevertheless, in 1921–22 Paál’s rejection of political passivism provoked a lively debate in the Hungarian press in Transylvania.53 Although it was clear that his plans for Szekler autonomy did not have any chance of being realized within the framework of the Romanian nationalizing state, they became a good discursive source for others who supported the political activism of the Hungarian minority, such as Károly Kós and István Zágoni, who were trying to build up a new “democratic” ideology for the Hungarian minority. They officially refused the Hungarian–Romanian border revision and claimed cultural and territorial autonomy for the Szeklerland. However, plans for autonomy fell in the same trap as political Transylvanism: they rejected a commonly shared vision of the future (the hope for a return to Hungary) without being able to win any measure of support among the Romanian political élite.54

In 1931, Árpád Paál, who had become a right-wing public figure and a prominent Catholic journalist, issued another plan for Szekler autonomy that referred to Article 11 of the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty. However, unlike his 1919 version, Paál defined what he called the “community” (Székely közület) in terms of an ensemble of different levels of autonomy: the neighborhood, the street, the borough, the city or the village, whose membership only referred to the “community of those residents in the Szeklerland who declare themselves to be of Hungarian mother-tongue.”55 Paál was not a racist ideologue, even if he had gradually shifted towards extreme right positions and political anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, he gave his communitarian Szeklerland an exclusive content: local inhabitants could be Szekler only by language, culture and, albeit not clearly specified, birth. Conservative conceptions of Szekler autonomy, based on cultural rather than territorial claims, were better received in the mainstream of Transylvanian Hungarian politics. The general assembly of the HNP, held in Marosvásárhely/Târgu-Mureş on 2 July, 1933, approved two motions, one calling for Szekler cultural autonomy and another protesting against the Romanian government for having failed to fulfill its obligations under the Minorities Protection Treaty.56 This last motion, despite winning unanimous approval, was never discussed by the Parliament. The last attempts to assert the Szekler cultural autonomy were made between 1934 and 1937 at the initiative of Senator Gábor Pál from Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc. As the recently published minutes of HNP Central executive council meetings show, resistance came not only from the central government in Bucharest and the Romanian parties, but also from the non-Szekler representatives.57 Following the 1937 elections, the introduction of royal dictatorship and the ban on all political parties ended any plans for regional autonomy. Due to the intensification of juridical and social discrimination and the implications of the First Vienna Award of November 1938, which returned the southern strip of Slovakia to Hungary, territorial revision again became a realistic goal, one that was shared by the overwhelming majority of the Szekler population.

Throughout the interwar period internal debates within the Hungarian minority over territorial autonomy to be granted to Szeklerland were influenced by various conceptions of the meaning of “autonomy.” Did autonomy imply a system of privileges (a kind of self-government) limited to the Szeklerland? Or should it be intended as a network of cultural and linguistic rights the exercise of which could not be linked to a specific territory? The restrictive view (Szeklerland as a corpus separatum, being Szekler as opposed to being Transylvanian Hungarian) gained the support of many Szeklers, but was always opposed by the traditional Kolozsvár/Cluj-based Hungarian elite and by Budapest, which had always considered a complete or partial border revision as the only possible solution to the Hungarian question in Transylvania. Moreover, the HNP itself considered Szekler autonomy a contrivance, or at any rate a dangerous issue. Calls for territorial autonomy could also help the Romanian government drive a wedge between the Szekler community and other Hungarians. This risk—real or presumed—weakened the position of Transylvanian autonomists.

Internal debates of the interwar period produced a generational gap between the old élites whose cultural politics were forged in the Austro–Hungarian period, and a younger generation of intellectuals and professionals who had come of age as ethnic and religious minorities in Romanian Transylvania. The latter included notables such as József Venczel and Imre Mikó, who were trained at the Romanian State University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, and the later, very influential Roman Catholic Bishop of Gyulafehérvár/Alba Iulia, Áron Márton, who was born of a Szekler peasant family. They were all inspired by the Hungarian populist movement; by social ethnography (sociography), which was enjoying outstanding literary popularity in Hungary and detailed the arduous living conditions of villagers;58 by the social doctrine of Catholic Church and Christian socialism; and also by the fieldwork of the Bucharest sociological school led by Dimitrie Gusti.59

Their ideological horizon differed from the traditional one because of its unprecedented social openness and its rejection of intellectualism. These young, modest intellectuals and clergymen were less interested in political and legal debates over territorial rights and instead focused their attention on népszolgálat (“serving the people”), an ideology that would influence the collective identity of the Transylvanian Hungarian élites throughout the twentieth century.60

The Szeklerland as a Cultural Battleground: Post-Imperial Trauma and
the Revival of a Mythical Past

Besides the diplomatic struggle between Romania and Hungary for territorial possession of the Szeklerland, the region fueled a complex intellectual competition over the “correct” interpretation of national past and the ethnic essence of Szeklerness. If one adopts the theoretical framework developed by Rogers Brubaker and then adapted by Zoltán Kántor to the case of the Transylvanian Hungarians, the Szeklers were subjected to competing nationalizing projects from above (Bucharest as the center of a new nationalizing state and Budapest as the capital of the external homeland61). After World War I the Szeklers also started to redefine their national identification codes and elaborated a two-level (micro and macro) allegiance system, in which belonging to the Hungarian nation as a whole went along with the promotion of the sense of local community. Following Balázs Trencsényi’s comparative analysis of the interwar discourse on national character, one could argue that the new Szekler normative paradigms did not constitute an exception, but fit into the general search for the “essence” of national belonging.62

As recent scholarship has pointed out, part of this ideological production was a reaction to state-promoted Romanian cultural nationalism. During the interwar period, historians and geographers such as Aurel Nistor, Nicolae Iorga, Sabin Opreanu and Gheorghe Popa-Lisseanu dealt extensively with what they defined as an advanced process of denationalization of the formerly ethnic Romanian population, which had made possible the emergence of a uniform, “Szeklerized” Hungarian-speaking population. According to their theories, biology and not cultural belonging or language determined one’s ethnic affiliation. In the second part of the 1930s and—even more intensively—after the 1940 partition of Transylvania, biologists, anthropologists, and eugenicists also focused their attention on the Szekler question. Racial anthropologists such as Gheorghe Popovici and Petre Rămneanţu compared the average blood agglutination of a Szekler sample with the averages of Romanian and Hungarian samples, with the result that the figures were closer to those of Romanians. As such, most of the Szeklers had to be declared Romanians because their ancestors had likely been “ethnically” Romanian.63 Nevertheless political enthusiasm for ethno-biology did not prevail over scholarly realism. After the crucial 1930 census, a methodological milestone for modern Romanian demography, Sabin Manuilă allegedly explained his refusal to introduce a nationality sheet for Szeklers and Moldavian Csángós (i.e. separate from Hungarians) by noting that there were no separate Szekler or Csángó languages.64

Szekler nationalism—or better, the ideologization of common sense nationalism—was the Hungarian answer to external challenges and—not surprisingly for an over-centralized country like Hungary—emerged first in Budapest.65 The psychological shock of losing their home country had a powerful impact on the tens of thousands of middle-class Szekler teachers, intellectuals and civil servants who took refuge in Hungary after 1919. State-sponsored promotion of a strongly idealized and uncontaminated virtual Szeklerland became for them an instrument to promote cultural revival and struggle against denationalization by Romanians. After Trianon, national imagology supported new identity-building agendas from above and outside: the Szekler came to represent the “purest” Hungarian, who lived uncontaminated in an alien urban culture. This also implied an extension to the Szeklerland—where the Jewish question had always been a non-issue—of the increasingly popular anti-Semitic claims according to which Jewish and German elements had dominated urban environments since the time of Austro–Hungarian monarchy. Thus the Szeklerland became a meta-historical space to be memorialized in living memory, where brave Hungarians restlessly struggled against Romanian oppression. The mythical Szekler king, Csaba vezér was portrayed proudly holding Transylvania’s coats of arms as one of the four characters of the statue composition erected in 1921 at Szabadság square in central Budapest.66 Another powerful instrument of memory building was urban toponomy. Many streets of Budapest and other cities were assigned the name of cities, rivers or mountains that were situated in the territories Hungary had recently lost. As an example, the Hargita/Harghita mountain group was for the first time put onto the mental map of average Hungarian citizens as a symbol of Hungarianness.67

In the early 1920s the Székely Egyetemi és Főiskolai Hallgatók Egyesülete [SZEFHE – Association of Szekler University Students] was founded on the initiative of five refugee students. Their leader was György Csanády, the author of the poem “Szekler Anthem”.68 The poem, the music for which had been composed by Kálmán Mihalik, was first performed in 1922, but only published in 1940 and was secretly played in Transylvania, where it became the second, non-official Hungarian anthem under Hungarian rule between 1940 and 1944.69 The SZEFHE worked independently in Budapest and Szeged until 1939, after which it joined Erdélyi Szövetség [The Transylvanian League]. Through the end of World War II, the SZEFHE played an outstanding role in the promotion of Szekler culture and moral values. Its hierarchy even replicated the ancient Szekler social hierarchy.70

Even more interesting was the promotion of the community of Hargitaváralja (Hargitaváralja jelképes székely község), a virtual Szekler village supposed to perpetuate organically the ancient rites and the social structure of a mythical Szeklerland within post-Trianon Hungary. The Hargitaváralja project was launched in Szeged in 1921 by a group of refugees to Hungary. It immediately won the patronage and financial support of the town’s prefect, Dr. György Imecs, himself of Szekler origin. It organized dances and Szekler parties, collections, and cultural events, and also supported a Szekler library in Szeged. Its public meetings were called falugyűlés [village assembly]. Among its members, one found Szekler-born high ranking army officers, including Lajos Veress Dálnoki, head of the anti-Fascist coalition government installed in Debrecen in 1944, and Vilmos Nagy Nagybaczoni, the wartime minister of defense. Its chief judge was the vice-president of the Hungarian railway company, Gábor Veress, while other prominent members included the Catholic priest Vilmos Apor, who later became bishop of Győr; historian István Kiss Rugonfalvi; and writers Áron Tamási and József Nyírő. From August 1936 to October 1944, Hargitaváralja also published a weekly house organ in one thousand copies.71 The journal not only informed its readers about the cultural events sponsored by the nearly one hundred Szekler communities scattered across Hungary, but also carried out investigations into the condition of Romania’s Hungarian minority and advertised Szekler-owned shops, pubs and restaurants, seen as champions of a “true,” national-minded business spirit.

Parallel to the Szekler revival in interwar Hungary, which was stimulated by private initiative but had been immediately recognized by the authorities as an excellent instrument of propaganda, the Szeklers in Romania began to rediscover and openly discuss their past, beginning of course with their ethnic origins. Although the aim could not have been clearer, namely to reinforce the consciousness of a peculiar Hungarian identity, they did not take up the “bio-political,” eugenic approach of certain Romanian scientists and policy makers, which in the 1930s influenced the Transylvanian Saxons as well. Instead, they preferred a culturalist stance rooted in a complex network of historical myths and popular legends, helping to spread a völkisch, non-urban Szekler identity whose traces can still be found in Szekler popular culture.72 According to semi-professional authors and self-proclaimed intellectuals speaking on behalf of the wider Szekler community, they were the descendants of the noble Hun nation, and not “simply” Magyars belonging to the Finno-Ugric family. To prove that, they made use of scholarly research on the diffusion of Hungarian runic script (rovásírás), the old runic writing with an ancient alphabet which had been used in most parts of Hungary until the sixteenth century, but traces of which had been found in some Szekler villages as late as the mid-nineteenth century.73

Nevertheless, the most durable historical myth was the myth of a supposed medieval chronicle (Csíki Krónika). This chronicle, believed to have been written in 1533, narrated the heroism of warrior Szekler kings, the rhabonbán, and described the mystical, protective function for all Szekler tribes of a Szekler chalice (székely kehely). Although professional historians (among them, the Szekler-born Lajos Szádeczky) had convincingly demonstrated at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Csíki Krónika was in fact a forgery composed in the second half of the eighteenth century, the legendary Szekler past survived in the collective memory. Moreover, it stimulated the reproduction of a collective identity that challenged not only the “negationist” Romanian narrative (the Szekler as denationalized Romanians), but also the integrationist (of all Magyars), Budapest-driven Hungarian national discourse. Nevertheless, polemics with both official Hungarian and Romanian narratives prevented academic historians from constructing an altogether separate national identity. Hesitation and embarrassment are particularly evident in case of István Rugonfalvi Kiss, a reputable Szekler-born professor of history at Debrecen University. While publishing a historical synthesis in 1939 which represented a more ambitious attempt to give the Szekler nation a scientifically based past, Kiss had to admit that the most treasured proof of an ancient, virtuous Szekler past, the Csíki Krónika, was an “infamous falsehood” on which no Szekler collective identity or historical consciousness could ever rely.74

Less controversial and more fruitful for the long-term cultural development of the Szeklerland were the efforts of local intellectuals who worked to uncover and promote Székely cultural heritage. Artistic treasuries and archeological findings represented an ideal link between the past and the present. Hungarians from both Romania and Hungary were encouraged to discover the Szeklerland’s natural beauties and enjoy a still “untouched” Hungarian world. A major proponent of this movement was the outstanding geologist János Bányai, professor at the Székelyudvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc Calvinist College and fellow of the Geological Institute of Bucharest, who after 1945 pioneered the Szeklerland’s industrialization. In 1929 he launched the Hargita expedition, an annual summer event for those who wanted to explore the Szekler countryside.75 In 1931 Bányai, along with fellow colleagues of Székelyudvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc College, launched a periodical called Székelység [Szeklerness], intended as a national review, and published short essays on a wide range of topics: local history, geology, human geography, folklore, literature, and poetry.76

The difficulties faced under Romanian rule also stimulated a more resistance-based cultural revival, focused on the preservation of some endangered features of the traditional Szekler lifestyle (costume, cuisine, associative life), while also creating new traditions. One example is the Szekler cult initiated by Hungarian ethnographer Pál Péter Domokos, who in 1926 returned to his birthplace, Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc, as a high school teacher and became the promoter of an initiative to make this periphery a place of pilgrimage and ritual for young people. On 7 June, 1931 he organized at the Roman Catholic monastery of Csíksomlyó/Şumuleu Ciuc a holiday called Ezer Székely Leány Találkozó [Reunion of a Thousand Szekler Girls]. The devoted Catholic, Pál Péter, wanted to make the center of Transylvanian Roman Catholicism the spiritual center of the Szekler people, regardless of their confessional belonging. The remarkable success of the first event encouraged the organizers to transform it in annual one. However, in 1935 the Romanian authorities suspected the Ezer Székely Leány Találkozó of becoming a Hungarian nationalist demonstration and therefore had it banned. Nevertheless, this invented tradition reemerged after 1940 and once again in 1990. In fact, in the interwar period the Szeklerland was a multi-confessional environment: in the 1930s only a slight majority of Szeklers (257,009 out of 474,127) were Roman Catholic, with a substantial proportion of Calvinists (around 170 thousand), Unitarians (over 45 thousand), Orthodox (55 thousand) and Greek Catholics (40 thousand).77 But even before the Szekler clergyman was appointed in 1939 as Roman Catholic Bishop, religious faith and national (minority) identity had begun to overlap more strictly than at any time before, as demonstrated by the growing attendance to the annual pilgrimage to the Franciscan monastery of Csíksomlyó/Şumuleu Ciuc. The Catholic Church stood up for minority rights of its Szekler/Hungarian believers, but also started to support charity actions and social projects in the Szeklerland.

Epilogue: Failed State Integration and Its Long-term Consequences

During the interwar period the Romanian authorities regarded the Szeklerland as a corpus separatum the population of which passively accepted what they perceived as “foreign occupation” of their homeland but refused any civic commitment to the state and its local agencies, instead displaying attachment and loyalty to the Hungarian state and Hungarian national symbols. In the interwar period, the cultural and the political debate among the Romanian majority and the Hungarian minority tended to focus on the more theoretical question of the ethnic origin of the Szeklers. Historical, biological and cultural arguments over the “national belonging” of the community collided. Meanwhile, Szekler intellectuals began to rethink their cultural identity and escape competitive grand narratives by presenting the Szeklers as a distinct group among Hungarians, or even the purest group, the former status of which, as an egalitarian warrior community, predestined it to isolation and territorial autonomy. For students of ethnic relations interested in the social construction of national symbols in an internal periphery, the case of the Szeklers within the context of the broader Hungarian Transylvanian population of 1.5 million is an excellent example of how one ethnic community—unable and unwilling to develop its own modern ethnic institutions such as language and national culture—attempted to construct or articulate new identity markers after becoming a minority within another minority.

With the Second Vienna Award the Szeklerland experienced a period of short-lived Hungarian rule (1940–1944) during which Budapest made considerable efforts to re-establish Hungarian social and cultural supremacy (even through the mistreatment of ethnic Romanians) and promote economic development. The lack of sensitivity to local issues, however, stimulated conflicts between the center and the periphery.78 After the controversial Hungarian intermezzo, the early Romanian communist regime provided the Szekler community with some cultural and linguistic rights. Between 1952 and 1960, Soviet-style territorial autonomy was granted to the Szeklerland in the form of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR).79 The collective memory of Hungarians living in the HAR preserved the years following its establishment as a period of cultural development. This could sound rather paradoxical when taking into account the high level of ideological pressure, the massive political reprisals and the extremely low standards of living suffered by a large part of the population in the first decade of the communist regime. One possible explanation can be found in the underlying role of “cultural ghetto” attributed by Moscow to the HAR.80 The Romanian authorities were aware of the fact that a reprisal against Hungarians, at least in the first period, would have given rise to the suspicion of oppressing the nationalities. The administrative umbrella represented by the HAR made it possible to preserve a particular kind of Hungarian cultural tradition for the local majority. Universities, newspapers, reviews, folk dance groups, and professional and amateur theatres played an outstanding role in reproducing elites and preserving Hungarian identity.

At the same time, the national forms of the “greenhouse” offered by Stalin to the Hungarians of the Szeklerland should have softened its socialist content: the “little Hungary” represented by HAR should have strengthened loyalty to the Romanian state. But the enthusiastic reaction of a great part of the population to the Hungarian revolution in 1956/57, which was the first major political test for the region and its leadership after the death of Stalin, revealed all of the internal contradictions of the “Hungarian policy” imposed on Romania by Stalin. The coexistence of a Romanian civic identity (being a loyal citizen of the Romanian state) and a Hungarian cultural one (feeling part of another community) proved to be an illusion. As a logical consequence, the Romanian communists led by Gheorghiu-Dej, who had never been enthusiastic about the HAR, decided to eliminate this “alien body” in 1960.

After the Szekler administrative unit was dismantled, the region’s former capital, Marosvásárhely/Târgu-Mureş, was transformed by the agenda of Romanian national communism. Nicolae Ceauşescu replaced the Hungarian/Szekler élite of the city with a new, ethnic Romanian one. After this, Marosvásárhely/Târgu-Mureş became a bi-national city with a growing Romanian presence. Nevertheless, Ceauşescu’s population policies did not aim to dissolve the Szeklers and their Hungarian cultural identity into the Romanian one, but rather to suppress/subordinate it to that of the ethnic/national majority. According to recent scholarship, during the first ten years of Ceauşescu’s rule a fragile compromise was signed with the Hungarian communist apparatus, allowing bilingualism and the survival of Hungarian social and cultural networks in the newly established (1968) provinces of Harghita and Covasna.81

The relationship between the Romanian state and this minority throughout the last century cannot be regarded as uniform and entirely conflict-dominated. Anthropologists Zoltán A. Biró and Julianna Bodó described well how the socialist system stimulated after the administrative reform of 1968 a local identity, Hargitaiság, with the unveiled aim of weakening the Hungarian master ethnic narrative.82 This fluctuating, often contradictory central policy could also explain why popular dissatisfaction with the Romanian authorities’ actions both in the interwar period and in the communist era did not result in major riots, uprisings or ethnically motivated clashes produced by secessionist movements or terrorist actions (limited violence only occurred during periods of political turbulence or warfare: 1919, 1940, 1944 and 1989–9083). Constraining factors clearly influenced the Szekler population’s passive acceptance of its minority fate after 1918. In addition, Romanian governments soon recognized that the Szeklerland could not be entirely “nationalized” by the establishment of colonizing villages and settlements, discriminative policies against the local majority or forced industrialization.84 The persistent lack of economic development, administrative know-how, and human resources prevented the Romanian state from fully nationalizing this minority-inhabited region. As a result, the Hungarian/Szekler community still numbers roughly 600,000 persons living in a compact ethnic and linguistic mass in the geographic middle of Romania, where they still make up 85 percent of the population of Hargita/Harghita County, 74 percent of Kovászna/Covasna County, and 40 percent of Maros/Mureş County (concentrated mainly in the eastern half of this county and in its capital, Marosvásárhely/Târgu-Mureş). Almost one hundred years after Greater Romania came into being, the Szekler issue still holds the marks of a low-potential conflict and remains politically and culturally unsettled.

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Note on Nomenclature: City and Place Names

For the first reference to each place, we will give alternative versions of the place name for that location. Here are the most frequently mentioned city and other place names in their various forms, for quick reference.

Brassó (Braşov, Romania, German: Kronstadt)

Csík County (Ciuc, Romania)

Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania)

Csíksomlyó (Şumuleu Ciuc, Romania)

Csucsa (Ciucea, Romania)

Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni, Romania)

Hargita County (Harghita, Romania)

Háromszék County (Trei Scaune, Romania)

Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania, German: Klausenburg)

Kovászna County (Covasna, Romania)

Maros County (Mureş, Romania)

Marosvásárhely (Târgu-Mureş, Romania)

Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare, Romania)

Segesvár (Sighişoara, Romania, German: Schässburg)

Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania)

Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania)

Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad, Romania)

Udvarhely County (Odorheiu, Romania)

Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik

Arts and Artists as Intermediaries in Identity Management and Ethnomanagement: Examples from the German Minority in Hungary and the Hungarian and German Minorities in Transylvania

My research on arts and artists in connection with minority issues centers around the fact that both serve as crucial instruments in the creation of the collective identity of a particular ethnic group. Moreover, my results should demonstrate that arts and artists passively are used and actively act as intermediaries in the identity management and ethnomanagement of minorities.

Further issues of this broad heading will be: the visible effects, if an artist belongs to a minority, if an artist feels he or she belongs to a minority, and the influence of this on his or her work. What are the reasons for an organizational commitment to the identity management and ethnomanagement of his/her ‘own ethnic group’ and vice versa?

Answers to these questions are based on research on the German minority in Hungary (Ungarndeutsche) and the Hungarians (erdélyi magyarok) and Germans (Siebenbürger Sachsen, Banater Schwaben) in Transylvania. The examples will be divided on the basis of the different genres of literature and the fine arts: concerning minority literature the focus will be on the interaction of literature and the intentional use of the minority language as an ethnic marker. Furthermore, the reciprocity of minority literature and ethno-political careers will be reflected in some biographical examples. Fine arts have the advantage, unlike literature, that they are a priori a universally understandable medium, and the paper will elaborate on the following topics: the question of which artistic works (e.g. statues, emblems on buildings, monuments) are directly linked to the culture of remembrance of the abovementioned ethnic groups and to what extent is fine arts important as a means of representing the German and Hungarian minorities in public space as a form of the “visual materialization” of ethnic identity and ethnic politics?

Keywords: ethnomanagement, arts, ethnic groups, Germans in Hungary, Hungarians and Germans in Transylvania, minority politics, culture of remembrance

A Theoretical Approach to Identity and Ethnomanagement

A short survey of the notions of identity management and ethnomanagement should be introduced into the theoretical aspects of the topic before I present my research on the role of the arts and artists within the wide range of ethnicity and minority policies.1 This creates a framework for comparison of my examples from literature, the fine arts, and the performing arts in connection with the concept of ethnomanagement, which I have developed in my habilitation thesis.2

Although the two terms, “identity management” and “ethnomanagement” are put on equal footing, I prefer the use of the term ethnomanagement in my research, instead of the notion of identity management, because the common state-of-the-art use of the term identity management was monopolized by the IT branch to delineate the administration of personal data. The first part of the compound ethno-management refers to basic terms like ethnos, ethnic group and ethnicity; simultaneously the term is structured like ethnopolitics or ethnopolicies. The second part of the compound ethno-management refers to the action that what will happen to the first part: the semantic weight of the notion of management finds itself between ‘to service, to guide’ and ‘to administrate, to head’ and, it expresses its close affinity to its close affinity to the term identity management.3

Moreover, this ethnomanagement concept draws attention more to the protagonists, who make use of the constructedness of ethnicity to its full capacity. The protagonists, called ethnomanagers, try to gain influence on important ethnic markers,4 which constitute ethnicity in the end. Both identity management and ethnomanagement are per se active and goal oriented terms or quantities. That means, at a semantic level, that these managers must have had clear intentions.

In my field work the main focus was laid on the protagonists of the societies of the German5 and Hungarian ethnic groups, where ethnomanagers clearly perform their activities, and furthermore, on those of various cultural institutions of the minorities. I ascertained that i) in a narrower sense ethnomanagers intentionally work in the field of minority politics; ii) in a broader sense people who teach in minority schools or work in minority media or in minority arts are themselves actors, as these institutions exert implicit control over minority monitoring and they can be considered ethnomanagers in certain cases.

Another invariable in this context is the adherence to the nation state model and its majority versus minority structure, as well as the assertion of the rights of the particular minority the political participation of minorities within the institutional framework of the nation state.6 The best brief example is the double identity of Germans in Hungary—the German term Ungarndeutsche(r) demonstrates it more descriptively—because any solution that demanded a full commitment to belonging to the minority would misrepresent the everyday culture of the Hungarian–German double identity.7 And one should not ignore the fact that each majority population within a nation state tends towards assimilatory cultural practices, and with regard to the Germans in Hungary Küpper predicts that in the near future the members of the German minority in Hungary will not be fully committed to this minority identity, and even the hitherto “half commitment” would fail to appear.8

So, each ethnic group,9 whether it is a majority or minority, develops specific strategies of ethnomanagement in close interdependence with political, legal and socioeconomic conditions. What they all have in common is that the essential parameters of inclusion and exclusion will be presented as “naturally grown,” very much like the essential ethnic markers, heritage and language. Therefore, ethnomanagers refer simply to these key aspects of preserving their own cultural identity to legitimize ethnomanagement activities in the first place. Furthermore, each symbolic representation of an ethnic group is constituted of overlapping political and cultural symbols, and it seems obvious that this subarea brings the political aspects of ethnomanagement together with arts and artists by developing a particular concern to interfere in the cultural life of the particular ethnic group and its representations.

Examples from German and Hungarian Minority Literature

Concerning the literary genre “minority literature” focus will be laid on the interaction of literature and the intentional use of the minority language as an essential part of ethnomanagement. This mirrors the alternatives of language perception as a dialect and minority language in contrast with majority language, not to mention language as an artistic means of expression and ethnic marker. Further topics and questions include the reciprocity of minority literature concerning the selection of literary themes with regard to the recipients, as well as with regard to subvention funds. Is it enough if an author considers himself “deutsch”, or is it advantageous to address issues concerning the culture or the past of the German minority in Hungary or Transylvania—and does this also apply to the Hungarians in Transylvania and the use of the Hungarian language in literature? However, I do not intend to become entangled in a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of fictional versus non-fictional means of expression.

My few examples begin with the work of a Nobel Prize winner. In 2009, when the German author Herta Müller, who was born in the Romanian village Nitzkydorf, won the Nobel Prize, the Germans in Romania had set a process into operation that aims to monopolize her and her literature for their own ethnopolitical purposes. Hence, Paul Philippi, former chairman and since 1998 honorary chairman of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (Landesforum or just Forum), satirized this monopolizing strategy in his speech given to delegates of the Landesforum in October 2009:

And yes: ‘We’ did not only get the Nobel Prize, which spans the world, but also the most famous German award for literature, the Büchnerpreis – again won by a compatriot from Hermannstadt, who left us a long time ago: Oskar Pastior, who, much as Herta from Nitzkydorf did later, had berthed in Berlin. […] Highlights for us, certainly not by ourselves, highlights by single persons, who belong to us. We, the Forum, may possibly benefit from it, but in relation we contributed little or nothing to it. (Translated by the author.)10

These words should dampen the demonstrations of self-praise by members of the Forum, which rose after these prizes had been given to the writers, who were for them still Germans from Romania in spite of the fact that they had emigrated to Berlin. And Philippi expresses his conviction that the delegates should focus on their obligation to work harder in their political business of ethnomanagement, instead of resting on other’s laurels.

The quotation also shows the commingling of the literature from (famous) members of a certain ethnic group with the political ethnomanagement of the same group. I do not want to dwell on the well-researched work or life of Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. Instead I give a few examples from the field of the minority literature of Germans in Hungary and their relationships to the ethnomanagement of the German Minority in Hungary (Ungarndeutsche). The following examples show that there have been close connections between production preconditions of German minority literature in Hungary and the ethnomanagement of the German minority. In 1974, after a pause of three decades after World War II, the literary section of the Democratic Alliance of Germans in Hungary11 published an anthology entitled Tiefe Wurzeln [Deep Roots]. Alfred Coulins stated later that this anthology had the ambition of setting a literary and a political goal.12 At the time of publication, many hopes were pinned on that anthology: above all, that it might give birth to an independent literature of the Hungarian–Germans within German literature, and the Democratic Alliance would have played the role of the midwife. Given this, the acceptance of Tiefe Wurzeln was euphoric in Hungary. It culminated in the principal topic of love of the German mother tongue and, at the same time, the Hungarian home.13

During the second half of the 1970s the Democratic Alliance of Germans in Hungary published two further literary anthologies entitled Die Holzpuppe [Wood Doll] (1977) and Bekenntnisse-Erkenntnisse [Denominations-Knowledge] (1979). The reviewer Heidi Ritter assigned the leading role to the Alliance of the Germans in Hungary, when it was about encouraging creativeness within the German minority in Hungary.14

From the perspective of the present the goal of creating an independent Hungarian–German literature within German literature was unsuccessful on the German literature market. This was primarily because the subjects of the Hungarian–German literature innolved the minority itself. This limited the potential readership. Literary forms of expression flattened out because of low demand. Regarding the Hungarian–German literature of the 1980s, János Szabó contended that the publication of crude texts and the absence of a functional public would have made everything more difficult, an overcautious rather than constructive criticism.15 If that was not bad enough, at that time the Hungarian–German author Georg Wittmann postulated that for writers of the German minority in Hungary it was most important to place the literature in the service of Hungarian Deutschtum.16 That claim suggests, more or less, that writers should not only subordinate their literature to Hungarian–German ethnomanagement, but their literature should obviously be even more one-sidedly part of Hungarian–German ethnomanagement itself. In contrast, the present generation of young Hungarian–German authors is well aware of the debate about their artistic and sociopolitical significance. The Verband ungarndeutscher Autoren und Künstler (VUdAK)17 holds workshops every year for that purpose. Furthermore, the Hungarian–German author Angela Korb, who is also an active member of VUdAK, assumed during an interview with me that of the 20 male and female authors within VUdAK there are only two professional writers.18

The targeted use of the language is arbitrary in the focus of a literature of a language minority. The Germans in Hungary have the following options: i) German (Standard German); ii) German (dialectical versions of German – Danube-Swabian dialects); iii) Hungarian.19 Angela Korb noted that dialect versions of German were used more and more rarely and that they served mainly as regional markers.20

The most famous Hungarian–German author was Valeria Koch. She wrote her poems in both languages, German and Hungarian. In the 1980s an academic discussion on the translatability of poetry began, because Koch provoked translation studies in the sense of which word choice she used in which language.21 But it was not only through this bilingual approach that Valeria Koch created a caesura in the history of Hungarian–German literature: she used a different approach from the working man, home-bound, or dialect-authors, who “produced literature” for their consumers.22 Since Valeria Koch rose to prominence, the whole spectrum has shifted. The German philologist Eszter Propszt identifies this shift: “von der Wir-Dichtung der Alten zu der Ich-Dichtung der Jüngsten”23 [from we-poetry of the old generation to me-poetry of the youngest; translated by the author].

In the 1980s the group of Hungarian–German writers that took this direction included e.g. Nelu Bradean-Ebinger, Martha Fata, Claus Kotz, Valeria Koch and Josef Michelisz. In spite of the (assumed) content-related opening of the Hungarian–German minority literature, the audience remained small, and even Valeria Koch could not succeed on the all-German literature market. It sounds like something of a sour grapes excuse when German philologists in Hungary claim today that Valeria Koch did not aspire to make that breakthrough.24

The situation on the literature market did not change until recent times: in her 2006 dissertation on the history of the development of Hungarian–German literature Rita Pável observed that it was an apodictic minority literature. Furthermore, Pável restrains the efficiency of the literature in relation to the local environment. The literature of the German minority in Hungary only exercised local tasks and responsibilities of literature.25 Nevertheless, Hungarian–German literature from her point of view was a corporate body of language identity, and minority literature was still able to play the role of a cultural bridge.26 This awareness coincides with the work of Eszter Propszt, who published a monograph on Hungarian–German literature 2007. She perceives, however, a considerable caesura between the identity characteristics that are determined by the Hungarian language and those that are determined by the German language: in recent times the identity construction of Germans in Hungary has been much more complexly nuanced by the Hungarian language. If anywhere, texts in German have realized their function as a means of identity creation in Hungary with regard to the collective identity of the Germans of Hungary.27 This is the outcome of the development of literary production on the one side and changing language and reading practices of the Germans in Hungary over the course of recent decades. This observation is—from my point of view—another basic requirement for observing the intermediary function of Hungarian–German literature within the larger framework of Hungarian–German ethnomanagement.

And now, let us expand on the activities of Hungarian–German ethnomanagement and their interplay with “their own” minority literatures: the interrelation between the umbrella organization Landesselbstverwaltung der Ungarndeutschen (LdU) [National Self-government of the Hungarian Germans], Magyarországi Németek Országos Önkormányzata in Hungarian, and the literary production of German writers in Hungary is plainly apparent. The aforementioned anthologies and further essential works were published by the LdU itself, so we can conclude with some assurance that the authors accepted that their texts would be published by a forum that is above all responsible for Hungarian–German minority politics. Generally speaking, these anthologies suggest an “ethnic corporate identity” of Hungarian–German writers. One may assume that this was just what the National Minority Self Government (LdU) had intended, and the willingness of the authors to publish their texts in an anthology under the label “ungarndeutsche Literatur” (Hungarian–German literature) meets these requirements.

The most intensive interrelationship between Hungarian–German ethnomanagement and the minority’s creative minds is given in the aforementioned association VUdAK, which was founded in 1992. One main goal was to bring together authors and artists of German ethnic origin for joint workshops and to establish different publication platforms for authors and artists—from the perspective of the ethnomanagement instigated integration into the structures of the LdU. The paper Signale gives an overview of the various activities of VudAK. It is released annually in December as a supplement of the Hungarian–German weekly Neue Zeitung.28 In the case of poetry, VUdAK assigns itself the role of canonicalization of Hungarian–German literature.29 This approach seems to be in accordance with ethnomanagement, because the literary canon is ethnically motivated: boundaries are limited by Germanhood in a Hungarian–German sense.

Signale 2009 lists 12 volumes altogether in the literary book series of VUdAK, Reihe Literatur [Literature Series].30 This series provides an opportunity for publication for authors writing in German because, since the time of the political transformation, the Hungarian government has withdrawn a lot of government support programs for publication houses and the distribution of literature, as well as for authors themselves. A minimum of support comes from German speaking countries, and this might be one more reason for the formation of such a closed production-reception circuit (of which Hungarian–German literature is an example).31

With regard to “competitiveness” Angela Korb stated that members of the youngest generation of writers are too anxious to encourage one another.32 Generally speaking, philologists do not expect a high degree of competitiveness in the literature of minorities: e.g. the Transylvanian scholar of German literature Michael Markel explains this lack of competitiveness in the small number of active writers, and he mentions that a good working climate depends on the number of active writers, because it would advance competitiveness at least.33

Korb also stated that there was strong social control in the literature of minorities, and Hungary itself was easy to overlook.34 Therefore, the National Minority Self Government (LdU) was able to influence Hungarian–German literature easily via subventions and valuation. Even recently both elements, social control and the exercise of influence from LdU, are essential to the choice of subjects in literature. This leads to a strong interrelationship between the identity constructions of the Hungarian–German minority and Hungarian–German literature. Eszter Propszt analyzed the praxis of that interdiscourse and observed the use of German in contrast to the use of Hungarian in Hungarian–German literature:

Identity construction in the (Hungarian) German language goes far beyond simplistic problem reduction with regard to the suspension of fundamental practices […] identity construction in the (Hungarian) German language does not require such a complex socialization of the readers as in the Hungarian language.35

Her conclusion contains considerable significance regarding the reciprocity between Hungarian–German literature and its readers. It also mirrors the present situation, in which the younger generation of Germans in Hungary speaks Hungarian better than German. Therefore, it is not surprising that the German language stands symbolically for simplifying social practices, and this goes hand in hand with the demands of many of the recipients, who still claim that Hungarian–German subjects should be written about in understandable German, and not as part of the German of literary arts.

Another example related to Hungarian–German ethnomanagement affects the search for and recruitment of talented aspiring writers. The primary responsibility in that case is with—not surprisingly—the National Minority Self Government. The LdU tries to create loyalty to their “own” institution as early as possible, and tries to bind pupils and teenagers who write in German to its causes. This takes place primarily in the Nationalitätenschulen (minority schools under the rule of the Hungarian–German minority). Another instrument with which to find young writers is the annual Valeria Koch-Preis [Valeria Koch Award], an essay and diploma thesis competition in German that is open exclusively to adolescents of Hungarian–German origin. The 2011 Valeria Koch Award, for instance, was titled: “Was bedeutet mir, Ungarndeutsche/r zu sein?”36 [What does it mean to me to be Hungarian–German?] This remarkable title is obviously self-referential, because it urges adolescents of the Hungarian–German minority to reflect on their Hungarian–German identity construction. Another aspect linking the Valeria Koch Award closely to Hungarian–German ethnomanagement is institutionally based: the nomination process for this award is highly bureaucratic, e.g. the school nominates the relevant pupils, and academics can be nominated by their department chairs or by a local minority’s self-government or Hungarian–German society.

As stated above, the ethnomanagement of the Germans in Hungary and Romania tried more or less to emphasize a self-contained local originality within the field of German literature and, in contrast with the ethnomanagement of the Hungarians in Transylvania (erdélyi magyarok), tried to affiliate the Hungarian minority literature with the overall literary production in Hungarian. Ádám Bodor puts the position of Hungarian literary studies in a nutshell when he suggests that people have attempted to “smuggle” (visszacsempészni in orig.) the oeuvre of Hungarian authors who lived or live outside of Hungary “back” to the Hungarian literary canon.37 This demand corresponds well with the fact that the Erdélyi Magyar Írók Ligája38 [Transylvanian Hungarian Writers’ League] (E-MIL), which represents the interests of the Hungarian authors in Transylvania, works together with the Magyar Írószövetség [Hungarian Writers’ Union] in Budapest. Moreover, the E-MIL is financed by the Communitas foundation, which is under the roof of the Romániai Magyar Demokrata Szövetség [Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania] (RMDSZ), the political representation of the Hungarian minority in Romania and, of course, in Transylvania.

The most significant difference between German authors in Hungary or Romania and Hungarian authors in Transylvania is illustrated by the fact that the last two chairmen of the above named RMDSZ are poets.

Firstly, I want to name the lyricist, literary critic and translator Béla Markó who entered the executive board of the RMDSZ in 1992 and in 1996 was given the Hungarian József Attila Award for literature. Béla Markó was chairman of the Union from 1993 to 2011, and during his long political career he held the office of a Minister of State in the Tăriceanu cabinet (2004–2007) and Deputy Premier in the Boc government (2009–2012). He wrote his first poetry in 1967 and his first volume of poems, entitled A szavak városában [In the City of Words], was published in 1974. The long list of publications includes the anthology Szétszedett világ. Egybegyűjtött versek, 1967–1995 [Torn World. Collected Poems, 1967–1995], published in 2000, and his recent volumes of poetry, entitled Visszabontás [Reinstate] 2011, Hasra esett a Maros (Gyermekversek) [The Marosch Fallen on the Belly, Poems for Children] 2012, and from same year the volume with Haiku poems entitled Boldog Sziszyphos [Lucky Sisyphos].39 Furthermore, an anthology entitled A feledékeny Európa [A Forgetful Europe], which contains Béla Markó’s speeches, lectures and interviews from 1990 to 1999, was published in 2000.

Secondly, Hunor Kelemen who succeeded him as the chairman of the RMDSZ is a lyricist and poet, too. Kelemen has been a member of the Romanian chamber of deputies since 2000, and he held the office of Minister of Culture during the Boc and Ungureanu governments (2009–2012). In 1995 Hunor Kelemen published his first volume of poetry, entitled Mínuszévek [Minusyears], and he was awarded with the debut prize from the Writers’ Union of Romania (Uniunea Scriitorilor din România) in 1996. A second volume of poetry followed in 2001, entitled A Szigetlakó [The Islander]. Between these two volumes of poetry, in 1999, Kelemen published a novel entitled A madárijesztők halála [The Scarecrows’ Death].40

Another character of Hungarian ethnomanagement in Transylvania is the lyricist and comedy writer György Csávosi who simultaneously fills the position of chairman of the Romániai Magyar Gazdák Egyesülete [Society of Hungarian Farmers in Romania]. He also participates in meetings of the Erdélyi Magyar Egyeztető Tanács [Consensus Forming Council of the Hungarians in Transylvania], which are of strategic relevance to the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Hungarian lyricists and poets who are directly involved in minority politics include the following individual: from 1992 to 1996 the lyricist Lajos Magyari held the position of senator for the comitate (county) of Kovászna in the Romanian Parliament; István Ferenc, who has published eight volumes of poetry, holds a position on the board of the RMDSZ in the comitate of Csík in the heart of the Szeklerland (Székelyföld). The graphic artist, poet and journalist Éva Emese Gál is a collaborator of the RMDSZ in the Szeklerland as well, and she is also a member of the Hungarian Writers’ Union. The lyricist and dramatist Géza Szőcs has published more than ten volumes of poetry since 1975. In 1990 and 1991 he was General Secretary (főtitkár) of the RMDSZ, and until 1992 he also held a seat as a Senator in the Romanian Parliament. From 1993 to 2010 Géza Szőcs edited the periodical A Dunánál [At the Danube] in Hungary. In May 2010 Géza Szőcs was appointed to the position of State Secretary for Culture at the Ministry of National Resources, and in June 2012 he resigned. His example indicates that the combination of being a Hungarian writer, i.e. writing in Hungarian, together with experiences in Hungarian minority politics in Romania may form an adequate basis to be lifted on the shield in a Hungarian Ministry.

Contrary to an increasing Hungarian national ideology apostrophizing the Hungarian poets as “defenders” of the Hungarian language and culture in Hungary, the bilingual situation in Transylvania generally affects the recent Hungarian literature scene more and more, because the corporate feeling of the Hungarian minority, which was strengthened during the period of political oppression in Socialist Romania, loses its significance and as a consequence the production of literature is shifting towards individuality. The Transylvanian Hungarian Writers’ League (E-MIL) nowadays looks to a greater extent at the quality of the Hungarian literature than the commitment of the author the Hungarian (minority) identity. Nevertheless, one should not forget that E-MIL stands close to the Hungarian Writers’ Union, as mentioned above, and this of course “has a political background,” as noted by the Transylvanian poet Noémi László, who grew up in Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca, in an interview.41

A different group of writers comes from the elder generation and it ties into the more traditional local cultural backgrounds called “Transylvanism.” It is connected with poets like Árpád Farkas, Aladár Lászlóffi and with the Székelyföld [Szeklerland], where Transylvanian Hungarianness is related to the notion of a “preserved Hungarian language,” “pure soul” and “true Hungarianness.” As a reaction to this Transylvanism, a workshop of young poets under the leadership of the publishing house Előretolt Helyőrség [Avantgarde] goes in the opposite popular, frivolous and sometimes radical direction, and they introduce primarily erotic topics. Until recent times this workshop and publishing house has served as a springboard for young authors in Transylvania.

In recent times one also notes an opening and liberalization towards the Romanian audience, in literature as well as in works for the theater. Regarding this, I continue with a comment of Transylvanian author Imre József Balázs:

If we invite authors to our Literature Academy whose books are also available in Romanian, such as Ádám Bodor, György Dragomán or Attila Bartis, we of course organize a reading in a book store of Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca for a Romanian audience as well. There are always 30-40 enthusiasts of literature.42

János Dénes Orbán, a Brassó/Braşov born poet, former leader of E-MIL and present owner of the coffee shop “Bulgakov” in Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca, stated that under communism the majority of the literature written in Transylvania was translated into both languages. In an interview conducted by Judit Schoblocher in November 2011 Orbán noted that in present-day Romanian literature was also translated, and “Romanians are not that active, but they also do some translating.”43

Examples from the Fine Arts of the German and Hungarian Minorities

In contrast to literature, the fine arts have the advantage that they are a priori a universally ‘understandable’ medium,44 and the reciprocity between minority artist and minority audience therefore appears different. The perceived value of the ethnic marker language—which is more or less hyperbolically represented in relation with language minorities—levels off, and there is no further need to deliberate over the question of local dialect versus standard language as another marker. The following examples should not lead to the use of categorizations like ‘folk art’ versus fine arts, and neither do I wish address the question of whether typical ungarndeutsche, rumäniendeutsche or erdélyi magyar (folk) art exists at all.

The relationship between ethnomanagement and the arts is primarily established by the ethnic origins of the artists. Furthermore, the examples illustrate the relationship between the self-localization of the artist within the minority and the thematic motifs of his/her art. The acceptance of a public contract often goes hand in hand with the choice of the motif, and it is therefore frequently rooted somewhere in the culture of remembrance of the minority. Another form of acceptance is given by any system of subventions coming from the public sector, with its contemporary political and sometimes ideological and ethnically motivated guidelines prescribing which types of arts and which artists are eligible for subsidies (and which are not). So far, this is another obvious aspect of ethnomanagement.

In 1992 VUdAK was constituted as an association of the former Ungarndeutscher Schriftstellerverband [Hungarian–German writers association founded in 1990], together with Hungarian–German artists. As is the case for Hungarian–German authors, for some of them VUdAK is the closest tie to the LdU. As was mentioned above, the umbrella organization LdU subsidizes VUdAK activities. Concerning the literature series, VUdAK set up the publication series Kunst [Arts].45 The Hungarian–German Neue Zeitung reports weekly on current and ongoing exhibitions. The abovementioned annual revue Signale gives a broader overview.

The following two examples will show certain interlinkages between ethnomanagement and the fine arts, embedded within the framework of the culture of remembrance of the German minority in Hungary:

Figure 1. Ferenc Trischler, bronze sculpture in the courtyard of the Lenau house in Pécs/Fünfkirchen, erected in 1995. Photo courtesy of the author

The statue cast in bronze refers to the expulsion (kitelepítés in Hungarian) of the Germans from Hungary, which took place from the end of World War II to June 1946.46 The sculptor, Ferenc Trischler, is of Hungarian–German origin and the statue itself was commissioned for the Hungarian–German cultural center Lenau house in Pécs/Fünfkirchen.

Trischler was born in 1945 in Németbóly/Deutsch-Bohl (today Bóly/Bohl). He first served his apprenticeship as a house painter. Then, after his friend, the sculptor János Meszlényi, had persuaded him to pursue a career as an artist, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he got his degree in 1975. The human “form” is at the center of his work, and his sculptures express symbolic and allegorical concepts. In most cases Trischler uses bronze. He created many works for public spaces and his bronze sculptures can be found all over Hungary, but primarily in the southwestern part of the country, named Dél-Dunántúl [Southern Transdanubia]. The bronze sculptures are commissioned for communities or public institutions. Ferenc Trischler calls up symbolic and allegorical concepts of Hungarian history by depicting important personalities, such as Szent István király [King St. Stephen] (Heves and Döbrönte, both 2001), István Széchenyi (Pécs 2010), József Rippl-Rónai (Kaposvár 2009), Turul and the Trianon monument (Lajosmizse 2001), and Mátyás király [King Matthew] (Lajosmizse 2003).47

The second example concerns the memorial in Elek,48 a small town in southeastern Hungary close to the Romanian border. The bronze sculptures were inaugurated on August 18, 2001 and commemorate the 5,000 Hungarian–Germans who had to leave Elek in 1946 forevermore. The sculptor, Sándor Kligl, is also of Hungarian–German origin.

After the inauguration ceremony the issue of the Neue Zeitung wrote the following on the memorial: “[…] the stylized street front of a farm house, where the avenging angel stands proudly triumphant in front of the home of a Danube-Svabian family at the very last moment before they were displaced.” (Translated by the author)49

Sándor Kligl calls himself Kliegl, too. The second form is the German spelling of his name and in this way he may symbolically switch between his Hungarian and his German identities.50 Kligl completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1975. Like Ferenc Trischler, Kligl has also created many bronze sculptures for the public spaces of Hungarian communities. Furthermore, in connection with the culture of remembrance, Kligl is a specialist in bronze memorial plaques (emléktáblák in Hungarian),51 which have been installed in public spaces of Hungarian communities, too. The motifs of the sculptures and memorial plaques were commissioned for the officials and are interwoven with motifs of Hungarian history. Sándor Kligl has created, for example, the following bronze sculptures: Kovács Béla (Budapest, Kossuth Square, 2002); József Attila (in a center of a group with altogether five sculptures, Hódmezővásárhely, 2005) as well as King Stephen and his wife Gizella (Szeged, 1996).52

Returning to the close connection between works of art—here within the framework of the culture of remembrance—of Hungarian–German artists and Hungarian–German ethnomanagement I would like to give another citation from the inauguration ceremony of the memorial in Elek:

The local German minority self-government and the German society for the Cultivation of Traditions were glad that the chairman of LdU Otto Heinek and Agnes Szauer, senior councilor in the Department for National and Ethnic Minorities, were among them. (Translated by the author.)53

Both examples of sculptors demonstrate the connecting line between the history of the German minority in Hungary—in both cases the traumatic displacement of the Germans after World War II—and the commission of the artists, as well as the Hungarian and the Hungarian–German public, and, last but not least, Hungarian–German ethnomanagement.

At the Hungarian Day of Painting in 2011 in Újbuda art historian Zoltán Vécsi Nagy stated that during the Ceauşescu era the Hungarian artists in Romania were caught between a rock and a hard place because the nationalist education policy at the time eclipsed the minority arts on the one side of the border and the art historians in Hungary were not interested in Hungarian art outside of the borders of the state.54 After the breakdown of communism and during the transformation period one observes a ‘rediscovery’ of the historical past and national affiliation in contemporary Hungarian minority art, if as a supplementary aspect. The main focus—also in the identity formation of minority arts—still refers to the relationship between belonging to a minority and being an artist. Moreover, everything together has to be considered with the role and capabilities of the arts within a certain society and its political and cultural institutions.

The outstanding institution supporting Hungarian fine arts in Transylvania is the Barabás Miklós Céh [Miklós Barabás Guild] (BMC) in Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca. It serves officially as the Erdélyi Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyesület [Transylvanian Hungarian Art Society], founded after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 by Károly Kós and Sándor Szonay. The foundation of this BMC was necessary because of basic disparities between Hungarian and Romanian art history. It was simply a question of ethnic boundaries between the two different ethnic groups. It was the history of the arts in general, because the Hungarian art school orientated itself around the Munich school, in contrast with the Romanian art school, which was more tied to Paris. Hungarian art always tended to constructiveness with even more temperament than the German role model, and later on Hungarian art took over elements from the Novacentist school in Rome. So Miklós Jakobovits, the chairman of the BMC, which was reinstalled in 1994 after a long mandatory break, argues that the present value system of the BMC is still founded on this historical basis, but nowadays a Hungarian heritage is not required to become a member of the guild, and it is not required to have graduated from an art academy. Today, the Jury of the BMC is more or less responsible for the recruitment of new members, and they tend to focus on Transylvanian traditions, although they remain aware, of course, that art is international, and Transylvanian artists sometimes became famous in foreign countries.55

The BMC is a member of the Hungarian umbrella society Magyar Képzőművészek és Iparművészek Szövetsége [Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists] (MKISZ) in Budapest,56 but in Transylvania it maintains close relationships with Romanian art associations. The art historian, Júlia Németh, vice chairperson of the BMC, argues that Transylvanian Hungarian artists had to fight against stereotypes like “conservative,” “traditional” or “hermetical” for a long time. At the moment the attribute “Transylvanian,” together with the noun art, may “rather positively imply a crossover of cultures boding something good.” In this context “Transylvanian Hungarian fine arts” (in the Hungarian sense of erdélyi magyar) is at present more a “cultural historical notion, and the formerly stressed attribute Hungarian is shifting towards Transylvanian.”57

From the Romanian point of view art critics nowadays do not only “accept” Hungarian arts from Transylvania, they subsume it easily under the notion of “Romanian art.” Moreover, Hungarian Transylvanian artists can get a lifetime achievement award from Romanian institutions, and they can represent Romania abroad at exhibitions. Under these conditions and preconditions, even the local connections to the abovementioned “Transylvanism” recede within the younger generation of Transylvanian Hungarian artists and open up to the question as to whether nationality will work as a group regulative in a globalizing European society. As an example of an artist collective, one might mention the Bázis csoport [Basis Group] in Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca, where the absence of official funding led to the formation of this self-organized group. In the beginning, in 2008, the artists Zsolt Berszán, István Betuker, István Duka Kudor and Szabolcs Veres rented the buildings of a bankrupt factory from the (at the time) new owners. The buildings serve as galleries and offer space for dance and theater performances. Furthermore, the Basis Group publishes the bilingual Bázis magazine in Hungarian and Romanian, concentrating on critics and art reviews as well as on their international network. The quick high profile of the Basis Group resulted in the submission of many applications for exhibitions (submissions continue to arrive). Nevertheless, the Basis Group is self-organized, and the main part of the costs could only be covered by the sale on the international market of their own artworks.

Performing Arts

Another example of an essential link between arts and Hungarian–German ethnomanagement is the Deutsche Bühne Ungarn/Magyarorzági Német Színház [German Theater in Hungary] (DBU) in the small town of Szekszárd in the Dél-Dunántúl area. German performing arts started there in 1982 on the bilingual (German/Hungarian) stage Schaubühne [Playhouse] placed in the Mihály Babits Kulturhaus [Mihály Babits Arts Centre]. The name has been transformed into DBU in 1989 and the DBU has moved in the current location in 1994.58

Figure 2. Main entrance of the DBU in Szekszárd, which is based in the building of the former Világ Mozgó [World Cinema]. Photo courtesy of the author

The theater celebrated its 25th anniversary in June 2009. So, Otto Heinek, the chairman of the LdU, underlined the important role of the theater in his commemorative speech, and he mentioned that it was not only “an integral part of our Hungarian–German cultural landscape but also an important column of our cultural autonomy”59 (translated by the author).

The DBU is the only professional German speaking minority theater. Furthermore, it is integrated into the theatrical landscape in Hungary. When I visited the Deutsche Bühne in 2008 it employed 35 people of Hungarian, Hungarian–German, German, or Romanian–German ethnic origin. The theater management wants to give a vital example to preserve the German language. Every year the ensemble tours Hungary, holding about 40 performances. The language of the performances is strictly Hoch-Deutsch [Standard German], and interpreting equipment with written captions in Hungarian guarantees that everyone in Hungary can understand the plays.

The theater manager Ildikó Frank (an actress from 2001–2004 and manager since 2004) characterizes the principal role of the DBU: “If we do our job well, we’ll win supporters for the German language, identity and culture.”60 A very close connection to Hungarian–German ethnomanagement is based on the fact that Ildikó Frank is the daughter of Gábor Frank, who was the director of the Valeria Koch Schulzentrum [V. K. School Centre] in Pécs before he became director of the Ungarndeutsches Pädagogisches Institut (UdPI) [Hungarian–German Pedagogical Institute] in Pécs; above all he is vice chairman of the LdU for education and he was for many years chairman of the Komitatsselbstverwaltung [self-government of the county] of the Hungarian–Germans in the county of Baranya/Branau in Pécs. Ildikó Frank stated in the interview that she had learned a lot from her father in connection with German with regard to the Hungarian–German identity, and that his experience had had a positive influence on her work.61 This father-daughter constellation shows symbolically the tight-knit inner structure of Hungarian–German ethnomanagement.

The Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca has a long lasting tradition since it was founded in 1792. The house hosts the theater and the opera together, and the opera has been a separate institution since 1948. After the transition, the Kolozsvári Állami Magyar Színház [Hungarian National Theatre in Kolozsvár] tried to tread a new path, breaking with the tradition and becoming predominantly an instrument for national education seeking to evolve into a theater that interacts with the audience. Therefore, three to four times a year the theater management invites local or even foreign directors, who have a talk with the audience after the performance. The language in the theater is Hungarian, but the performances are subtitled in Romanian or if necessary in foreign languages, like English, French or German.62 These dynamics resulted in a move away from local Transylvanian or Hungarian nationalist attitudes, and this was praised in the Romanian press and also won the theater fully booked performances. The writer, art director and advisor of the Hungarian national theater in Kolozsvár, András Visky, stresses that “it has been good to identify with being a city theater and not necessarily a minority theater, because it has been good for the minority to communicate to others and to prevail against each form of closedness.”63 The financial needs of the Hungarian national theater are covered mainly by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, as well as the RMDSZ, the Hungarian political party in Romania.

Another quite different Hungarian theater in Transylvania is the Váróterem Projekt [Waiting Room Project], which calls itself Alternatív színházi törekvések Erdély szívében [Alternative Theatrical Ambitions in the Heart of Transylvania].64 The Váróterem Projekt was founded in 2009 in Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca by Zsolt Csepeli, András Visky and Levente Imecs, three friends who met at the Acting school of the University. Since 2010 the Váróterem Projekt has been an official society, and the collaborators are members of this society. At the end of 2011 the staff included seven actors and eight other staff members, such as the dramaturge and the costume designer. In accordance with the financial resources, two new performances per year are within a realistic framework. All performances are in Hungarian, subtitled in Romanian. There is no direct cooperation with the abovementioned Hungarian Theater in Kolozsvár, although András Visky, one of the founders of the Váróterem Projekt, is the son of the homonymous art director of the Hungarian Theater. Levente Imecs put the artistic potential of the Váróterem Projekt in a nutshell:

I am sure that we are able to create performances to our tastes. Classical theater will be performed perfectly by the Hungarian Theater in Kolozsvár. We are not able and we do not want to reach that level, and therefore it is evident that our path is marked by ”direct indirectness”.65

Moreover, the Váróterem Projekt tours with its performances in Transylvania and Hungary, and they participate in festivals too, but when they are asked to perform traditional or popular plays, they refuse.

Conclusions

Each of the three categories—literature, the fine arts and the performing arts—exemplifies a different approach to the ethnomanagement of the German minority in Hungary and the Hungarians and Germans in Transylvania. The poets are strongly obligated to the minority language, and this is likely the key to the question as to why in many cases they have readily assumed the role of sustainers in the sense of “a minority can only survive as long as the minority language is used.” German and Hungarian ethnomanagement takes advantage of the writers’ language dependence and ennobles the poets in this role. But writers do not lodge any (independent culture) protest against this ennoblement. One of the main reasons for this might be that many of them are in certain ways dependent on subsidies granted directly by ethnomanagement societies like the LdU and the Forum to the Germans and the RMDSZ to the Hungarians.

The institutions of the performing arts, namely the Deutsche Bühne Ungarn and the Hungarian Theater in Kolozsvár, are placed in the role of cultural sustainer too, and in comparison to semi-professional writers or artists they are even more dependent on subsidies. Therefore, one observes a much closer conjunction of the German and Hungarian minority theaters to ethnomanagement on a monetary basis. The Váróterem Projekt works in a manner that is more or less out of the ordinary, although it is also a means of embodying and transmitting the Hungarian language in Transylvania via the performing arts.

This leads us to the fine arts, which have no particular obligation to the German or Hungarian language. The ethnic marker heritage with regard to the belonging to the German or Hungarian minority is the key to ethnomanagement. My two Hungarian–German examples, however, show that the abovementioned sculptors created their bronze memorials in the majority of cases for the culture of remembrance of Hungary—I intentionally listed many other bronze memorials of the sculptors in this paper—and only in very special cases for the culture of remembrance of the German minority in Hungary.

An examination of the work of Transylvanian Hungarian artists shows the differences in the sequence of generations of artists. The elder and midlife generation sticks to Hungarian ethnic affiliations and to local “Transylvanism”. The younger generation mirrors much more a social community that has been formed by Transylvanian cultural diversity, where ethnicity stands for one element within the increasingly individualized forms of artistic expression.

As a last note, I wish to underline that poets, artists and performers resemble one another predominantly in their economic relationships to “their” minorities’ ethnomanagement, and furthermore, this dependent relationship is in most cases stronger than any subordination under the terms and conditions of ethnicity.

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Leslie M. Waters

Learning and Unlearning Nationality: Hungarian National Education in Reannexed Felvidék, 1938–1944

Educational policy was a fundamental component of the integration of reannexed Felvidék (present-day southern Slovakia) into the Hungarian state between 1938 and 1944. In fact, the army of teachers and administrators deployed in Felvidék played a larger role in the reintegration process than Hungary’s occupying military force. The Hungarian administration’s aims were twofold: on the one hand, to instill loyalty and service to the Hungarian nation and participation in the further success of Hungary’s revisionist project, and on the other hand, to delegitimize the previous regime and encourage students to reject Czechoslovak identity. This process revolved heavily around language, making Hungarian the primary language of instruction in most of the region’s schools, devaluing knowledge of Slovak, and restricting Slovak-language educational institutions. For students in the region, the change in territorial administration resulted in a transformation in their language use. With these linguistic advantages, the Hungarian administration made tangible strides toward reintegrating Felvidék’s Hungarian students into the national body, but struggled to do so with minority students.

Keywords: Hungary, Slovaks, Minority Policy, Identity, Education

Introduction

When Hungary reoccupied southern Felvidék [former Upper Hungary]1 in 1938, educational leaders had two goals for the youth now under their authority: for them to “unlearn” the Czechoslovak nationality allegedly forced upon them during the twenty years of Czechoslovak rule, and in its place to learn to identify as Hungarian citizens. As schools, school districts, and curricula were reconstituted, loyalty and service to the nation became the educational focus throughout the regained territory. But there was more than the hearts and minds of the youth of Felvidék at stake: successful reintegration of the region would help justify Hungary’s further territorial aspirations. If the people of the territory could be effectively and happily brought back into the state, Hungary’s case for border changes in Ruthenia, Transylvania, and Voivodina stood a much better chance in the court of international public opinion. The government believed that Felvidék’s inhabitants would have to be re-taught loyalty to the Hungarian state and how to be properly Hungarian. The Hungarian administration used the region’s school system as the main vehicle for this endeavor.

Both the larger educational history of Felvidék and the pedagogical methods employed by the Hungarian government during the reintegration period indicate that national leaders in East Central Europe strongly believed in employing education in the service of their national agendas. Perhaps they would have agreed with philosopher Ernest Gellner’s assessment that “the monopoly of education is now more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence.”2 Indeed, an army of teachers and school administrators played a larger role in the reintegration process than Hungary’s limited occupying military force. Education was also a feasible antidote to minority agitation. Nationalism theorist Anthony D. Smith’s theory of “civic education” argues that “if ethnic cleavages are to be eroded in the longer term, [. . .] this can be done only by a pronounced emphasis on inculcating social mores in a spirit of civic equality and fraternity.”3 Hungary strove to use education to impart Hungarian mores and achieve a sense of fraternity, but failed fully to grasp what civic equality for its new minorities would entail. Thus, Hungarian treatment of minorities in the educational realm was riddled with inconsistencies and suspicion. Standing in the way of fraternity on Hungarian terms was a history of territorial back-and-forth that brought frequent and radical changes to the educational system in Felvidék. Each new regime signaled change in the region’s political jurisdiction, privileged ethnicity, and educational policy, and a new blueprint for the upbringing of the next generation.

Transforming education was equally about the calculus of language use. The school system exhibited tremendous success in eroding Slovak language use in the seven years of Hungarian administration. It was largely a battle of attrition, as young Hungarian students entering school received no Slovak language instruction, older Hungarian students no longer perceived benefits of continuing to learn Slovak, and Slovak or nationally indifferent parents chose the dominant Hungarian schooling.4 With these linguistic advantages, revisionists could feel confident that they had turned back the tide of two decades of Czechoslovak schooling and succeeding in reintegrating Felvidék into the Hungarian student and national body.

Nationalist Education in Hungary and Czechoslovakia

Hungarian education policy in Felvidék after the reannexation was formulated against a long backdrop of nationalist competition. From the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, education was a keystone of the Hungarian government’s Magyarization program, aimed at assimilating the kingdom’s substantial minority populations to the dominant Hungarian culture and language. It was hoped that teaching a distinctly Hungarian curriculum would unify the diverse kingdom within a singular political nation. The assimilationist educational policies had mixed results, but were more successful, at least statistically, in this territory than elsewhere in the Kingdom of Hungary.5 Slovak speakers in Felvidék in particular were targeted for assimilation by Hungarian nationalists such as Béla Grünwald, a historian and outspoken official in Zólyom County, and the members of FEMKE, the Hungarian Educational Association for Felvidék. Grünwald famously boasted in 1878 that “the secondary school is like a huge machine, at one end of which the Slovak youths are thrown in by the hundreds, and at the other end of which they come out as Magyars.”6 Slovak speakers also often assimilated because of the relative underdevelopment of the Slovak national movement, which lagged behind some of the other minority ethnic groups like Serbs and Romanians, who had the advantage of drawing from their ethnic brethren in independent states bordering Hungary. Along with many Slovaks, most Jews in Felvidék adopted the Hungarian language and identified as members of the Hungarian nation, as was the case throughout Hungary.7

In the late nineteenth century, at the height of Hungary’s Magyarization drive, the government closed down the kingdom’s three Slovak secondary schools along with the Matica slovenská, the leading Slovak cultural organization, charging them as agencies of Pan-Slavism.8 Slovak education was further curtailed in 1907 when the Hungarian government passed the so-called Lex Apponyi, a wide-ranging piece of educational reform that mandated that minority students in the Kingdom of Hungary be able to express themselves in written and spoken Hungarian by the end of the fourth year of primary school.9 This and other provisions in the Lex Apponyi meant that by 1918, only one in eight Slovak-speaking schoolchildren attended Slovak primary schools.10

After 1918, the government of the newly established Czechoslovak Republic, which took control of the region after the World War I, moved quickly to reverse the effects of Magyarization on the Slovak population. The state closed down several Hungarian secondary schools and converted the vast majority of the remaining institutions into Czechoslovak schools, sometimes immediately, sometimes phasing out Hungarian instruction one grade level at a time.11 A new teaching staff was brought in, made up of between 300 and 400 teachers from the Czech areas of Bohemia and Moravia, due to a lack of qualified Slovak teachers.12 The result of this transformation was so rapid that by the 1925–26 school year, more students in Slovakia graduated from Czechoslovak secondary schools than Hungarian-language ones.13 In less than ten years, the previously undisputed cultural dominance of Hungarians had been shattered.

The attempts by the Czechoslovak State to alter the status quo in the schools of Slovakia were vehemently protested by both the Hungarian minority in Felvidék and the Hungarian State. A 1920 report on schools to the President of the Czechoslovak Republic accused Hungarians in Košice of sabotaging the newly established Czechoslovak schools. Their rallying cry of “Don’t put your son or daughter in a Czech school” had effectively suppressed enrollment at the city’s Slovak secondary schools, at least temporarily.14 Ultimately, however, such efforts were only marginally effective as the Czechoslovak state took complete control over the system of education. Leaders from Hungary proper urged the Felvidék Hungarians to resist the assimilation attempts made by the Czechoslovak government, but feared the consequences of the new system nonetheless. In an article on the Czechoslovak school system, Adolf Pechány, a Hungarian educator originally from Felvidék, noted that “Czechization is difficult among the Hungarians,” but despite that, even in the purely Hungarian areas “the young generation beg[an] to speak broken Czech” by 1927.15

In order to combat this gradual assimilation, the Hungarian State worked to actively retain contact with and support the Hungarians living in Felvidék. They created organizations such as the Alliance of Felvidék Associations (Felvidéki Egyesületek Szövetsége) to strengthen ties between the Hungarian minority and their homeland state. The Alliance served the dual purpose of publicly organizing cultural activities for the Felvidék Hungarians while secretly agitating for territorial revision.16 There was also some clandestine contact between Hungarian students in Felvidék and schools in Hungary. The Royal Catholic Gymnasium in Miskolc, for example, administered exams to Hungarian students who chose private home schooling over attending the Czechoslovak State Gymnasium in Košice. Once border crossings for students became more difficult, a board of examiners was set up in Košice and upon their recommendation, the gymnasium in Miskolc would issue diplomas.17 Thus, there was a limited amount of cooperation between Hungarian educators in Felvidék and Hungary proper prior to the First Vienna Award in 1938.

The treaties concluded at the end of World War I contained stipulations for the protection of minorities living in the successor states of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, theoretically protecting Hungarian-language teaching in Felvidék. According to the Treaty of Saint Germain, which officially established the Czechoslovak Republic, all minority groups had the right to establish schools and utilize their own language as the language of instruction.18 This obligation was upheld by Czechoslovak law 189/1919, the Minority Schools Act, which provided for minority schools in any district where at least twenty percent of the inhabitants belonged to a particular ethnic group. Policy and practice, however, did not always coincide. Czechoslovak authorities divided areas with many Hungarian inhabitants between several school districts so that a number of Hungarian-majority communities were without a Hungarian-language elementary school.19 In 1928, at the request of the President of Czechoslovakia, British historian R.W. Seton-Watson undertook an independent investigation into minority conditions in Slovakia. He found that Hungarians in Czechoslovakia had critical grievances, especially in the realm of education. In addition to the problem of predominantly Hungarian villages without Hungarian primary schools, there were only seven Hungarian secondary schools in all of Czechoslovakia (down from sixty in 1918) and, most critically, there was no teachers’ college for the 637,000 Hungarians counted on the 1921 census.20

The Kingdom of Hungary, which due to territorial losses was divested of most of its ethnic minorities, also provided minority protection in the field of education through law XXXIII (1921) and Educational Act 110.478 (1923), though not to the same extent as the Czechoslovak Minority Schools Act.

In any commune containing at least forty children who belong to one (ethnic) minority group, also in any commune in which the majority of the population belongs to one (ethnic) minority group, instruction in the mother tongue is to be introduced upon the request of the parents or guardians concerned.21

Whereas in Czechoslovakia the threshold was twenty percent for the introduction of minority education across the board, in Hungary it could be as high as fifty percent. The Hungarian law potentially provided greater rights to small minority populations in urban areas, but was definitely a greater hindrance to rural minority education than the Czechoslovak law. Furthermore, the fact that instruction in a minority language had to be “requested” by a parent or guardian in order to be implemented meant that someone in the locality needed to be familiar with the law and know how to navigate the bureaucracy required to have minority education put in place. Thus, while Czechoslovakia and Hungary offered laws to protect minority education during the interwar period, in both states implementation often failed to meet the minimum standard these laws were meant to provide for. According to the terms of the First Vienna Award (Nov. 2, 1938), southern Felvidék once again became part of Hungary and schools in the reannexed territory transitioned from the Czechoslovak to the Hungarian educational system. In the process, they came under the jurisdiction of a different set of rules for minority education; a different segment of the population, now Slovaks, not Hungarians, would be those subject to minority education.

Educational Reintegration

The transition back to Hungarian rule meant yet another round of denationalization and renationalization for the schoolchildren of reannexed Felvidék. Hungarian educational administrators had no explicit criticism of the academic quality of the Czechoslovak educational system; their concerns lay with questions of nationalization and implied national values. Benedek Áldorfai, a Roman Catholic priest and Hungarian educator in the city of Kassa (Košice in Slovak), claimed that the pedagogical goal of the Czechoslovak state had been “to estrange the Hungarian youth in their souls, language, and spirit from Hungarian life, nationality, and homeland.”22 Alongside this estrangement, Hungarian educators argued, was a sustained effort to convince Hungarian youth in Felvidék to identify as Czech by adopting Czech language and culture so that they could enjoy the benefits of belonging to the titular nation.23 But the criticism went beyond turning Hungarians into Czechs; Ministry officials claimed that Czechoslovak civic education was fundamentally antithetical to Hungarian identity because it “create[d] citizens loyal to the state against the spirit of their family upbringing.”24 Even if a student spoke Hungarian and identified as a member of the Hungarian nation, they were considered corrupted if they accepted Czechoslovak ownership of Felvidék and tried to integrate into the civic life of the new state. In Áldorfai’s estimation, “these Czechoslovakified Hungarian mother-tongued youth were overwhelmingly infected in their souls and spiritually degraded.”25

Reintegrating the schools in the returned territories into the Hungarian national school system thus meant familiarizing students who began their schooling under the Czechoslovak system with a distinctly Hungarian body of knowledge. The Ministry of Education introduced the “nation-related subjects” of Hungarian language, literature, history, and geography to all schools in the reannexed territory immediately following the border change.26 Otherwise, however, institutions followed the Czechoslovak curriculum during the 1938–39 school year in order to provide teachers with enough time to revise the program of studies. The Hungarian-language schools in Felvidék thereafter adopted the same textbooks as those used by schools in Hungary proper; by the beginning of the 1939–40 academic year, the Hungarian State curriculum was fully integrated into Felvidék schools.

Hungarian-language instruction was the cornerstone of the transformation of Felvidék schools. Statistical evidence from the secondary school yearbooks reveals that in terms of language acquisition, the Hungarian regime made significant inroads into strengthening their national language and reversing the progression of the Slovak language among the Hungarian population. At János Hunfalvy Gymnasium in Kassa, 57 percent of Hungarian students reported knowledge of Slovak in the 1939–40 school year (Figure 1). By the end of the 1943–44 academic term, the figure dropped to 24 percent. Conversely, students who reported speaking only Hungarian climbed from 38 to 74 percent over the same five-year period. The entry of younger students into the gymnasium that did not receive any schooling under the Czechoslovak system and thus no Slovak language instruction largely accounts for these dramatic changes. However, it also appears that some students gradually changed their responses to the question over time, disassociating themselves from the Slovak language. For example, in 1941–42, 60 percent of students from the third grade level at Hunfalvy reported knowing Slovak in addition to their mother language of Hungarian, while 40 percent claimed to speak Hungarian only. The following school year, among that same group of students, now in the fourth grade, only 44 percent acknowledged speaking Slovak, and Hungarian-only speakers jumped to 55 percent. Considering that this pattern is relatively consistent throughout grade levels and academic institutions not only in Kassa, but in the secondary schools in the territory in general, such statistics cannot be wholly attributed to changes in the student body.27 Clearly, some students reported differently from one year to the next. With the absence of daily Slovak lessons and the reduced public use of the language, students’ exposure to Slovak significantly diminished, and speaking it was no longer necessary or beneficial for the average Hungarian student. The unlearning of Slovak was a natural component of returning to the Hungarian curriculum.

Figure 1. Language Knowledge Among Hungarian Students at János Hunfalvy Gymnasium28

In addition to changing the language of instruction and teaching particularly Hungarian subjects, informal activities that revolved around celebrating the nation became commonplace in the weeks and months after Felvidék’s reannexation. In the interest of inculcating patriotism and “releas[ing] youth from the Czechoslovak spirit,” students at the Ferenc Rákóczi Gymnasium participated in the celebration of traditional Hungarian national holidays such as the commemoration of the 1848–49 revolution and went to see nationalist films such as Magyar feltámadás [Hungarian Resurrection] and Észak felé [Northward], which discussed the triumph of Hungarian territorial enlargement. They even gathered to welcome the returning soldiers after the country’s latest expansion in March 1939 when Hungarian troops occupied Ruthenia.29 Another popular technique for aiding Felvidék’s reintegration was to create partnerships between institutions and educators in Felvidék and other parts of Hungary. Education Minister Pál Teleki made frequent trips to the returned territory in the months following the Vienna Award, including a visit to the Ferenc Rákóczi Premontory Gymnasium in Kassa, where he and a delegation of Hungarian scouts ceremonially presented the school’s teachers and pupils with a Hungarian flag.30 Teachers and administrators often enlisted schoolchildren in Trianon Hungary to welcome home their Hungarian brothers in Felvidék; charitable causes ranged from making flags for Felvidék schools to collecting Hungarian-language children’s books to be distributed in classes in the returned territory.31 Such activities and partnerships were meant to encourage Felvidék’s students to envision themselves as part of the Hungarian nation and faithful adherents to the cause of territorial revisionism.

The Irredentist Curriculum

At the same time as the adoption of Hungarian curricula in Felvidék schools, the returned territories were being newly emphasized in schools throughout Hungary and in the country’s textbooks. Hungarian educational materials continued the interwar practice of advocating for the complete restoration of the historic Kingdom of Hungary, but after 1938 slightly revised the message to reflect the revisionist triumph of the First Vienna Award.

The goal of geography lessons at the primary school level was, according to the national curriculum, the “inculcation of a love for the pupil’s native country and nation, and awakening of a national consciousness.”32 The native country that these pupils were taught to love was not the independent Hungary created after Trianon, but the thousand-year-old Kingdom of Hungary with its pre-1918 borders. “In the discussion of Hungary’s economic and political geography we first show historical Hungary,” explained the introduction to one geography textbook. “Only in this way will the student truly understand the huge degree of truncation.”33 Only after students learned about the physical characteristics, ethnic makeup, and economic capacity of historic Hungary did the lessons turn to Hungary’s contemporary situation.

The image of Greater Hungary was constantly reinforced in school activities and materials. Geography exercise books were essentially outlines of Greater Hungary printed over and over, upon which students were asked to draw the location of various geographic elements such as rivers, natural resources, and major cities.34 Many textbooks presented three maps of Hungary: Past, Present, and Future; the Past and Future were represented by Greater Hungary, while the “Present” showed the current political borders of the state. As Hungary’s territory expanded, these images changed to reflect the new boundaries, but the “Future” nevertheless remained the pre-1918 borders.35 The current political boundaries, these visual materials taught, were merely temporary. In 1938, the first Hungarian border change lent credence to the state of temporality that these images were meant to impart.

Hungarian history primers espoused the complete, “integral” restoration of the borders of Hungary throughout the interwar period.36 The First Vienna Award, which used ethnography rather than history as the basis for territorial changes in Felvidék, did nothing to alter the discussion of revisionism in textbooks. School textbooks published after 1938 reveal a continuity in the overt irredentist language seen in earlier editions, despite the new borders and the different justification on which they were obtained. An elementary history textbook from 1941 triumphantly stated that “the enlarged Hungarian homeland waits for a better future with the trusting belief that the thousand-year-old border will be completely restored.”37 A high school geography textbook likewise reminded readers that “the mournful lynching of Trianon was broken in 1938 and is now only a bad memory,” although “our great cultural cities, Pozsony (Bratislava in Slovak), Brassó (Braşov in Romanian), Arad (Oradea), Temesvár (Timişoara), and Fiume (Rijeka in Croatian) are still under occupation.”38 The primer ends with an explicit call for complete territorial revision:

The natural endowments of the territory and the lives of its inhabitants […] show the truth that Truncated Hungary is no country, Greater Hungary is heaven. Once and for all, this assures us that we will all the sooner regain, in its entirety, our thousand-year-old homeland’s historical territory. So let it be!39

The indoctrination of school children thus continued in much the same manner as it had prior to 1938, with unflagging emphasis on total territorial recovery, not just the recovery of ethnically Hungarian areas. These textbooks refute the assumption that the territorial revisions brought about a decrease in Hungarian irredentism because the public was satisfied with partial concessions. Rather, it demonstrates a high level of domestic production and consumption of irredentist materials continued even after territorial revisions stopped in 1941.

Hungarian textbooks presented a number of historical interpretations of the First Vienna Award. Some, like a 1941 secondary school geography primer published by St. István Society, elicited the rhetoric of divine intervention in righting the wrongs of Trianon. “Our enemies believed that the Trianon peace would determine the borders of Hungary and her neighbors for a long time, perhaps centuries” noted the textbooks author, Lajos Bodnár. “With the help of God, however, after two decades the Trianon borders were successfully changed, at least in part.”40 Though Bodnár’s line of reasoning is perhaps to be expected from a Catholic publishing house, it resonated with the broader revisionist campaign’s calls for divine justice and the belief that natural order necessitated a powerful Hungarian state encompassing her historic borders. Other textbooks took a more political approach to Hungary’s territorial revision. A history primer from 1940, when Germany was dominant on the battlefields and the Western powers appeared overmatched, chose to emphasize the changing geopolitical climate and Hungary’s allies as the reason for the country’s enlargement. “The military emancipation of the Hungarian territory of Felvidék,” the textbook claimed, “was the outcome of our cooperation with Germany and Italy.”41 Another history primer, however, written two years later, presented a very different explanation for the First Vienna Award; it put the primary agency not in the hands of God or the Axis Powers, but in the hands of the Hungarian Army.

The year of St. Stephen [1938] changed the fate of our homeland. [. . .] Now the Hungarian army again became the guardians of our internal order and the outer authority of the country. When thereafter the Czech lands came out against the German Empire, then began to disintegrate into parts, our homeland also began to demand its rights in blood. Inasmuch as a peaceful agreement did not come into being, the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy as requested arbiters, awarded us back from the Czech occupied territory 12.000 sq. km, but the heroic fight of the warriors of Munkács had already stamped the seal of this observance.42

Though still recognizing the formal role of Germany and Italy, the “warriors of Munkács” are the real actors in this passage. The city of Munkács was significant due to a border skirmish between the Czech army and Hungarians shortly after the First Vienna Award and because of its historical role as a bastion against Habsburg absolutism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, it was Hungarian struggles for freedom, both in the past and the present, which enabled Hungary’s territorial expansion. The emphasis on the heroic Hungarian army’s role in territorial revision reflects a development in Hungarian education that coincided with Hungary’s formal entry into the Second World War. Schools were now a place where support for the war effort and the Hungarian army needed to be fostered alongside national identity.

The minority question also made its way into Hungarian textbooks in relation to Felvidék and the subsequent territorial expansions. Once again referencing the arguments of the revisionist movement, the textbooks often emphasized that the differences in lifestyles of Hungary’s various peoples in the tradition of the perceived ideals of St. Stephen’s medieval kingdom, were actually complementary and contributed to the overall success of the state. A geography textbook from 1941 enthusiastically claimed, “we have no doubt in the returned minorities, [. . .] that according to the ideas of St. Stephen, peoples of different languages and religions will once again find each other and live happily within the frame of historical Hungary.”43 Reconciliation was first necessary, but could lead to a mutually beneficial partnership.

We must love our national minorities like brothers! However, they also must stick with the Hungarians in good times and bad; they must finally understand that Hungarians don’t want to oppress them. [. . .] Only with mutual understanding [and] cooperation can we support a happier and more beautiful Hungarian future.44

However, despite these types of optimistic statements, the message conveyed by the textbooks on minorities was decidedly mixed. Slovaks were often described in unflattering terms; for instance, one primary school primer from 1942 refers to them as “simple, unambitious people.”45 Just as Hungarian authorities struggled to reintegrate minorities into the educational system, they also had difficulty integrating them into the curriculum.

The place of the First Vienna Award and Felvidék’s reannexation infiltrated the Hungarian curriculum deeply in history and geography and in other disciplines as well. Gyula Bognár, an instructor at the State Teacher Training Institute, encouraged teachers to “commemorate at great length the return of 12,000 square kilometers of territory and the homecoming of a million Hungarians in our geography lessons.”46 Furthermore, he argued, educators should utilize literature related not just to the returned areas but the entire territory of historic Felvidék in order to “awaken a love of Felvidék in the younger generations.”47 The minority experience of Felvidék Hungarians under Czechoslovak rule could also be used to impart patriotic lessons to students. The girls’ textbook for the new subject of Homeland Defense Studies from 1943 featured an account of young Hungarian girls in Kassa remaining faithful Hungarians under a repressive Czechoslovak regime. The girls secretly sang the Hungarian national anthem, dressed in traditional Hungarian folk costume, and endured abuses from the authorities due to their patriotism.48 Adding literature and cultural studies of Felvidék to the proposed course of study, educators like Bognár brought special attention to Felvidék’s contributions to the national cultural canon, making the region an integral part of the curriculum.49

The Minority Question in Hungarian Education

The issue of minority education became an even greater point of controversy after the Hungarian takeover of Felvidék. Slovaks made up 11.6 percent of the 1.2 million inhabitants living in the area reannexed by Hungary, which also contained minority populations of Jews (who often identified themselves as Hungarian, especially in cities), Ruthenians, and Germans.50 The official government line called for tolerance toward minorities in the region and emphasized their right to instruction in their native language. There was an ideological reason to encourage good relations with the minority ethnicities in the educational sector. During the 1920s and ‘30s, the Hungarian revisionist campaigns had emphasized the mistreatment of Hungarians living in the successor states and often pointed to problems in education to prove their point. They also claimed that a reconstituted multi-national Hungary would much more effectively protect minority rights. Now that the roles were reversed, the Hungarian government saw sound minority educational policy as one way to prove their claims were accurate and justify further territorial concessions. The awareness that satisfied minorities were important to the success of reintegration in Felvidék did not always ensure proper treatment of the Slovaks and other ethnic groups. It underlines the point, however, that the government believed that in order to receive more territory, and potentially territories with a much lower percentage of ethnic Hungarians, the illusion of decent relations with the minorities of Felvidék must be fostered.

Due to the expansion of the minority population brought about by the First Vienna Award and the subsequent territorial expansions, the Hungarian government reiterated the rights of minorities to receive an education in their mother tongue guaranteed by the 1921 law.51 The Ministry of Education issued a new order regarding minority educational instruction in 1939 to address the status of the minority language schools that were acquired in the First Vienna Award (1938) and the occupation of Ruthenia (1939). The order stipulated that “in schools with Slovak or Ruthene or German as the teaching-language, instruction shall be in the mother tongue, while the Magyar language of the Hungarian State shall be taught as a compulsory subject.”52

In reality, many of the minority language schools in Felvidék were closed or combined with Hungarian language institutions after the area came under Hungarian jurisdiction. In one example from Kassa, three secondary schools—the Czechoslovak State Gymnasium, the Hungarian Language Czechoslovak State Gymnasium, and the Slovak Language Premontory Gymnasium—were combined into one, the Ferenc Rákóczi Premontory Gymnasium. According to the school’s 1939–40 yearbook, only thirteen teachers were retained from these institutions: ten from the Hungarian language school, three from the Slovak language school, and zero from the Czechoslovak State school.53 Though the yearbook claims that none of the teachers from the Czechoslovak school “requested to serve the Hungarian State,” they would most likely not have been able to remain as teachers had they stayed. The remaining positions at the new combined gymnasium were filled by education ministerial decree by a mix of temporary and permanent teachers, both from Felvidék and Hungary proper.54

Though many of the Slovak or Czechoslovak language schools experienced a similar fate, a number of Slovak-language institutions remained and had to navigate the difficulties of being minority institutions. In general, secondary education in Felvidék was divided along ethnic lines. The student body of Hungarian-language secondary institutions was made up of only around 5 percent Slovak students. Hungarian enrollment in Slovak-language schools was similarly low. 55 Although Hungarian authorities recognized the right of minorities to attend school in their native languages, they were highly suspicious of minority schools and maintained tight surveillance over them. Local authorities continually reported on the activities of the Slovak schools to the central government. In 1941, the police in Bars County reported that the elementary school in the village of Hull (Hul in Slovak) did not fly the Hungarian flag on March 15, a Hungarian national holiday (since 1927). Local members of the Hungarian Levente, a paramilitary youth organization dedicated to physical and military training, searched the school for the flag in order to raise it but only found Slovak flags and nationalist materials. The Prime Minister’s office responded to the report by urging the Ministry of Education to be diligent in calling for the “surrender and destruction” of “materials, pictures, and instructional tools in schools left over from the period of foreign rule.”56 Such incidents were continually reported and often drew the attention of officials from the lowest to the highest levels of government.

The vigorous surveillance that Slovak schools were under by the Hungarian authorities certainly did little to encourage a smooth transition to Hungarian rule or loyalty from the Slovak inhabitants, but local officials and the central government did not always agree on the proper course of action in minority issues in education. In another report, from the city of Nagysurány (Šurany in Slovak), local Hungarian authorities wrote the Interior Ministry to report that, despite an invitation, the principals of the Slovak secondary and primary school in the town did not take part in the celebrations commemorating the anniversary of the First Vienna Award. In this case, the Prime Minister’s office followed up not by reprimanding the principals but by asking the county governor not to hold “patriotic celebrations” in minority areas. Their reasoning was to avoid giving Slovaks “the opportunity for demonstrations of passive resistance against the state.”57 Officials in Budapest thought better of flaunting Hungary’s political dominance in a volatile, heavily minority town. In these matters, the Hungarian government was in a difficult position in multiple ways. Which was more pernicious: leniency toward potentially dangerous minority agitators with the power to influence the younger generation, or the fallout from alienating minority groups who, though perhaps not enthusiastic supporters of the state, were well-behaved citizens capable of in time becoming loyal members of the community? This is the question that Hungarian governmental officials had to weigh while trying to turn Slovak schools in Felvidék into loyal educational institutions but also to protect minorities from the excesses of local Hungarian nationalists.58

In a lengthy report by education ministerial advisor János Puszta, which investigated problems with Slovak students in Kassa, we see the complexity of minority education in Felvidék and further evidence of the cautious approach Hungarian authorities took in dealing with these issues. The investigation was prompted by reports that students from the State Slovak Language Gymnasium of Kassa had rioted during a special screening of Magyar feltámadás [Hungarian Resurrection].59 Employees at the local theater extended an invitation to all of the secondary schools in the area to attend viewings. But the film was a questionable choice to screen for Slovak students. It was aggressively anti-Czechoslovak, portraying Czech soldiers as crass invaders who oppressed the downtrodden Hungarian minority, and it depicted Hungary’s reannexation of Felvidék as a glorious triumph and return to natural order. When interviewed about the incident, the teachers at the Slovak Language Gymnasium admitted they had been concerned that some parts of the film may be inappropriate for the Slovak students or cause them embarrassment, but they feared it would give the impression that school teachers were anti-Hungarian should they decline the invitation, and so decided to take their students to the see the film. Hungarian students from other nearby schools attended the screening as well.60

Problems arose during a scene in the film that dramatized Czech soldiers occupying a Hungarian village in 1918. When the actors started singing the Czechoslovak national anthem, some of the Slovak students stood up and began singing along. This prompted the Hungarian students to start hissing and shouting at the Slovak students. Then, in a later scene that depicted a group of Hungarian students secretly singing the Hungarian national anthem when it had been forbidden, the Hungarian students in the theater demanded that the Slovak students stand up and sing the anthem with them. After the film ended, some of the Slovak and Hungarian students encountered each other on the street outside the theater. A fight broke out, with eventually 30-40 students involved in the street brawl.61 The fighting ended quickly, and the crowd dispersed before authorities could arrive.

In his report, Puszta, the education ministerial advisor who was sent from Budapest to investigate, noted that local news exaggerated the event—it wasn’t so much an anti-Hungarian riot as an “unfortunate incident.” However, the fight at the movie theater was indicative, he believed, of the problems the Hungarian state faced in reintegrating the minority Slovaks of Felvidék. Puszta stated that given their ideological indoctrination under the Czechoslovak system, it should have been obvious that the Slovak students would be offended by Magyar feltámadás. “There are marks left on the Slovak students from the last twenty years,” he noted.

They heard that the Czechs are their true brothers and the Hungarians their eternal enemies. They were taught that Czechoslovakia was Europe’s greatest state and society. In contrast, [they learned that] the Hungarian state and society lives in darkness, oppression, subjugation, and injustice. The Czechs brought freedom after centuries of oppression: the Hungarians can only give the Slovaks the fate of the servant.

Given this educational legacy, Puszta acknowledged that it should come as no surprise “if part of the Slovak youth regards the Vienna Award as a Slovak Trianon.”62

It was not only their previous state indoctrination that induced hostility towards Hungary on the part of Slovak students; Puszta also recognized that local Hungarian attitudes toward Slovaks played a role in furthering their anti-Hungarian dispositions. He noted that Slovak students’ behavior at the movie theater was partially due to provocation by some of the Hungarian students during the screening. The larger issue lay with the general attitude of some Hungarians—most notably many civil servants—toward the Slovak minority. According to Puszta, there were two variants of Hungarian attitudes towards Slovaks: one in line with the government’s official standpoint, which “want[ed] the Slovak question resolved with tolerance and acceptance,” and another that advocated for the “open and quick removal of the Slovaks.”63 The first group consisted of the younger generation of native Kassans and the mayor. The latter was made up of the older generation of Hungarians from Kassa, who had lost the most during the Czechoslovak takeover of the area, and many of the younger officials from Hungary proper who came to Kassa after the First Vienna Award, bringing with them uncritical stereotypes of Slovaks. People of this second group, many of whom were in the state’s employment, were taking it upon themselves to enforce a brand of nationality politics that expressly conflicted with the policies of the state. “In the town center,” Puszta noted, “they impatiently admonish Slovak speakers that the time has come for them to speak Hungarian.”64 More seriously, locals were responding to any anti-Hungarian action in independent Slovakia with demonstrations against the Slovaks of Kassa. Puszta lamented that “these people criticize authorities for their patient attitude towards the Slovaks.” Such dispositions, he believed, were harmful to the country and the government’s larger minority policy.65 In the long run, failure to follow the government line could lead to greater unrest on the part of the minorities and even jeopardize Hungarian prospects for further territorial revisions.

Apart from the issue of minority politics, Puszta mentioned another major cleavage he perceived in Kassa society: the disconnect between those Hungarians born and raised in Kassa and the so-called “parachutist” Hungarians from Trianon Hungary who moved to the area to take civil service posts after the territory was reincorporated in 1938. The newly arrived Hungarians were only integrated with local Kassans slowly and with great difficulty, he explained, a consequence of different worldviews on economics, minorities, and social parity. There was also an element of competition, as native Kassans resented the parachutists for taking jobs they believed they had earned after years of sacrifice and discrimination living as minorities in Czechoslovakia.66 Puszta also made mention of a certain type of official he believed was particularly dangerous to social cohesion: recent transplants from Hungary that took to informing on locals as a way to advance their careers. Although these issues could surface throughout the civil service, they were particularly acute in the field of education, as many of these suspect officials worked as teachers or educational administrators.

Puszta’s observations on Felvidék’s social and political landscape suggest that the variance between the official minority policy of the government and its actual execution in Felvidék was an inhibitor to the region’s successful reintegration. This was by no means a new problem, as obstruction of minority education by local officials had been “the most effective and habitual vehicle of Magyarization” since the late nineteenth century.67 However, the territorial expansion in Felvidék added new urgency to an old problem, as Hungary’s minority population had, after a long period of contraction, drastically expanded literally overnight. Any attempts by the Hungarian government to legislate minority rights would only be as effective as the local officials and populace allowed them to be. This was not, however, a simple variance between state officials advocating for tolerance and locals out for retribution. Puszta’s descriptions reveal that while some civil servants fell in line with government policies, others violated them, and that attitudes toward the Slovak minority among native Kassans were not homogeneous, determined more or less by generational association. We also see that ethnicity was just one of many dividing lines within Felvidék society; Felvidék Hungarian claims to a distinct type of Hungarianness, in contrast to Trianon Hungarians, and the competition between these two groups for civil service jobs created social tensions as well. It also challenged traditional claims of a singular Hungarian nation with a unified history and culture by highlighting distinct regional differences between Hungarians of Felvidék and Hungarians of Trianon Hungary.

Puszta’s recommendations that conclude the report are equally revealing. In line with many of the suspicions state officials held toward minority language institutions, he stated that the “turmoil of the Slovak students ha[d] one nest: the Kassa State Slovak Language Gymnasium.”68 To combat this problem, he suggested removing the principal, Jozsef Trochta, and replacing him with someone who was “definitely dependable from a Hungarian standpoint,” spoke good Slovak, and was acceptable to the Slovak students.69 Puszta also advised the Prime Minister not to blame anyone for the demonstration that broke out during the screening of Magyar feltámadás and that he should personally tell those involved that they would be pardoned, but that similar offenses in the future would not be.70 Perhaps most interesting is Puszta’s recommendation for the teachers; he stated that both the Hungarian and Slovak teachers in Kassa needed to receive further instruction in order to meet the State’s pedagogical and minority policy expectations. Hungarians must be enlightened on inclusive nationality politics and Slovaks should be warned of their obligation to the Hungarian State.71 “In the interest of peace and order,” he suggested, some of the teachers brought into the region but found to be “differing from the government’s minority politics” should be sent back to Hungary proper to serve as an example of the consequences of violating state policy. In the future, all teachers assigned to teach in Kassa should be required to have had experience teaching in a minority area.72

Puszta’s findings highlight some of the complexities the Hungarian government faced in implementing their educational policies in the returned territories. The government had difficulties deciding when and how to reprimand Slovak educators for fear of alienating the Slovak community. The fate of Jozsef Trochta is a prime example of this. In the course of his investigation, Puszta learned that Trochta had participated in anti-Hungarian demonstrations, criticized the Hungarian government to a Czech reporter, and aided individuals in smuggling Slovak propaganda over the new border. Yet despite these indicators of severe disloyalty to the Hungarian State, the government treated Trochta with a great deal of leniency. Though he was removed from his post as principal of the Slovak Language Gymnasium in Kassa per Puszta’s recommendation, he was not dismissed outright; he was moved to the Slovak gymnasium in Ipolyság (Šahy in Slovak), a community further from the border with far fewer Slovaks and thus far fewer minority problems than Kassa. By moving Trochta to Ipolyság, the goal of the Hungarian authorities was most likely to isolate him geographically instead of allowing him to remain in ethnically charged Kassa as an embittered, idle, cast-off. It is also an indicator of the dearth of qualified Slovaks who were willing to serve the Hungarian state as educational administrators. The Hungarian government navigated the fine line between alienating Slovak educators and students by making an example of Trochta but preventing his further jeopardizing of minority integration in Kassa.

Conclusion

Hungarian officials saw the education and reeducation of youth as the best method to undo the perceived damages of Felvidék’s period of separation from the Hungarian state and to assure the territory’s successful reintegration. While alarmist nationalist educators decried the degradation of the “souls, language, and spirit” of the region’s students under the Czechoslovak educational system, they fundamentally believed that, under the Hungarian state’s resumed guidance, they could learn proper Hungarian nationality. The Hungarian educational system largely succeeded in the tasks of reintegrating Felvidék into the national curriculum and offering a Hungarian education to the students of Felvidék, but struggled with formulating and executing an effective program for the education of minority students. Tensions between pluralist and assimilationist minority policies, local and Budapest-based educational and governmental officials, and welcoming and antagonistic attitudes undermined the reintegration of minority students into the Hungarian school system.

Archival Sources

Archív mesta Košice [Košice City Archive]. 1938–1945 Collection.

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MOL) [Hungarian National Archives].

K28. Miniszterelnökség [Prime Minister’s Office].

Orders 133.200 IX (1939), 24.024 (1940), and 56.600 (1941) by the Hungarian Ministry of Education.

“A m. kir. vallás- és közoktatásügyi miniszter 112.009/1938. IX. sz. rendelete a visszacsatolt területi ifjúság számára ifjúsági könyvek gyüjtése tárgyában” [Order No. 112.009/1938. IX of the Royal Hungarian Religion and Education Minister on the Gathering of Youth Books for the Youth of Returned Felvidék]. Néptanítók lapja és népművelési tájékoztató [Journal of School Teachers and Educational Instruction] 22 (Nov. 15, 1938): 926–27.

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Péter Apor

The Lost Deportations and the Lost People of Kunmadaras: A Pogrom in Hungary, 1946

The subject of this article is one of the scandals of postwar Hungarian politics and society: the anti-Semitic pogrom that took place on May 21, 1946 in the village of Kunmadaras. The Kunmadaras riot was part of a series of anti-Jewish atrocities that broke out in the summer of 1946 in the Hungarian countryside. These events, however, were comparable with similar violence against surviving and returning Jewish communities in East Central Europe, particularly in Poland and Slovakia. The scholarly literature so far has typically understood these events as the outcome of social discontent raised by economic hardships and mismanaged or openly abused and even generated by political ideologies, particularly Nazism and Communism. These descriptions rarely problematize the Jews as an obvious ethnic category and seldom ask questions concerning the ways peasant or local communities actually distanced their neighbors as “Jews” to be beaten. This article focuses on the everyday interaction through which ethnicity and ethnic identities were constructed in a village that, as the outcome of the events, was split between “Hungarians” and “Jews” in the summer of 1946. While taking the political implications into consideration, I argue that the pogrom was a consequence of the frames of traditional peasant culture, which were mobilized under the particular postwar social and political circumstances, and particularly of the culture of collective violence that was also present in the village of Kunmadaras. The second section of the article, however, concentrates on how politics abused the events during a subsequent trial and constructed a particular Hungarian version of the anti-Fascist myth without the Jewish victims themselves. As was the case all over Soviet-dominated East Central Europe, this myth built a certain level of legitimacy for Communist parties.

Keywords: Anti-Semitism, collective violence, Communism, popular culture, memory of World War II

Introduction

On May 21, 1946 a riot against the Jews of the Hungarian village of Kunmadaras broke out. Several people were beaten and eventually three of them were killed. The Kunmadaras revolt was one in a series of horrific assaults against surviving Jewish communities in postwar East Central Europe, particularly in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Attempts by historians to interpret these controversial events regularly generate fierce debates, such as the recent debate concerning the 1946 Kielce pogrom in Poland or a debate in the mid-1990s about the postwar beatings of Jews in the Hungarian countryside. For many historians the pogroms are explained by social and economic circumstances, in particular the general privation and widespread social discontent that accompanied it, which was abused by various malicious political ideologies for their own purposes.1 Apparently, such cases prove the survival of prewar fascist and Nazi racist propaganda and serve as ex post facto evidence for the complicity of local societies in the deportation of Jews initiated and coordinated by German authorities.2 Other historians argue that while the impact of Nazi anti-Semitism was relevant, postwar domestic Communist parties played a more instrumental role in the pogroms, as they manipulated and abused anti-Semitic sentiments to legitimize their own dictatorial attempts.3 A third position, on the contrary, calls into question the notion that the atrocities were motivated by political anti-Semitism and, in fact, rejects anti-Semitism as a motif in general, links the violence instead to ordinary acts of banditry and robbery.4

Strangely, despite their disagreements on other points, both the interpretation based on the impact of political ideologies and framed as a history of political ideas and the alternative one focusing on allegedly non-political social mentalities lead to a rather embarrassing conclusion. The idea that peasants were either manipulated by politically conscious organizations, groups or persons, Fascists or Communists, or were completely inimical to political ideologies sharply detaches the realm of political ideas from lower-class culture or popular mentalities. From this perspective, it seems as if peasants were invulnerable to violent ideologies, as if they had even resisted them, as if they were unable to commit racist atrocities on their own without the help of politics. The notion that ordinary people commit ordinary violence motivated by material reasons implies this reasoning, whereas racist ideological violence is the character of extraordinary, extremist evil political movements, the “Fascists” or “Communists”, who are cast as alien to “normal” society.

A careful reading of the evidence concerning the Kunmadaras pogrom, however, suggests a radically different reading. This essay examines this alternative explanation. The atrocities in Kunmadaras, where the villagers systematically beat almost all of their Jewish neighbors, were indeed anti-Semitic. Yet, peasants had no need of political organization or the guidance of parties: the pogrom was the outcome of an extreme combination of the peasant understanding of the postwar situation in the context of traditional popular culture. The beatings of Jews were not an inevitable outcome of the survival of fascism: the distancing of neighbors as an ethnically distinct other and their exclusion from the village community was a gradual process that was firmly located in the postwar context and happened through the activization of traditional means of popular culture.5 Peasants, having a sophisticated culture, were indeed able to launch pogroms by themselves.

Nonetheless, this culture was not separate from political or elite cultures. Contemporary politics did have a good deal of responsibility in the atrocities, particularly since villagers read the postwar campaign against the black-marketeers as actually justifying their actions. However, what established an even more striking relationship among various layers of popular and elite cultures was the memory of the deportations and the Holocaust, or more precisely, the absence of this memory. In postwar Hungary, as was the case in most European societies, the memory of World War II was dominated by the will to forget, and especially to forget the embarrassing memory of the massive horrors committed against Jews. In this context the war appeared as a general tragedy that hit everyone similarly, and the suffering of Jews was not a distinctive historical event: Jews were not special victims of Nazism. The context of the deliberately forgotten deportations made returning Jewish communities so vulnerable to violence, and the atrocities themselves so vulnerable to subsequent political manipulation. It was the virtual absence of Jewish victims from the Communist versions of the anti-Fascist myths that made these myths so attractive to Jews and anti-Semites alike.

The Trial of the Village Teacher

The Screening Committee, which was responsible for ousting out war criminals and fascist persons from public offices and decided whether or not someone would be put on trial, questioned the political reliability of the school teacher in the village. The Committee argued that the teacher was supporting the political measures that were forced on Hungarian society by German fascists.

János Nagy, a local school teacher, as the chief-trainer of the military youth corporation, infected the Hungarian youth for years with the controlled ideas of the pro-German, fascist politics. He himself, although he has never been in the army, had the gall to express the delight, in front of a large public, that he took in the German occupation, which had to be shared by the whole Hungarian people on the celebration of Heroes Day in spring, 1944. In his blindness he made the Jewry the cause of every problem.6

Following this report of the Committee, Nagy was brought to justice. He was accused of being a war criminal and was sentenced.

This ruling, however, was not exactly unanimous. Many young people who had been taught by Nagy marched into the room where the trial was held and demanded that he be released. Several of them gave confessions in front of the court, where, in general, they expressed their doubts that Nagy had been an anti-Semite and instead made a case for the general popularity of the teacher in the village.7 The only point of the indictment, which no one disproved, was that he had given a chauvinistic and militaristic address on May 28, 1944, in which he had encouraged the audience to continue fighting on the side of the Germans. The speech sufficed not only to prove to the court that Nagy had pro-German sentiments, but also that he should be regarded as a war criminal: “With their propaganda, the defendant and others who shared his way of thinking influenced the Hungarian people not to take in sides with the Allies, and this had the consequence that the country was razed to the ground.”8 The conclusion that Nagy had been part of an interwar establishment that had run the propaganda was proven not by actual concrete evidence, but by an element of his biography: he was a teacher in the village and as such, in 1929, he became a “levente”-trainer, a position in the official youth organization, which specialized in patriotic and militaristic education. His accommodation to the interwar official infrastructure, however, made him automatically a fascist in the postwar context. The support Nagy had from his former students was interpreted by the court merely as an indication that “young people who had been educated by the accused in the spirit of fascism” were unashamed to show this attitude in public.

Qualifying him as a fascist justified further points of the indictment, although the number of the confessions that supported either the prosecution or the defense was approximately the same. The judge accepted that Nagy had disliked the Soviet Union, too. In his speech, Nagy had called his audience’s attention to “a horde that had been approaching the borders of Hungary, and Hungary had been obliged to resist.” The court considered the allegations regarding Nagy’s anti-Socialist sympathies as well-founded, although there was only one witness who supported them. He told the court that the defendant had threatened him, saying that “his socialist thinking would come to a bad end.” The conclusion that he was an anti-Semite was also logical for the court, although it was proven in a very convoluted way. The confession that Nagy forbidden his disciples to sing anti-Semitic songs became evidence against him according to the logic of the ruling. The judge argued that the fact that he had had occasion to ban the songs was indicative of the educational atmosphere, which had been in his control, meaning that he himself had once taught the anti-Semitic songs, which later he had forbidden students to sing. The court was not able to submit in evidence any concrete fascist act committed by the teacher—participation in the deportation of the Jews or in fascist movements—, the evidence for his conviction was taken from part of his biography. The ruling was not based on falsified confessions, but the confessions used by the court gained their authenticity from the story told about the ”levente”-trainer. One part of his past provided the frame which made it possible for the People’s Tribunal to interpret other events of his life. The peculiar event conceived as the starting point of his story offered causal explanation for his further acts as well. The narrative made the fascist real: the life-story of the teacher was presented as the story of a fascist.9

The ruling of the court of first instance divided the population of the village. For a lot of them it was not acceptable: Nagy was a respected person of the community and they did not regard him as a fascist. Thus, when his second trial began on May 20, a significant crowd of approximately 300 persons on 15-20 carts accompanied Nagy on his way towards the neighboring settlement, Karcag, where the trial was to be held.10 The tension increased when the villagers arrived at the border of Karcag, where they were informed of the regulation that only five persons per party could enter the courtroom. The people of Kunmadaras were dissatisfied with this proposal and decided not to go. Furthermore, they did not let Nagy participate in his trial, in spite of the fact that he asked his followers to let him go. According to several statements the crowd got angry when they tried to enter Karcag, in spite of the police forces standing on the road. The police shot into the air, which further inflamed them. This event persuaded the people to return to their village, but they were very disappointed due to the failure of their acts. Remembering the tense situation, several witnesses recollected that they had heard Zsigmond Tóth, the first defendant of the post-pogrom trial who was accused of organizing it, inciting people against the Jews. He claimed that the Jews had to be struck dead by any means, since thanks to them the people allegedly could not enter the courtroom.11

Campaign against the Black-Marketeers

From the autumn of 1945 until August 1946, the introduction of the new currency, the forint and the issue of the black-marketeers and speculators often appeared in newspapers. The fly-pitchers were considered enemies of the economic recovery and their activity were regarded as the main cause of the shortages that endangered the rebuilding of the country. Mátyás Rákosi, secretary general of the Hungarian Communist Party, laid great emphasis on this in his New Year’s article in 1946. He claimed that the available goods had to be distributed first and foremost to the industrial workers, as they were the most needed in the rebuilding. This important principle was threatened by the black-marketeers who made their fortunes primarily through depreciation. The existence of great concentrations of capital revolted the workers, who “undertake the most serious sacrifices and privations quietly, if they see that the common bearing of the burdens is a reality and no one can obtain property and lead a life of luxury off their misery and privation.”12 Not rarely the articles called for the people to take steps against the black-marketeers, for example the article of József Révai, the main ideologue of the Communist Party, who stated that democracy was based on the consciousness of the people, but the people asked why democracy did not clamp down on the black-marketeers.13 Another article argued that the workers not only trust in the authorities, but assist to them in order to effect improvements to public supply. It stated that only regulations that could be secured by the masses would actually be realized.14 These articles emphasized that the measures were on behalf of the workers themselves, as they served the purpose of enabling them to get food from the pantries of the wealthy.

An important element in the “campaigns to defend the forint” was the boom of posters and caricatures that depicted the black-marketeers with easily recognizable stereotypically Jewish features, for instance before the lynching of two Jewish merchants in Miskolc in July, 1946.15 At the end of the nineteenth century Jews were usually depicted with “a thick crooked nose, thick lips, big ears, wooly hair, two shabby locks in front of the ears, a short fat body, short, bandy legs, rough hands and most characteristic of all, a devilish grin conveying greed and the desire for possessions.”16 These last features were attributed to them by a leaflet that appeared on a communist noticeboard: “However, if there will be persons among them [implying Jews – author’s note] who see the black market as a better chance, who want to gamble [...] or enter one of the parties in order to [...] satisfy their greed [...],” the left would protest against this immediately, as it had promised.17

The Historical Anthropology of Memory

The Jew-baiting began in the morning at the market square with the beating of a Jewish man who had arrived from a neighboring village, Tiszaszentimre. Then the crowd chased a Jewish merchant and his family through the streets, while at the market the others attacked a person from Budapest. After finishing at the market the people broke into the shop of a Jew who lived nearby. Members of the Jewish population who were not at the market tried to hide or lock themselves up. The crowd went to their houses and assaulted them. Several people were beaten and three of them were killed. One of the people who was murdered originally tried to escape from the village, but the persecutors caught up with him near the military airport.18

Villagers were called to account at the end of May, 1946 at the People’s Tribunal. They told their stories about the pogrom under rather special circumstances: the place where these accounts were given was a court room and the witnesses were speaking during a trial. The reports had a specific purpose: to defend the people giving them against various charges. They took the form of confessions, which is an act of memory that seeks to neutralize itself: it aims at purification. At first sight, the narratives tried to legitimize at the People’s Tribunal the behavior of their authors, but they provide no explanation for the outbreak of deadly violence. The historian finds no reasons in the defendants’ stories as to why they assaulted people, nor can one shed light on the motives underlying the violence or how the perpetrators gave reasons for the riot. The narratives that can be found among the documents of a trial inform the reader merely how the defendants or the villagers tried to tell stories that would sound authentic. Consequently, they did not want to legitimize their acts, but rather the memory of an ambiguous occurrence: they wanted to be able to continue living live with their memories. Thus the historian can speak about the form of memory that the narratives produced, he or she can describe the context in which the particular elements of stories gained meaning and constructed a coherent recollection of the event. Still, the manner in which the villagers told stories about the pogrom that sounded authentic sheds light on their ideas regarding a “legitimate” riot. Through the micro-historical analysis of the peasant way of thinking an answer can be found to the question of how the commission of acts of violence was meaningful for the villagers.19

What seems to be a remarkably striking feature of the trial even at first sight is that a large number of the statements claimed that mostly women had taken part in the violent acts. The first question that arises is whether there was a distinct female interpretation of the events? Did the women see the pogrom differently from the men? Was there a female narrative, a women’s story in Kunmadaras, like the story captured by Natalie Davis in her analysis of pardon tales told by women in Early Modern France?20 Can the researcher sort out peculiar elements that feature only the “women’s voice”?

There is a place in the memory of the women that occupies a central position. That place is the market. Very few women started their stories with the events of the previous day. For most of them the morning of the day at the market was the point when the pogrom had begun. A woman was selling turkey when she noticed that the merchant was beaten. A third one was going to the market when a group caught her eye, and she learned that Klein had been assaulted. Most of the witnesses remembered that women were the ones who participated in the pogrom: “all of them were women and girls, the men were not beating anyone, but rather incited the women to hit.”21 What do these statements prove? First of all that usually women went to the market. The market is the place of shopping in a village and shopping is considered women’s work. Therefore the market was full of women and not men. In Kunmadaras they participated in face-to-face marketing and consequently they were more sensitive to prices, as well. The women remembered the acts they had committed on the day of the violent outbreak in the context of their ordinary activity.

However, was this only a female narrative? The “memory of women” refers not only to what women remember, but also to how they are remembered by others. Many of the male witnesses remembered that the movement had been led by a woman named Eszter Kabai Tóth. She was the person who incited the people to beat the Jews by shouting, “The Jews have to be hit!” Then she personally attacked one of the first victims, Klein, after having slapped a Jew named Weisz a couple of times in the face.22 Numerous witnesses remembered that the victims had been assaulted mainly by women or at least that women had initiated the violence. The crowd was led by a couple of women towards the victims, who lived farther from the market square. The witnesses noticed the women on every side of the atrocities: by the house of Neuländer or Kohn.23 The narrative described above was not told only by woman, but also about them. Obviously, numerous men also had taken part in the pogrom, as one of the policeman observed: “The whole crowd consisted of a very mixed group, men, women, adults, children, Hungarians, Gypsies, people with various occupations...”24 However, the presence of the women was so striking that most of the witnesses felt that they had to talk about it. However, emphasizing women’s participation and representing the pogrom as if it had been mainly a women’s issue could lead to further consequences.

For several witnesses the affair at the market was a usual clash between sellers and buyers: “On 21 May, on the market day, a quarrel broke out between Eszter Kabai and Klein, the egg-merchant who was called Csoli. I do not know what it was about exactly, but because of it Klein was beaten.”25 Some of them were seeing to their everyday tasks at the market. There was a person who wanted to buy a pig when he noticed that the crowd was attacking someone. Another person went to the square with his fiancée and was talking with his friend, who was a member of the police, when he saw the people badgering two merchants.26 For another person, the Jew-baiting was a simple village brawl. He had been drinking wine together with his friends in the morning and after having finished three liters he considered visiting another friend. He happened to walk down the same street as the riotous crowd and he began to shout because he was drunk. Some defendants told the story as if it had been one of the events of the day, one of many, for instance one of them said that after the Jew-baiting incident he had went home to have lunch, while the other gave reasons for having left the pogrom earlier: “According to my master’s instructions I had to go to Karcag, so I went home, had lunch, and at about one o’clock I went to Karcag by bicycle.”27

However, some of the villagers remembered more. Many women gave an account of a quarrel between the women who had arrived to sell or buy in the market and the Jewish merchant, Klein. One of them went to get some information about the price of eggs when she heard Klein saying that he was willing to buy eggs for 100 million pengős instead of the normal 30 million. The women protested and suddenly started to hit the merchant.28 His offer was understandable for them, since they knew that if he were to buy all the eggs, they would not be able to get any, as one of them shouted: “Then we cannot live!” Another woman told the story as if all the Jewish merchants had declared that the price of the eggs had been 100 million. The conflict at the market was presented as a struggle between the rich Jewish merchants and the village. According to one of the witnesses, the merchant had claimed that he wanted to devastate all Hungarians. The women considered themselves keepers of the household, and this perception was strengthened by the men. In their eyes, the individual clash between Klein and “one of them” represented the social dissatisfaction due to the bad living conditions, inflation and the shortage of food. A woman said that after the Weinbergers were beaten, the sausages and meat that had been found in their house had been carried to the police station, since the crowd had demanded that this food be taken away because the Jewish family even had a pig. (According to the medical report one of the three murdered victims was strikingly well-fed.) One of the women gave an account of her participation as follows: she had gone to find her husband and when she had recognized him in the crowd she was told that the people were beating Klein. She immediately pulled her husband from the crowd and sent him home. She presented herself as the defender of the family and the caretaker of her man. Women referred to the security of the household, thus retelling the story primarily as an issue that affected women meant that it would represent the welfare of the family. The Jewish merchants became economic criminals and beating them was transformed into justified revenge. For these defendants, the pogrom was not about fascism and anti-Semitism: their accounts evoked the image of stalwart defense of the family and acting to facilitate the proper distribution of food. They had beaten Jews in the name of their “moral economy,” which shaped ideas about the just share of economic goods and work in a community. The participants in the market riot could understand the posters that appeared on walls all over the country saying, for instance, “Women! Against black market, starvation, and shortage of fuel you cannot fight alone. The Hungarian Communist Party fights with you, for you.” These posters could be interpreted to imply that in the eyes of the state the claims of the rioters had some legitimacy.29

The quick wealth of the Jewish population as it was perceived by the villagers was absolutely incomprehensible for them. The Jews “returned from the deportations, and though they assert that nothing remained for them and they have nothing, within a couple of months they had the best things, their shops were full, they lived well, seemingly without any work.”30 For the villagers, the rational explanation for this phenomenon was that the Jews surely earned their money through the black market. The villagers were clear on the existence of the black-market. However, an abstract social category was not recognizable for the villagers: the concrete category of the Jews filled it with meaning. In their perception, by raising prices the Jews behaved on the market square exactly how black marketeers were depicted as behaving. Every feature that was attributed to the speculators found embodiment in the Jews in the perceptions of the villagers, and the consequence of this was not only were the Jewish merchants considered black-marketeers, but their features started to be considered characteristic of all Jews. This understanding was confirmed by popular wisdom about Jews and business, Jews and money, as the following common sayings collected in Kunmadaras illustrate: “Nor the Jew gives on credit,” meaning only for cash, or “Counts like a Jew in an empty shop,” meaning he or she has no income.31

The defendants remembered their personal disappointment that led to their violent behavior:

I returned from Russian captivity in October, 1945 and I have been employed as a day-laborer, but I cannot afford even to buy a suit. In Kunmadaras a lot of people talked about, I do not remember who they were, how the Jews, sure enough, were well off, hardly arriving back from the deportations how well they lived by buying and selling on the black market and on the side, they did no work, yet they ate white bread, had suits made, while we, prisoners of war, had nothing. Thus, a certain antipathy evolved against the Jews, although personally I had no troubles with any of them, but the things I heard produced bad feelings in me too.32

For them, the most significant reason for the outbreak of the pogrom was this perceived social tension. Issues of basic sustenance and food supply were extremely pressing in 1946 in the Hungarian countryside, since the inadequate supplies, a consequence primarily of the war acquisitions mostly by the Red Army in 1945, had substantially decreased agrarian production. The gap in the living standard was recognized through the comparison of the living conditions of the former war prisoners and the deported Jews. The difference in the living standard that was formulated in this manner meant a real threat for the villagers: “they eat white bread, whereas I can hardly provide a little corn pone to my family, which consists of five small children.”33

For some of the accused persons, this threat was connected with the fear of an imagined Jewish revenge. One of them remembered that Klein had given reasons for increasing the price of the eggs by asserting that he would ruin all the retailers since he had been deported because of the Hungarians and only as many Hungarians should have remained would be needed to carry the chamber pots for the Jews. He also claimed that the Hungarians did not know what suffering was, as they had been at home and were eating and drinking, and only the Jews knew what suffering was. These statements referred to a certain sense of guilt, nevertheless only a few defendants had been motivated by personal thirst for revenge. They remembered when the Jews had returned from the deportations and demanded back their lost property: “Mrs. Weinberger, when she came back from the deportations and began to collect belongings that had been taken, falsely accused me, saying my eiderdown was hers, but it was mine.”34

Recollecting the reasons of why they had begun to beat the Jews, the people of Kunmadaras connected the pogrom with the memory of the World War at the People’s Court, but in a very peculiar way. They did not remember the events of the war, for example deportations or joining the army. On the contrary they recalled only the end of the fighting, namely the return home, speaking about soldiers as well as Jews. The Jewish population of Kunmadaras, which amounted to 273 persons at first, was transported to the ghetto of a neighboring small town, Karcag, that was formed on April 24, 1944. Roughly 1,300 Jews lived there until they were taken to the sugar factory of the county town, Szolnok, on June 18. A few days later they were put on trains and transported to the Third Reich. However, in accordance with an agreement between Edmund Veesenmayer (1904–1977, the Nazi deputy in Hungary) and the Hungarian authorities most of them were taken to an Austrian village, Laa an der Thaya near Strasshof, for forced labor, and not to concentration camps. Some of them, nevertheless, died in Auschwitz. A significant proportion of the deported persons returned home, somewhere between 70 and 120 Jews, of whom many had survived in Austrian labor camps, in the summer and autumn of 1945.35 Consequently, most of the Jews who came home had no personal experiences and memories of death camps, and they could not give account of such events to the villagers. On the other hand, those who could have spoken about the horrors of camps had died in them. Thus the inhabitants of Kunmadaras did not remember the deportations in the context of a genocide that might have been perceived as exceptional, but rather connected them with the other type of returning home: the return of the soldiers from captivity.

Approximately 20–25 percent of the war prisoners returned from Soviet and Allied captivity by the summer of 1946, but most of the war prisoners came back after July, 1946, and definitely in 1947 for the sake of the elections. The people of Kunmadaras therefore experienced their arrival mostly after the pogrom, in contrast with the deported Jews, who had been already returned by that time. Also, 112 soldiers from Kunmadaras died during the war,36 which means that the catastrophe of the Jews did not seem exceptional. Thus, the memory of the former war prisoners took the form of a sort of a comparative memory, in the sense that the villagers who fought on the Eastern front as soldiers of the Hungarian army always compared their living conditions to the living conditions of the Jews:

[…] when the Hungarian war prisoners came home from the captivity, they had nothing, they had nothing to eat, the Jews returned from the deportations and started to buy and sell at once on the black market and lived well without doing any work, ate white bread, while we were digging in the ground [...]37

This phenomenon could shed light on how they remembered the war. The villagers never mentioned events of the war in connection with the Jew-baiting, nevertheless a special linkage to the interpretation of the war can be deciphered. The memory of the villagers blurred the difference between the deportation of the Jews (when each member of the community, including children, elderly and women as well were carried away without any reason) and service in the army, which concerned only the men. For them the war was a real disaster that was followed by starvation and privation. During the war the men were carried away either as soldiers or as deported Jews. When they returned home, they found poverty and had to begin life again, using every effort, which for them meant mainly hard physical work. Regarding this, it is obvious that for the villagers the way of life of the Jewish merchants who claimed that they were victims of the war was incomprehensible and merely confirmed the view that the Jewish population did not belong to the community that was suffering the consequences of the war.

This supposition is confirmed by the text of the decision that was accepted after the pogrom by an inter-party meeting of the local parties. The main point of this document was the immediate expulsion of the Jews, however later it was modified so that the Jews who could adapt themselves to the social change and the Hungarian community would be allowed to stay. Another witness explained this statement more subtly, namely that the people who had held the meeting expected the Jews to become used to democracy, that is to say, throw in their lot with the community. What did this common fate mean for the villagers? The witnesses claimed that the decision had been made against the Jews, who allegedly had not worked and had felt unwell in the village and had been requested to leave. The villagers considered hard work as the common duty in the postwar situation, and those who seemed to fall short of their expectations could be excluded from the community.38

The Jewish merchants were represented as people who were not bound to the village society, consequently sacrificing them meant no danger for the community. They could be sacrificed in order to preserve social peace.39 The way they were introduced implied that black-marketeers had no place in a working community: they placed themselves outside of the society. In front of the People’s Tribunal a particular social tension arose, a tension that was also understood by the defendants. However, the fact that a certain layer of the society lives better than others does not provide justification for violent actions against them. The conflict has to be represented and comprehended in a symbolic way that makes it inevitable that the hated group is an enemy who endangers other categories of the society.

One of the defendants who had participated in the beating of Rosinger at the military airport gave reasons why he had joined in: people coming from the village had told him that the Jews had collected the Christian children:

My five little children, the eldest of which is nine years old, on that day, namely May 21, at the same time that I heard the abovementioned news, was at home absolutely alone. I totally lost my mind when I heard this rumor, as I immediately thought that my children might have been in the clutches of the Jews since then.40

Another defendant said that at first he had not believed this rumor, but later, influenced by the atmosphere among the crowd, he had changed his mind. His sister stated that his children had been collected by certain Jews, and this drove the man—who certainly had joined the people beating the Jews—crazy.41

This kind of accusation created a moral distance between the Jews and the other groups of the community of Kunmadaras. The Jewish merchants were transformed into cruel child-murderers who endangered the community. The charge of killing children is a very powerful one. It contrasts the principle of innocence, which is embodied by the image of the children, with the other side of the moral dichotomy that is thus created, evil. On the other hand, this technique is a very basic mode of distancing. Very similar accusations were made against the early Christians in the Roman Empire, against the Jews and heretics in the Middle Ages in Western Europe and later against witches. The historian can explore these charges in nineteenth-century East Central Europe, where for instance the Jews were accused of committing ritual child murders or Gypsies were accused of killing babies, or different religious sects of depraving children. However, the last two forms of accusations characteristically belonged to the twentieth century. Charges of inhumanity made against a group that is excluded from a given community because it questions the basic norms of that community may sound authentic, thus the emotional distance can be easily reproduced. What is more, this sort of accusation is very powerful since if the guilty person or group offends basic norms of the community, then normally there is no intention of “improving” him or her. In such cases the pattern of the revenge is strengthened: the intention is to cast out the culprit.42

According to the defendants, why did the Jews collect and kill Christian children? One of the witnesses remembered when Eszter Kabai had shouted to the women at the market square that the Jews had killed the children and then boiled and eaten them. A defendant offered the following explanation for why he had joined the crowd: when he had worked on the fields he had been told that the Jews had carried away the Christian children. Four were found by one of the Jews, while two others were found by another Jew. They were made into sausages and salami. Considering that the difference between the living standard of certain Jewish merchants and the poorer peasants was the main cause of the conflict according to the villagers, the tale of the Jewish merchants who were turning Hungarian children into sausages and salami was a perfect metaphor for their emotions. In a community in which there were serious shortages of food and a meat dish was considered almost a luxury, the abundance of goods possessed by those merchants was absolutely incomprehensible and intolerable. Food is a very powerful form of expression in societies that have to live in want: this was the situation in every traditional agricultural community, as peasant tales clearly show. Therefore the symbolic expression of such welfare obviously could be sausages made from the meat of Christian children. This narrative provided an explanation for the prosperity of the merchants. Only a few people could believe the charge of Jewish ritual murders in middle-of-the-century Hungary, however the tale of cannibalism expressed demonstratively the attitude of the peasants towards black-marketeers. This group endangered the survival of poorer families and meant social injustice for them. The black-marketeers, who were perceived on the basis of differences in living standards, were given physical form with the help of traditional Jewish images, and the charge of being child-murderers symbolized social discontent because of the privation and sense of threat. As one of the defendants put it, “The Jews have to be exterminated, let them perish, the bloody Jews since they live on Christian and Hungarian flesh, they collect the Christian children and turn them into sausages, they want to hang the Hungarians.”43

The particularly deformed blood libel was not the cause of the outbreak of the pogrom, but it served as a means of legitimizing it. The altered charge of ritual murder certainly evoked aspects of popular anti-Semitism, but in spite of this popular anti-Semitism cannot be regarded as the reason for the outbreak. Jews had often been accused of killing children, and older people in the village could remember blood libels of the nineteenth century. The charge of ritual murder appeared in modern Hungary from 1882 (Tiszaeszlár) up until 1901 (Németújvár). In Tiszaeszlár on April 1 a fourteen-year-old girl disappeared, and two days later in the village it was widely claimed that she had been killed by the Jews. It was the time of the Jewish Easter and the election of a new kosher butcher, so a great number of Jews had come to the village. These events produced a tense atmosphere and the villagers connected the loss of the girl to the Jews, evoking the traditional charge of ritual murder. The Jews were accused of taking the blood of the Christian virgin in order to consecrate their temple or matzoh. This is the traditional language of blood libels. Consequently, the tale of the Jewish child-murderers did not sound absolutely surprising to the inhabitants of Kunmadaras. People were familiar with stories of Jewish child murderers. Perhaps some of them believed these stories, but nonetheless, a statement made by one of the defendants is more plausible: “Do you believe that the Jews kill the children?” “Yes and no.”44

However the accusation in this case differed from the traditional blood libel in that it excluded any interpretation of the reemergence of the charge of ritual murder. This case was rather a symbolically proper form of popular accusations against profiteers. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that they assaulted only the merchant Jews. As Ede Kempfnek, who was a veterinary surgeon, noted 45 years later, “When they got there somebody started saying that this man should not be hurt since he helped a lot when we were in trouble with the animals. And the people went away.”45 The participants in the riot distanced their neighbors by casting them in the role of the Jewish black-marketeer during concrete experiences and contact.46 The memory of the villagers preserved the violence as a reaction to the offenses that were taking place in the community, such as the arrest of János Nagy, the illegal wealth of the Jews, or the inflationary profiteering, whereas their belief was confirmed by the campaign against the fly-pitchers and the popular aversion to Jews.

The Penetration of History: The Trial

The case of Kunmadaras was tried by the Special Council of Five of the People’s Tribunal, which was formed by Act No. VII/1946 in order to pass sentence on persons who were accused of committing crimes against democracy and the Republican system. The trial took place in Budapest in late June, 1946. All the major defendants were convicted of leading a movement to overthrow the Republic and democracy. At first sight, it may seem surprising to characterize violent acts against Jewish merchants as conspiracy against the system of the state, nevertheless the ruling stated clearly that, “the fall of the state order would be bound to happen, if similar demonstrations were to become frequent for any reason.”47 How was it possible to interpret the pogrom in Kunmadaras in this way?

The trial was exceptionally important for the communists, so the party intervened in the process immediately. Originally, the communist Attorney General, József Domokos considered condemning the defendants as swiftly as possible, so he assigned the Summary Court of the County of Szolnok as the court of competent jurisdiction. Accordingly, the social democrat Minister of Justice, István Ries, also sent the public prosecutor of Budapest, György Auer, to Szolnok.48 Nevertheless, the Summary Court did not press charges against the people who were regarded as the main instigators, which disgusted the communist press. It wrote that the people, the community of Kunmadaras, saw with indignation that only eight dirty, stupefied people in rags were sitting in the prisoner’s box, while the real instigators were missing. They were looking for János Nagy among the defendants.49 The attacks against the Summary Court also produced doubts regarding the competency of the Summary Court, so the Attorney General passed the issue to the People’s Tribunal of Budapest. However this measure had to include a modification of the charge, since the Summary Court had the right to sentence only common criminals, while the People’s Tribunal tried political cases. The indictments of the important cases of the People’s Tribunals normally were prepared in the Ministry of Justice, even when these were not led by communist judges, and also every issue where the defendants were accused of acting against democracy had to be passed on to the Ministry in order to be controlled. Under these circumstances, when the Attorney General found the indictment incorrect from the political point of view, he could modify it.50 Although the People’s Tribunals were influenced by the left, they cannot be regarded communist institutions in 1946.51 The courts consisted of five members: each of them was delegated by a party of the Hungarian National Front for Independence (MNFF; the Hungarian People’s Front).52 The two workers’ parties hoped for the nomination of a judge who in their view could be trusted to represent justice.

What was this justice? Regarding the number of defendants, there were 59, and the judging by the echo of the case in the international press, it was a gigantic trial. The greatest emphasis was placed on the first three defendants. The first defendant was Zsigmond Tóth, who had been born in Pozsony (Bratislava) in 1920. At the time of the riot he was a Czechoslovak citizen, and together with his family he had been expelled from the country according to the Czechoslovak policy of declaring people of Hungarian nationality collectively war criminals. Tóth had been living in Kunmadaras for several months when the pogrom was broke out. The second defendant was Gergely Takács, the secretary of the local organization of the Smallholders Party. He had been born in 1899 in Balmazújváros. Takács had lived in the village for a long time and he was one of the most significant members of the community. He occupied various posts in the local administration in the interwar period. The third one was János Nagy, who had been born in Kunmadaras in 1903 and practically never left the village. He was embedded strongly in the life of the community since he gained the post of the local reformed teacher in 1927, became a “levente”-trainer in 1929, and then in 1932 a chief trainer. In addition, he knew Gergely Takács from prewar times. The others were common people of the village and actually it was these people who had assaulted the Jews.53

The judge had already known János Nagy, who by that time had been condemned of being a fascist. So the People’s Tribunal of Budapest generated certain assumptions about the identity of the teacher according to which his past acts were judged. The court interpreted his initiative to gather in the building of the Trade Corporation and prepare a petition to be submitted to the Minister of Justice as an attempt to create a sympathetic crowd in support of his case. As a consequence, he was seen responsible for the establishment of an aggressive mass of people, which already created an anti-Semitic atmosphere. Finally, Nagy’s activity was considered the definite cause of further violent actions. The fact that he had stayed at home passively as the Jews in Kunmadaras were being beaten and killed was transformed into a crime: the court believed that he had consciously failed to prevent the villagers and especially his former disciples from beating the Jews, in spite of the fact that as a teacher he had had considerable authority.54

As the teacher was considered the most influential person of the movement, the other actors and the event itself were cast in light of his alleged identity as a fascist. The facts gained meaning in the narrative of the People’s Tribunal according to the prescribed narrative identity of Nagy. The trial functioned as a closed institution, which tried, as far as it is possible to maintain, the validity of the identities that it had previously produced.55 The narrative in the ruling began early on May 21, 1946. Two would-be participants in the pogrom visited Zsigmond Tóth in his apartment. Tóth first buckled on his dagger and then all of them went to the market square, which was already full of stallholders and buyers from the village, as well as from other parts of the region. According to the ruling, the pogrom started with Tóth’s exclamation, “Well, now it’s time to start the dance!” He allegedly had made this statement when he became convinced that the atmosphere and the size of the crowd were both appropriate. According to the People’s Tribunal, the villagers had realized that Tóth had called on them to beat, hit, and kill the Jews.56

Listing the events of the morning, the judge stated that, “At about eleven o’clock in the morning the organized crowd reached József Kohn’s house, in which he also has his shop.”57 Another victim tried to hide in a wagon at the railway station, but after a little while he was discovered and ordered to come out. According to the ruling, the only way in which the crowd could have found him was that he had been observed when in flight by certain people who later had called the others to the station. It concluded that this scene was evidence that the pogrom in Kunmadaras “occurred in an organized way, systematically and it was known and carried out by a large part of the people.”58 Their command, “Come down, bloody Jew, none of you’ll escape!”, verified the statement of the People’s Tribunal. “After having beaten Bertalan Weisz, the crowd, which was systematically advancing and operating,” proceeded towards the house of another Jew.

If the pogrom was an organized action of the villagers, then consequently somebody had had to organize it ahead of time. According to the ruling, the first direct organizer of the movement was Zsigmond Tóth, the first defendant:

It could not be revealed how long had he been waiting for this propitious occasion, but he had been well prepared, as is shown by the fact that he had systematically engaged in this activity with all his might and competence and he had not rested until he had heated the passions of the crowd to the degree that had become proper for the outbreak of the subsequent events of the day.59

According to the ruling, János Nagy and Gergely Takács had been responsible for the violent acts, too. They knew that the mood among the people had become anti-Semitic, yet in spite of this they did not do anything against it. Moreover they assisted in planning the pogrom. They acted consciously, according to the ruling, and given their intelligence they could have predicted the subsequent events, namely that pogrom-like actions would be taken by fascists. They were clear that assaulting and killing innocent Jews were fascist acts, thus they knew that they would commit fascist crimes.60 The court was sure that anti-Semitism and fascism could be equated.

The position of the left was reflected in a speech given by one of their representatives in the parliament: “Is the government aware that the concomitant phenomenon of fascism, anti-Semitism, has appeared again in certain places in the country? [...] What is the government ready to do in order to nip reaction, disguised in this way, in the bud?”61 Anti-Semitism was the litmus test of fascism: where it was discovered, one had to look for fascists immediately. After the pogroms, the Central Board (Központi Vezetőség) of the Communist Party arranged a conference where the problems of the anti-Semitic events were included. Moreover, the party considered the issue so important that Mátyás Rákosi, the secretary-general himself, also delivered a speech. He listed all the pogroms of which he was aware, beginning with the Ózd case. As Rákosi noted, the communist secretary had been knocked down and then the anti-Semitic disturbances had broken out. “We have inquired into things there,” he concluded, “and obviously we have found fascist threads...”62 Rákosi interpreted the Miskolc case as a pogrom that had taken place after an anti-Semitic provocation during a political meeting. He contended that “many fascist people from Miskolc and the neighborhood had joined” the participants in the gathering. He was convinced that it had to be a well prepared provocation since it had paralyzed the economic life of the region (no one had gone to work during the pogrom), had presented the Communist Party as an anti-Semitic party, and had dealt the police a heavy blow. He closed his speech with a supposition, namely that “a central fascist organization is taking part here.”63

One of the court’s main pieces of evidence for that allegation that the villagers organized a pogrom was the fact that a meeting had taken place after the unsuccessful excursion to Nagy’s trial. The ruling interpreted the events as follows: when the villagers found themselves unable to enter the court, they returned home and decided to gather in the building of the Trade Corporation (Ipartestület) of Kunmadaras to write a petition on Nagy‘s behalf to the Minister of Justice. The fact that the crowd returned home after they were not allowed to enter the courtroom convinced the chairman that their basic purpose had been to repeat their previous “terror action.” According to him, the people of Kunmadaras had gone back because they had realized that there was no chance of achieving their goal to liberate the teacher by coercing the court. The fact that every witness confessed that they had signed the form also spoke against them. The atmosphere of the meeting had been characterized by the hatred against the People‘s Tribunal, the police and the Jews, stated the judge. That was the point where the results of the activity of the three major defendants were merged into each other, since each of them was present in the building that evening. Gergely Takács then actively incited against the Jews. He learned from a participant that someone had rung the police in Karcag to prevent the crowd from entering. He immediately claimed that this had surely been done by the Jews. The People‘s Tribunal argued that the defendants had consciously exploited the people’s anger, which had been inflamed partly by them against the People’s Tribunal and the police, and had contributed to the creation of an anti-Semitic atmosphere by making inflammatory statements.64

They knew that the villagers were angry with the witnesses for the prosecution, consequently Takács suggested forcing them to withdraw their testimony. Thus the crowd waited for Ferenc Takács, one of the witnesses for the prosecution, near the cemetery, where they started to pelt the witness, who was returning home on a cart, with stones. By that time they had been persuaded, however, that the Jews had obstructed the trial, which was shown clearly by the curses they uttered at Ferenc Takács and his wife: “Wait till we catch you, bloody democrats, henchmen of the Jew People’s Tribunal, Jewish henchmen, there will be no trial now!”65A few villagers started to identify the witnesses for the prosecution with the Jews and to imagine a Jewish conspiracy behind the events. They had decided, according to the ruling, that in spite of any alleged plans of the Jews, they would defend the teacher. Another group of villagers went to the house of the second witness for the prosecution, Ferenc Wurczel, and forced him to go with them to the building of the Trade Corporation. However, in the street he was attacked by the crowd and badly beaten. According to the ruling, he was assaulted primarily because of his Jewish origins.66

What thoroughly convinced the People’s Tribunal that the case had been an anti-Semitic conspiracy was that Zsigmond Tóth had stated that he had learned that the Jews would try to carry off János Nagy from his house at night, so he had decided to watch. He also called on people to harass the Jews the next day.67 The ruling interpreted the antecedents of the pogrom as part of an organized conspiracy that had been prepared by three anti-Semitic people to achieve, firstly, the release of one of them from police custody together with the humiliation of the People’s Tribunal, secondly, the organization of a pogrom. The ruling considered Tóth’s anti-Semitic activity and Nagy and Takács’s movement against the People’s Tribunal as connected. When Zsigmond Tóth incited the people against the Jews, Gergely Takács joined in the activity, claiming that “it’s time to get rid of those who sponge off the Hungarian people.”68The ruling managed to find an anti-Semitic conspiracy that finally had resulted in a pogrom.

Nevertheless, according to the People’s Tribunal the main purpose of the conspiracy was not to plan violence against the Jews. Parallel to the organization of the anti-Semitic pogrom another movement took place in Kunmadaras at approximately the same time. The teacher in the village, János Nagy, was sentenced as a war criminal in 1945. However, due to the legal incompetence of the first court, a second trial was planned to be held in Karcag on May 20, 1946. In order to be acquitted he started a movement among his former disciples in the “levente”-organization, as the People’s Tribunal argued.69 The ruling interpreted the incident when the police prevented the villagers from entering the location of Nagy’s trial as an attack against the authority and honor of the police and the People’s Tribunal, since it had happened publicly. The judge concluded that Nagy and his friend Takács had acted consciously and maliciously against the People’s Tribunal in order to prevent Nagy’s conviction. They also had involved Nagy’s wife in the movement by persuading her to go to the Hungarian Democratic Women’s Association (MNDSZ), where she “asked them, in tears, to save her husband from the clutches of the People’s Tribunal.”70

The sentence claimed that Nagy and Takács had led a movement against the democratic system when they had prevented the police and the People’s Tribunal from fulfilling their obligations. They created a mass action, the judge argued, that prevented the police from leading the defendant into the courtroom, and this had paralyzed the power of the police. Furthermore, they had compelled the People’s Tribunal, with the help of the crowd that had been mobilized by them, not to pass sentence on a criminal (Nagy). That it became known among a couple of thousand people that the force of the masses was capable of obstructing the work of constitutional institutions and even paralyzing the functioning of the democratic system was the antidemocratic factor in the aforementioned defendants’ action.71 The sentence stressed that the security of the democracy had been seriously threatened.

What or who threatened democracy? In its understanding of the events the People’s Tribunal described the incident when the villagers had returned home together with their teacher, characterizing them all as fascists who were enemies of the democratic order and who had obstructed the People’s Tribunal and the police, preventing them from fulfilling their obligations. The ruling offered the following evidence: they had also known that the fascists had been enemies of the contemporary system and had been aspiring to overthrow it. Therefore, concluded the People’s Tribunal, when they had obstructed the police and the People’s Tribunal, they had committed fascist crimes. In the following part the ruling proved that everyone had known that acting against the law meant attacking the state. After the pogrom the representatives of the local parties gathered and issued a declaration that said that the Jews of the village and Ferenc Takács, the most important witness for the prosecution, would have to leave the village. The People’s Tribunal comprehended this scene as a real fascist act against democracy, since it had alloyed anti-Semitic elements with an attack against a person “who is really faithful to the ideas of the people’s democracy.”72

This manner of reasoning endowed anti-Semitism with a new function. It ceased to refer to the crime of which the defendants had been accused. Instead it became an indicator of fascism. Accordingly, the chairman interpreted the decision of the inter-party meeting about the fact that the Jews and Ferenc Takács had had to leave the village as a typical manifestation of fascist terror. The concomitant phenomenon of every fascist action inevitably was anti-Semitism, as implied by the following statement:

As a natural, obvious outcome, and necessary accessories of the fascist, anti-state character of the whole movement, an act that was originally directed solely against the power of the state, the People’s Tribunal, the state institutions that had ordered the arrest, turned against the Jews through the guidance of Zsigmond Tóth and Gergely Takács.73

According to this logic, fascists always organize anti-Semitic pogroms and anti-Semitic pogroms are always committed by fascists. The People’s Tribunal equated fascism with anti-Semitism and vice versa. This argumentation meant doubtlessly that any anti-Jewish act was directed against the democratic system. According to this understanding, the Chairman of the Court argued that the events of Kunmadaras were not a Jewish issue, but rather an issue pertaining to the whole Hungarian state order.74 These statements disconnected anti-Semitism from the Jews. Although beating and killing Jews (or any other group) is obviously at the least an anti-democratic act, the sentence referred to this act only to prove the appearance of fascism. In a strange way, the events were recaptured without the presence of the Jews. The People’s Tribunal managed to produce a narrative of an anti-Semitic pogrom without involving the Jewish victims.

What was very characteristic of the case is that even the Jewish victims contributed to this reconstruction. While they recollected memories of their sufferings they connected these events with another atrocity that had taken place in the village. For them, this provided a logical explanation of the pogrom, not least of all because they could find people responsible for it. The victims who had experienced deportations, official anti-Semitic discourse and Nazi and Arrow Cross cruelty against Jews interpreted the harassment of Jews in Kunmadaras in the same framework. For them it had been an anti-Semitic pogrom that had been organized by fascist war criminals and carried out by a cruel crowd. A victim said that he knew János Nagy as a “levente”-trainer with a Sam Browne belt who taught his disciples to sing anti-Semitic songs. Another one recognized one of the defendants as a chief “levente” whom she knew as a great fascist. One of the victims claimed that people who had hit them had also served in the Hungarian SS armored division.75

The occurrences evoked memories of the deportations in the witnesses. One of them recollected that one of the defendants had accompanied them to the village with the following words: ”Well, Jews I have come for you, go to the others who are already lying in a heap.” This was represented also symbolically. According to some of them, the villagers had been led by a person dressed in black or brown with a little moustache. Furthermore, for them the tale of infanticides was remembered in the form of a charge of ritual murder. A few of them recollected that the villagers had been asserting that the Jews had collected the Christian children, as they had needed blood to consecrate temples.76

While the Jewish victims were looking for the people responsible for the violence and the reasons underlying their acts, the explanation of the People’s Tribunal was plausible for them. The statement that the pogrom was not only a Jewish issue but rather an issue pertaining to the new democracy meant for them that anti-Semitism was considered a crime against the state that called for serious punishment. It seemed that the authorities took the issue of Jew-baiting seriously, and this created a feeling of security. In addition the deportations were not an exceptionally important element in Jewish memory in this trial. The memory of the deportations was not formulated exclusively in the Jewish context. The victims remembered it in connection with other events, but the memory served symbolically to represent suffering. Their suffering, however, was not given greater significance than the sufferings of anyone else. As the chief rabbi of Kecskemét argued, there was no need to mourn for the Jews who had been killed innocently, but rather for human civilization, which had fallen, and the classes that had been responsible for this had persecuted not only the Jewry but the exploited poor as well.77 If anti-Semitism was considered an act against the democratic state, then it was possible to be an anti-Fascist without being a Jew. Jewishness could be solved within the identity of a person who was on the side of democracy and the oppressed.

Rulings in a trial are, however, not simple statements. They are not simply one among many publicly manifested opinions that can be freely contested. If rulings are brought in formally adequate conditions, they have legally binding consequences. A legally correct ruling is a performative speech act that impacts social reality in very concrete ways. It makes (and often compels) individuals, institutions and authorities act and speak in certain ways, obliges them to commit certain actions and to address issues in a particular manner.78 The manner in which the People’s Tribunal equated Fascism and anti-Semitism had important consequences on how institutions and public figures started to think and speak about the state and the concept of democracy. In a situation in which the notion of democracy required an absolutely new form of public discourse that was based primarily on the sense of being threatened, fascism was produced as the enemy of the democracy, which made it possible to identify democracy with the struggle against fascism. Fascism and democracy were presented together, and fascist movements were needed in order to constitute the endangered democracy. In the thirteenth century the Eucharist started to occupy a central position in Christian ceremonies. The Eucharist was represented as potent and capable of working miracles. The Eucharist was considered a sacrament that was able to defend itself from its enemies. The Jews, who were obviously not Christians (and official Church discourse often referred to them as murderers of Christ), were involved in that process. A new narrative emerged about Jewish abuse and desecration of the holy host that usually ended with a miracle ensuring the safety of the Eucharist. However, these accusations were not merely intended to “point out” that the Jews were enemies of Christianity, but rather to provide evidence of the threats to the host and, consequently, its miraculous power. The Jews played a crucial rhetorical role in producing the qualities and existence of the Eucharist, and furthermore their existence as a (fabricated) threat was a fundamental requirement of the foundation of that entity.79

Something very similar happened in the case of the notion of democracy in Hungary after World War II. The National Assembly accepted in March, 1946 Act VII, which was about the protection of the democratic system and the republic and contained definitions of several political crimes. In a situation in which the democracy in Hungary defined itself as young and therefore defenseless and fascism had proven a danger to democracy during the war, the representatives of the Assembly considered penal protection as an effective and necessary measure against opponents of this system. As the act explained it,

The penal defense of the state order is an obligation of the first order for every country, a system based on democratic principles cannot lack an effective penal state defense. But least of all a state like Hungary, which is rising again after World War II and the Arrow Cross–German devastation. Our democratic system can look back on only one year of development, while the republican form of state has been realized only recently. Regarding these conditions, the attacks against the democratic Hungarian system and form of state are of even greater account, since they endanger substantially the existence of the state, the development of the life of the society and, together with them, the place of the Hungarian people among the democratic nations.80

Therefore the Act considered every attack aiming at the overthrow of the democratic system and the republican form of the state to merit serious punishment. The explanation indicated the purpose of the act as the prevention of any recurrence of fascist-like anti-state aspirations. The trial of the pogrom in Kunmadaras was the first case that was tried on the basis of this Act.

Fascism is definitely inimical to democracy. The People’s Tribunal also shared this view. Fascist acts were obviously capable of overthrowing any kind of democratic system, as the ruling emphasized. It argued essentially that inherent characteristics showed the real nature of particular acts. Accordingly, the conclusion was drawn that fascist deeds and movements naturally opposed the notion of democracy. They were incapable of living together and fascism could prevail only after the death of democracy. Consequently it aspired to destroy democratic order.81 Fascism and democracy were old enemies, so protecting fascist activity endangered the Hungarian republic, as had happened in Germany, when the Weimar Republic had been overthrown by Hitler’s fascists (so argued the chairman of the Court). It was therefore seen as logical for the People’s Tribunal to interpret the events in Kunmadaras as simply signs of a reemergence of fascism. The ruling stated that Gergely Takács had been the election agent of an Arrow Cross member of the parliament, and later had been named sergeant by Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party, during the last days of the war in Germany. János Nagy had allegedly mobilized his disciples, who had been educated in the spirit of fascism by him. Not only had old fascists reappeared, but the whole village had gone back to the age of fascism, to 1944. According to the chairman of the Court, the case of Rosinger, who had been killed, clearly proved the total victory of the prevailing ideas of 1944. The chairman evoked another scene: “Ernő Weinberger’s family is lying bloody in the ditch and the crowd is carrying off the lard, bacon, and goods in stock. The atmosphere of 1944 is complete.”82 He characterized the decision of the inter-party meeting as a fascist act by claiming that the fall of order in Kunmadaras had become absolute. Only the wagons necessary in order to deport the persecuted had been missing. According to these statements, in Kunmadaras fascists had reenacted their role by attacking Hungarian democracy.

A historical trial makes history internal, in other words it personalizes it. The goal is to transform the historical narrative into personal experiences. The trial is a drama in which social reality is constituted, reproduced and reenacted.83 In the first trial of Nagy the sentence evoked history: the defendant was connected to the fascists of World War II. A similar technique can be detected in the trial of the pogrom in Kunmadaras.

A freak smile could show on the face of the organizers and leaders of the movement, what they had wanted was realized: the village of Kunmadaras had gone back on the cart of time to the fascist and Arrow Cross era of the year 1944, some of its inhabitants acted as the fascist and Arrow Cross scoundrels of that time had acted.84

The process established historical continuity between Nazism and the anti-Jewish riot of Kunmadaras in order to show the continuity of fascism. However, through this representation, the enemies of postwar fascism could present themselves as the heirs to an anti-Fascist past or speak about their past as the anti-Fascist past. As fascism is against democratic systems, the adversaries of fascism could present themselves as perpetual defenders of democracy. Thus the emergence of the new democratic state of Hungary could be explained not as the consequence of the collapse of the prewar regime, but as part of a constant anti-Fascist struggle. Consequently, only people who could prove their anti-Fascist pasts could present themselves as propagators of the new democracy, and at the same time this became sufficient evidence that someone had a democratic mentality.

The dissent of the chairman stated that after the crowd had returned home, Kunmadaras had experienced a fascist-like terror and the state authority basically had fallen due to this terror.85 This interpretation added a new aspect to the concept of democracy, which started to mean the institutions and the structure of the state. From this time on, the security of democracy meant defending the authority of the state. From the point of view of the birth of the Hungarian people’s democracy, the aspiration of the post-World War II system to find fascist conspirators, who allegedly represented the greatest threat to it, can be considered crucial. During this endeavor the regime itself produced the fascists. The People’s Tribunal defined the anti-Jewish riot in Kunmadaras as a fascist conspiracy. This statement identified fascism with anti-Semitism and provided a tool with which the authorities could find their enemies: from this time on the appearance of anti-Semitism made fascist conspiracies immediately recognizable. This logical connection made it possible for the system, which defined itself as a young democracy threatened by fascism, to demonstrate a historical continuity of fascism, and this presented the regime as the authentic heir to the anti-Fascist struggle. Finally, the state authority, which was taking measures against fascism, was able to conceive of itself as democracy.

Conclusions

Various Communist versions of the anti-Fascist myth played an immense role in the shaping of the Stalinist dictatorships in postwar East Central Europe. In this narrative, fascism was simplified as the brutal attempt of reactionary capitalist classes to maintain their rule over the working masses and to suppress the democratic aspirations of the people. Communists claimed themselves the representatives of the people, thus, initiating and leading the resistance against Fascism. The protection of democracy, thus, equaled Communism, whereas any attack or criticism of this (Communist) “democracy” was understood as Fascism. In this particular narrative, the fascist assault against democracy necessarily targeted Communists, and Communists were the only people who really resisted Fascism. The victims of Fascism suffered for political reasons. The Jews were at best marginal components of the story or were rather completely ignored. Despite the blatant simplifications and manipulations in this narrative, this strange post-Fascist anti-Fascism could link itself to tangible experiences of political resistance, as in Germany, or nationwide anti-German armed resistance, as in Yugoslavia or Poland.86 In Hungary, which remained unfortunately Hitler’s last, if only reluctant, ally, on the contrary, there had been only sporadic domestic resistance. The Hungarian version of the anti-Fascist myth, it seems, instead of the wartime semi-fiction of Communist anti-Fascist resistance was based on the postwar fiction of anti-Communist Fascism.

As they abused the Jewish victims only to establish a clearly and immediately recognizable characteristic of “Fascism”, these strange anti-Fascist ideologies took for granted the existence of “Jews” as an ethnic category. As a consequence, such ideologies were never interested in the actual social and cultural circumstances that helped to sustain the particularism and exclusion of Jewish citizens and the ethnicization of such mechanisms. In Kunmadaras, however, cultural stereotypes were mobilized and political messages were appropriated and finally were translated into ethnic categories during actual social intercourse in the marketplace on May 21, 1946.87 Peasant or local communities actually distanced their neighbors as “Jews” to be beaten through their everyday interactions, which helped to construct ethnicity and ethnic identities in a village that, as an outcome, was split between “Hungarians” and “Jews” in the Summer of 1946.

Archival Sources

Budapest Főváros Levéltára (BFL) [Budapest City Archives]. Budapesti Népbíróság, büntetőperes iratok, Tóth Zsigmond és társai ellen köztársasági államrendet veszélyeztető cselekmény ügyében [Budapest People’s Tribunal, Criminal Records, Zsigmond Tóth and company charged with activity against the order of the republic]. HU BFL – XXV.1.a – 1946 – 2351. Vizsgálati dosszié [Records of Investigation, vol. 1] V 56032.

Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Levéltár. Néphatalmi és különleges feladatokra létrejött bizottságok, A Kunhegyesi járás Kunmadaras Igazoló Bizottsága iratai [The County Archives of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok. Committees created for people’s control and special duties, files of the Kunmadaras Screening Committee of Kunhegyes district]. XVII/418.

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MOL). A jogszolgáltatás felsőbb szervei, Népbíróságok Országos Tanácsa, Általános Iratok [National Archives of Hungary. Supreme organs of jurisdiction, National Council of People’s Tribunals, General Records]. XX-4-b-348/1945.

Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár [Archives for Political History and Trade Unions] (PIL). Szociáldemokrata Párt, Főtitkárság, A Főtitkárság levelezése zsidó szervezetekkel [Social-democratic Party, General Secretariat, Correspondence of the General Secretariat with Jewish Organisations]. 283. f. 10/212.

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Ferenc Laczó

“I could hardly wait to get out of this camp, even though I knew it would only get worse until liberation came”1

On Hungarian Jewish Accounts of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp from 1945–46

Contrary to influential assertions on the early postwar silence surrounding the extermination of European Jewry, in Hungary, as in a number of other countries, extensive documentation of the Holocaust had already begun in the 1940s. In addition to postwar trials, published memoirs and early historical works, thousands of Hungarian Jewish survivors articulated their experiences in the offices of the National Relief Committee for Deportees (DEGOB) in 1945–46. However, these sources have not yet been systematically analyzed and early witness accounts in particular remain heavily underrepresented in historiography. This study is an effort to begin to redress this imbalance by examining 349 DEGOB accounts that discuss Buchenwald, a major Nazi concentration camp and a contested lieu de mémoire. It reveals that returnees defined, represented and assessed Buchenwald in varying ways, their perspectives depending not only on factors such as when and where they stayed in the camp and what they had to endure while there, but also on which other camp they arrived from and the conditions under which they traveled. My analysis of early Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald also reveals that while a number of interviewees understood their escape from the group of Jewish prisoners within the camp as the key to their eventual survival, others tended to use ethnic labels to identify the perpetrators of violence against them. Moreover, two major narratives were circulating regarding the liberation of the camp: the accidental Nazi failure to complete their program of extermination and another involving a successful uprising of the inmates against their tormentors. Last but not least, the paper argues that some of those who survived Buchenwald and subsequently entered the DEGOB offices showed clear awareness of the Nazi extermination program, but they preferred to discuss it in indirect ways.

Keywords: Hungarian history, Nazi concentration camps, Jewish witness accounts, Holocaust reception, discourses of violence

Witness Testimonies prior to the Era of the Witness

This study is a contribution to the recuperation of early Hungarian Jewish perspectives and voices on the Holocaust.2 Studies of the Holocaust are an important and influential field of contemporary history, together with accounts of witnesses that have become part of psychological and sociological investigations and also entered broader cultural debates. Nonetheless, the incorporation into mainstream historiography of the plethora of witness accounts produced by Holocaust survivors immediately after the World War II has only begun.3

The disinterest and even ignorance of such early voices is linked to how historiographies of the Holocaust have typically framed their subject. On the one hand, the systematic extermination of European Jewry during World War II seemed so complex and generally incomprehensible that any profound understanding seemed to require a slow and gradual process and substantial time. On the other hand, it has also been recurrently emphasized that, due to the psychological consequences of their persecution, survivors were not able to articulate their experiences immediately either.4 Until now the Holocaust has been broadly understood as an event that acquired wider political and cultural significance only several decades after the war for two main reasons: the generally belated recognition of the scope and coherence of the Nazi program of extermination and the silence of traumatized survivors.

Such narratives are currently facing a serious challenge: a substantial body of scholarship has already been published offering a plethora of evidence to discredit notions of early postwar silence and repression.5 Without questioning the increased importance of Holocaust remembrance that has been observable in more recent decades,6 this new wave of scholarship aims to show in particular that Jewish survivors were anything but mute during the early postwar period. David Cesarani, editor of one of the most important collections demonstrating this point, insisted that Jewish survivors, “if anything, succeeded too well, too soon” in commemorating the Holocaust avant la lettre, and it would therefore be much more appropriate to inquire into the early postwar “deafness” of the surrounding world than to continue discussions of supposed Jewish silence.7

This article draws on all of the 349 testimonies in the collection of the National Relief Committee for Deportees in Hungary (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság, DEGOB) that make references to the Buchenwald concentration camp.8 My choice of Buchenwald as a case study was determined, apart from the crucial circumstance of the availability of rich and diverse accounts from 1945–46, by the fact that Buchenwald was one of the largest and oldest camps in a Nazi German environment9 and has remained a contested lieu de mémoire ever since.10 Not only is Buchenwald very near Weimar, one of the symbolic centers of Germany,11 but it was also heavily instrumentalized under the East German Communist regime.12 There were fierce debates about Buchenwald after 1989, too, especially concerning the Soviet camp that was in operation there after 1945.13 Therefore, it appears all the more intriguing and relevant to inquire how its survivors discussed this major Nazi camp before canonical interpretations emerged and stereotypical images took form.

The largest part of this paper offers a qualitative analysis of early Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald based on close reading. On the general level, I am interested in how survivors articulated their experiences soon after their release from the camp—despite the immense difficulties of verbalizing their sufferings and in the absence of widely agreed discursive frames.14 More specifically, I address the following questions: how did Hungarian Jewish survivors define, represent and assess Buchenwald in 1945–46? How did they retrospectively describe the condition they were in while there? How did they discuss their experiences of violence? Did they employ ethnic labels in their accounts and, if so, when and how? How did they narrate the liberation of Buchenwald? Finally, how did they perceive the Nazi program of extermination in the immediate aftermath of the war? Before going into these details, however, I address in the following sections the historiographical context and offer a quantitative description of the backgrounds of the interviewees.

On the Historiographical Context

Drawing on evidence in a wide variety of languages and covering a host of European countries (such as Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Poland), the 2012 monograph by Laura Jockusch entitled Collect and Record! has shown that from the late nineteenth century onwards the Jews of Eastern Europe developed new techniques of documentation in reaction to anti-Jewish violence. More concretely, they came to understand the collection of witness accounts as an essential part of their scholarly-commemorative response to human-made catastrophes. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would subsequently apply these techniques to the unprecedented crimes committed during World War II.

The collection of witness accounts was thus an eminent part of the agenda of the historical commissions and documentation centers that were launched as soon as the Nazi genocide was over.15 In some cases, such as occupied Poland or France, Jews in fact initiated the documentation of their destruction at the hands of the Nazis while it was still taking place.16 As a consequence, manifold Jewish sources on the Nazi Endlösung were created and a broad array of publications was completed before the end of 1940s—only to be largely neglected and almost fully forgotten afterwards and remain underexplored to this day.17

Collect and Record! also highlights the seminal contributions made by Jews originating from Eastern Europe to these early postwar endeavors. Jockusch explains that Polish Jewish survivors were the crucial actors, not only in Poland but also in France—the other major center of documentation discussed in her book. On the other hand, Jockusch unfortunately makes no reference to early postwar developments in Hungary. This is all the more regrettable since not only was approximately every third victim of Auschwitz a Hungarian Jew but Hungary was one of the countries with the largest group of Holocaust survivors in this period—and has remained so since.

Due, above all, to this large and active group of Jewish survivors, Hungary made an impressive start in producing detailed knowledge about various facets of the Nazi program of extermination, with a clear focus on “the fate” of Hungarian Jewry. In spite of severe problems related to social reintegration, material restitution and the local culture of commemoration, early Hungarian efforts to document the Holocaust were manifested in several major ways.18 Publications by the controversial Hungarian Jewish journalist-turned-historian Jenő Lévai provided substantial overviews of the Hungarian Holocaust in the second half of the 1940s.19 Lévai’s works belong among the earliest empirically based presentations of the Holocaust in any country, even if they were also responsible for the invention of several historical myths.20 Second, crimes committed against Jews during the war years played highly prominent roles in the early Hungarian postwar trials.21 Third, Hungarian Jewish witness testimonies took various forms immediately after the war. In spite of being omitted in a recent guide to the field of Holocaust literature, Jewish survivors published dozens of memoirs in Hungarian before the onset of Stalinism in the late 1940s.22

Moreover, the altogether twenty-nine interviewers working for the National Relief Committee for Deportees (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság, DEGOB) project alone created over 3,500 interview-based files in 1944–46, making it the largest pool of such sources apart from the Polish one.23 The three main tasks of the National Relief Committee for Deportees were to help the repatriation of survivors to Hungary, provide social aid, and pursue projects of documentation. By September 1946, in addition to the interviews, DEGOB also created altogether 30,000 files on Hungarian Jewish survivors and 120,000 on people who perished during the Holocaust.24 Members of DEGOB’s Information Bureau were also present at major postwar trials to record parts of Jewish concern. Last but not least, they established a collection of Hungarian Jewish-related press materials featuring over 10,000 articles.

DEGOB recorded over 3,500 interviews in a mere year and a half. The first one in the collection was conducted in December 1944 and the last in April 1946. The Organization of the Jews of Hungary from Outside Budapest (Magyarországi Zsidók Szervezete Vidéki Osztálya) conducted numerous interviews in the spring of 1945 that were later incorporated into the DEGOB collection. The central establishment of DEGOB in Budapest began to add its own by early summer of the same year. The length of the records produced varies from just a few paragraphs to dozens of pages. On average, however, they are mostly concise and descriptive pieces of one to four pages that only occasionally address more complex interpretative questions and largely avoid strongly emotionally charged matters.25

To help the work of the interviewer and standardize the contents, a questionnaire with twelve major themes was gradually developed. This defined the major subjects of the interviews as follows: personal data; the situation of Jews at their places of residence; ghettoization and its prehistory; deportation; arrival; the destination of the first deportation, its organization and life in the camp; labor camps, their organization and life in them; evacuation; stages following evacuation; liberation; life in the camp upon liberation; the way home. Ultimately, the thousands of early post-Holocaust Hungarian witness accounts were the result of semi-structured interviews, and they could well be considered co-products of interviewer and interviewee.26

The fact that the impressive early postwar Hungarian Jewish efforts remain heavily underrepresented in contemporary English-language scholarship (Jockusch’s monograph being only one, though a key example here) is arguably part of an even larger problem, namely the rather peripheral position of Hungarian scholarship on the Holocaust.27 Several current priorities of Holocaust research, including the incorporation and analysis of survivor testimonies, remain only marginally present in Hungarian historiography. It is indicative of this larger trend that some of the most important recent contributions to the prehistory and implementation of the Hungarian Holocaust devote exclusive attention to the perpetrator side and the mechanisms of destruction, without studying the reactions and behavior of the victims.28 My paper aims to redress this imbalance by examining 349 DEGOB accounts that discuss Buchenwald, a major Nazi concentration camp and a contested lieu de mémoire.

Interviewees, Ghettos and Deportations

Hungarian Jewish deportees experienced and narrated their time in Buchenwald in different ways depending on where they came from, how they arrived there, when and how long they had to stay and, last but certainly not least, what happened to them while they were there.29 Since some of the 349 protocols that make reference to Buchenwald contain contributions from more than one person, they include the accounts of altogether 393 interviewees.30 The files contain basic information on the background of most of these individuals. With the exception of two people who were born in Germany, all of the 393 interviewees came from the enlarged wartime territory of Hungary.31 Even though the collection cannot make claims to representativeness, not even regarding the group of returnees, comparing the characteristics of this Buchenwald sample with the whole group of DEGOB interviewees still promises to yield important insights. Prior to my textual analysis, I will therefore describe the sample of interviewees with particular attention to their gender, age, locations of ghettoization, and routes of deportation.

Due to the gendered manner of deportation and especially the almost exclusively male camp society of Buchenwald, there is a great gender imbalance in my sample. Only thirty of the 393 individuals are female, i.e. less than one in thirteen.32 This sharply differs from the overall proportion of men and women in the DEGOB collection as a whole, where men constitute a very slight majority of 51 percent. The contrast is all the more striking since significantly more women than men were interviewed in the case of certain regions that include Kárpátalja (Subcarpathia), from where most of the Buchenwald interviewees came.33

In the overwhelming majority of cases (386 out of 393), the year of birth of the interviewees is also indicated in the files. All of them were born between 1887 and 1933. Thus, when they returned to Hungary and entered the offices of DEGOB in 1945–46, the oldest among them was 58 while the youngest merely 12. Their average age was 27.85, with a significant majority below 30. This closely resembles the overall sample of interviewees, in which the average age was 27.3.34 It is conspicuous that nearly half (172 out of 386) of the interviewees were born between 1924 and 1929, i.e. were past 16 but not yet 22 in 1945.35

Regarding the location of ghettoization, the information is less systematic and the entries are not entirely consistent.36 Nevertheless, the 243 cases give a reasonably reliable estimate of the regional origins of the interviewees. The results prove both unequivocal and striking. The most commonly appearing ghetto names are those of Munkács (Мукачеве in Ukrainian) with 39, Ungvár (Ужгород) with 35, Beregszász (Берегове) with 25 and Szeklence (Сокирниця) with 21, all of which are in Kárpátalja (Subcarpathia).37 Mátészalka in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County is mentioned 16 times as the location of ghettoization and is therefore fifth on the list and first within the territory of postwar Hungary. Mátészalka is followed by Huszt (Хуст), Iza (Іза), Aknaszlatina (Солотвино), Felsővisó (Vişeu de Sus), Nagyszőllős (Виноградів) and Técső (Тячів). With the sole exception of Felsővisó from Máramaros (Maramureş in Romanian) County, each of these places is in Kárpátalja as well.38 If we added Budapest with its multiple locations of “concentration,” there are twelve cities in the sample in which at least five of the interviewees were ghettoized, and nine of these twelve are in Kárpátalja.39 These nine cities account for nearly two-thirds (157 out of 243) of all known cases—surpassing even the disproportionately high percent (48.6) of interviewees from this region in the DEGOB collection as a whole.40

In the case of 362 individuals, the various camps to which they were deported are listed at the beginning of their files. These entries can be divided into three large groups: 198 were taken to Auschwitz, while 123 were not.41 Third, there are 41 cases in which Buchenwald is not included in the list of camps to which they were taken, but the name is referred to in the text in one way or another. Of the 198 who had been to Buchenwald and had to go through Auschwitz too, 121 were taken from Auschwitz directly to Buchenwald and 70 arrived there through various alternative locations in between.42 The most common patterns in this group of 198 individuals are the following: 38 of them were taken to four different camps and arrived at Buchenwald directly from Auschwitz. 20 of them were taken to Auschwitz and then to another camp before they arrived in Buchenwald where they were eventually liberated. 18 were taken to three camps but had to travel directly from Auschwitz to Buchenwald.43

Regarding the second group, the 123 Hungarian Jewish individuals who were taken to Buchenwald but not Auschwitz typically were deported from Hungary directly to Buchenwald. According to the list of camps at the beginning of the files, 38 of them were in two camps, 17 in three and 14 in four after first being deported to Buchenwald. Another common pattern was to have been at two camps, but to have been taken to Buchenwald twice: there are altogether eleven such returnees among the interviewees.44 There is another significant cohort of nine interviewees who were not taken to Auschwitz, but rather were taken to three different camps, arriving in Buchenwald as the last of these three.45

Perspectives on Buchenwald: Bare Life in a Multiethnic Setting

The DEGOB accounts of Buchenwald practically unanimously describe the conditions of their train journey to Buchenwald, a topic most famously depicted by Jorge Semprún in his Le Grand Voyage, as hardly bearable.46 The arrival in Buchenwald tends to be described in nearly identical ways too. Numerous accounts explain that it involved the loss of the last items of personal property, a mass shower and being given inmate clothing. Several reports explicitly refer to the experience of being reduced to a mere number within the camp.47 Many files contain observations concerning the camp as a whole, such as references to its enormous size and the density of its population.48

On the other hand, as I will aim to show, later experiences and the interpretations of these experiences upon liberation, and, consequently, the overall assessments of Buchenwald, strongly diverge. There is no clear consensus in the files regarding the kind of establishment Buchenwald was either. Several Hungarian Jewish witnesses testifying in 1945–46 spent only a few days or weeks there and understood Buchenwald to be a distribution center (gyűjtőhely or gyűjtőtábor in Hungarian).49 Many other witnesses referred to it as a concentration camp, whereas some thought it was a death camp or even an extermination camp.50

Hardly any of the accounts relating personal experiences in Buchenwald map the camp, suggesting that Jewish inmates were not at all in a position to gain any detailed knowledge of it. There is only one account that at least aims to list the main parts of the camp, and does so in the following manner: “there were three camps here: the small Lager, the Zeltlager and the great Lager.”51 Beyond this, there is the occasional reflection on the faulty nature of memory, such as “my memories of it [of Buchenwald] were blurred by later horrors.”52 Such statements could also lead to explicit admissions of having no real knowledge of the camp. For instance, one of the reports states that, “my memories of Buchenwald were erased by later horrors.”53 Other inmates reflected on their forcefully restricted perspective: “this was a gigantic Lager and we could not see much of it,”54 or referred to the lack of time they had to get acquainted with it: “I only stayed in Buchenwald for a very short time, six or eight days, and so I could not get any real insight into what was going on in the camp.”55

Discussions of Buchenwald camp society recurrently highlight its multinational56 or multireligious, i.e. Christian and Jewish, character.57 One Hungarian Jewish witness remarked that Buchenwald was not established specifically for Jews.58 Another witness listed various kinds of inmates: “those captured belonged to different categories: there were political Jews, homosexuals, criminals, so called action Jews, such as those from the June action.”59 On the other hand, several reports underlined that in this multiethnic camp Jews were either segregated, specially discriminated, or both.60 Some survivors offered estimates of the number and proportion of Jews. One of them stated that 10,000 inmates were Jewish out of altogether 60,000.61 Another maintained that there were 80,000 inmates and only three blocks of Jews in the whole camp,62 while a third asserted that there were around 30,000 Jews in Buchenwald at the beginning of April 1945 (i.e. shortly before liberation).63

In his book Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben maintained that power confronted bare life in the camps without mediation.64 His statement finds much support in the accounts of Hungarian Jewish Buchenwald survivors. These reports refer not only to “indescribable” forms of suffering,65 terrible humiliations,66 purposeless brutality and sadism,67 and occasionally even to one’s own dehumanization (more on this question below),68 but also extensively dwell on basic circumstances and elements of life, such as the possibilities to sleep and eat, occasionally including the amount of weight lost,69 as well as the extreme cold that was described as being especially severe during the long hours of senseless waiting at Appell (roll call) outside.70

In the following two excerpts, one finds concise lists of many of these negative experiences:

We were undressed and our few remaining belongings were taken away. We were brought into a small room where three to four people slept in every bed. We were given pasta soup and bread but were so weak that we could hardly eat. We were given very poor trousers, our coats were even worse, and we got a blanket each. The roll calls were very long and we suffered a great deal due to the cold. Our treatment was the worst imaginable. The SS men were walking around with their huge dogs and shot those who tried to escape.71

In Buchenwald, 1,500 people were put into a single block. We slept on wood in our clothes and shoes. We suffered a lot. My weight went down to 32 kilograms. The Capo of the SS would beat us for no reason. Roll calls lasted two to three hours per day. We had to get up at 5:00 am, got black coffee, one loaf of bread for six people and three-quarters of a liter of soup. We had no blankets and felt very cold. Many died of exhaustion. Life there was unbearable.72

In short, the Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald are replete with descriptions of experiences of freezing, severe hunger, the lack of space, and brutal violence (from above but occasionally also among inmates, to which I will return below). Nonetheless, as already noted, the overall assessment of the camp was far from uniform.

Several Hungarian Jewish survivors evaluated their time in the camp in extremely dark colors, “the days I had to spend in Buchenwald were the most horrible of my life.”73

We were subjected to the cruelest treatment there, we had to step on dead bodies, people were constantly in pain, whining and shouting due to the lack of space, but no one cared. The provision of food was also the weakest imaginable. I had to put up with awful suffering caused by hunger too.74

Such thoroughly negative assessments of Buchenwald are accompanied by somewhat more positive memories. In the DEGOB collection, one finds statements on how Buchenwald had “good” or at least “better” food,75 that the treatment here was “relatively mild,”76 even “quite decent,”77 the inmates were “relatively free,”78 there was all in all “less suffering”79 and the camp was “quite bearable.”80 Another survivor called it his “luck” to have been taken to Buchenwald.81 “I stayed ten days in Buchenwald, where I was put into the Zeltlager [tent camp] and this place felt like a holiday compared to Auschwitz.”82 Other survivors highlighted that they had nothing to do in Buchenwald and all they could do was lie around.83 According to some witnesses, life could be “monotonous,” even “boring” there.84 Ironically, still others experienced Buchenwald not as a place of suffering and dying but of sickness and recovery: these witnesses got sick elsewhere and essentially gathered their experiences of Buchenwald in its hospital where they were eventually liberated.85

Living and Dying in Buchenwald

The most crucial question to emerge from the witness accounts concerning Buchenwald appears to be how inmates struggled to survive and how they died there. Numerous survivors described the condition they were in as between life and death. According to one of the reports, the food that was provided “was too little to survive on but too much to die.”86 Similarly, another explained that the food was minimal, “too little to live but a little too much to starve.”87 A third stated that “we were half dead already at the train station,” i.e. even before they would have arrived in Buchenwald.88

Four of the DEGOB files discussing Buchenwald even refer to the concept of Muselmann (in three cases the expression is used in Hungarian, i.e. as muzulmán), a term in the vocabulary of the camps that was used derogatively to refer to those who were exhausted, starved and lethargic to the point of being resigned to their death.89

Dead bodies were lying in front of the blocks. When the camp was being emptied, I felt that I could not join them and decided to lie down among the dead. I stayed there for 36 hours until the whole camp was gone. Then I stood up with great difficulty. At that point, I was rather dead than alive since I could barely move.90

In addition to discussing the human condition between life and death, many accounts refer to one or several causes of death. The various forms of dying mentioned include freezing to death,91 starvation,92 being shot,93 even being bombed by the Allies,94 death through the brutal treatment of SS men,95 or dying in the shower “simply” under the weight of falling water.96 Some reports list numerous causes: “People died from diarrhea, typhus or exhaustion. The sick were supposedly murdered with injections. The crematorium was in constant operation.”97

Some of the 349 reports also include data on the number of survivors. There is little disagreement in the DEGOB files on the number of survivors who were in Buchenwald at the time of liberation. All the numbers given fall between 20,000 and 24,000.98 There is greater variance on how many inmates were there previously. The numbers given climb from 70,000 to 80,000 and 90,000. Only one of the reports adds the temporal dimension to explain that the number increased from 40,000 to 100,000 once camps farther east were dissolved and the Nazis moved their inmates further west.99 Understandably, it was much more difficult for survivors to estimate the number of the dead than the number of the liberated. In fact, there is only one report that provides concrete figures regarding how many people had been murdered: “51,000 people were executed while I was there.”100

Numerous Hungarian Jewish interviewees were liberated in Buchenwald, and several of them told relatively detailed stories of their liberation (more on this below). Far fewer seem to have survived the death marches to make it subsequently to the DEGOB offices.101 While many accounts refer to camp inmates being taken away just prior to liberation, there was hardly any knowledge of how many people were actually taken or what was done to them.102 Some exceptional evidence is provided by a witness who arrived in Buchenwald just before its liberation and on the way there had observed the dead bodies of those forcibly removed only to be murdered.103 In this regard, only two files provide concrete figures. One of them states that three-quarters of the 35,000 people who had to leave Buchenwald at the last moment were subsequently murdered.104 According to the other, 60,000 were murdered in the last minute. Most of them had been taken to Buchenwald “from neighboring camps” shortly before.105

Violence and Ethnicity

Not only do the reports identify multiple causes of death, they also tackle the question of violence in alternative ways. On the following pages, my aim will be to identify patterns of how violence was discussed at the DEGOB offices. First of all, Hungarian Jewish survivors often connected their discussion of violence to that of ethnicity. Perpetrators were repeatedly ethnically labeled, even in texts that otherwise largely refrained from employing such labels. Second, survivors rarely affirmed their Jewishness. In all likelihood, this had to do both with the “Jewish” context of the interview situation, making more explicit statements unnecessary, as well as the fact that the perpetrators used Jewishness as a negative, even diabolical marker during the extermination process and so it was most dangerous to be assigned to this category until liberation.106 Furthermore, the refusal to respond to orders directed at Jews was a key element of numerous accounts, as were successful attempts to acquire a different ethnic marker. Third, the processes of dehumanization under the terrible conditions of the camp and, more concretely, the level and forms of violence between inmates are among the most controversial aspects of the Holocaust.107 Some of the early survivor accounts are distinguished precisely by the fact that they address these morally highly controversial issues more openly than many later, more pietistic and sanitized representations of the Holocaust.

The ethnicization of violence is manifested in relatively simple discursive forms, such as in the following excerpts: “I simply could not continue my work any longer. The Polish Capo, who was supposed to supervise us, saw this. He beat me badly with his gun and kicked me too.”108 “Our supervisors were Christian Poles who treated us in the cruelest manner.”109 “We had to bear a lot from the Poles, who would beat us with decks and dongs.”110 “We spent four weeks there and had no work to do, but the Polish Capos responsible for us did us considerable harm.”111 “The SS orders were carried out by Ukrainian youth who would constantly beat us.”112 These statements confirm that there was a complex hierarchy of ethnic groups in Buchenwald and Hungarian Jews tended to suffer everyday abuses not at the hands of German Nazis, but rather at those of Eastern European collaborators whom the Germans recruited through various means.

The most frequently reported case of avoiding the potentially lethal Jewish label was when, shortly prior to the evacuation of Buchenwald, Jews were called to the Appellplatz. The stories told by several survivors were almost identical in this regard. “When the Jews were called, I did not go, and so when the Americans liberated the camp I was still alive, even if sick.”113 “The next evening all the Jews were gathered on Appellplatz. I sensed the danger and with a few others, I decided to return to the small Lager. The next day the order ‘Appell Juden antreten’ was repeated, but I did not show up then either.”114

Stories of escape that center on the refusal to be identified as Jewish by the Nazis were accompanied by those focusing on the successful change of the ethnic marker. “I cannot tell what happened to this fellow of mine. I got hold of a Yugoslav badge, which I put on my coat, and I qualified as an Aryan from that moment onwards,” explained one of the survivors.115 “The next morning an Appell of the whole camp was called. Three SS men selected Jews to be taken to work in a factory. I managed to go over to the Russians. The next day, I was transported to Theresienstadt alongside them,” another recalled.116

In addition to such changes of ethnic belonging in the camp, some survivors indicated that they managed to qualify as Christians. “I stayed at a carpenter shop and was again registered as a Christian. When I heard the megaphones shout ‘Sämtliche Juden antreten’, I thought that this could only get me into trouble and went over to the Christians instead.”117 “In the children’s block, the Blockältester [barrack leader] was Czech. After much effort, he managed to arrange to have the bureau of the Lager register us as Christians.”118

Not all Hungarian Jewish survivors of Buchenwald had such good fortune in their attempts to escape the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Nazis, and many of them had much darker episodes to narrate. Accounts of scenes of humiliation were unavoidably accompanied by the sense of having been dehumanized and were thus the most painful to recall. Nonetheless, such memories were not fully repressed in 1945–46.119 Some survivors would explicitly state that they were dehumanized in Buchenwald: “I cannot tell the day or the date, we were no longer humans at this point, we lived like the most misfortunate animals.”120 Others would describe awful scenes of humiliation in some detail:

Putting the food of the hungry masses into the middle of the Appellplatz was one of the amusements of the Lagercommandant [SS officer, commander of the camp]. Given the signal, the masses of people ran for the hot food in the cauldrons and trampled each other. The cauldron was turned around and the food was lost. The SS official was very amused at this.121

Another survivor discussed how the deported related to the psychological problems of others in the context of their own dehumanization by providing the following example: “Many became hysterical. Nothing describes better how rough we became than the fact that we hit these crazy ones, not least to acquire more space.”122

This quotation touches on the controversial question of violence by and among the inmates. A less radical reference to this issue runs as follows: “we were taken to shower and made to wait there for hours. We felt great hunger. People started fighting like animals just to get a little water.”123 In the course of a more radical discussion of this problem the claim is made that the almost starved inmates of Buchenwald killed each other.124 Last but not least, three former workers of the Buchenwald crematorium offered an account at the DEGOB office that is in many ways exceptional, not least of all because it narrates their own violent acts, including how they mistreated Germans after liberation (more on this report below).125

Without meaning to assess the level and types of violence among the inmates of Buchenwald on the basis of these scattered references, I would conclude by noting that one of the major causes of violence seems to be its previous experience.126 The DEGOB records indicate that Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust may often have constituted exceptions to this more general pattern—even if not all of them proved exceptional in this respect. Sustained attempts at dehumanization can prove effective. Such acts are evil in themselves, but also in their consequences, and need to be condemned accordingly.127

Stories of Liberation and Resistance

Stories of having remained sick or of having contracted illnesses after liberation are much more typical of the sample as a whole than the aforementioned singular case of violent revenge. The arrival of the Americans thus did not constitute a complete break in the life of every witness. The treatment they were given may have been a dramatic improvement, but many of them first stayed in the same hospital building.128 Notwithstanding recurrent references to continued poor health, apart from the day of arrival, no day was more often discussed than that of liberation.129 Its date was usually specified too, though survivors gave a number of different ones. April 11, 1945 was most commonly given.130

In the DEGOB offices, two major stories were told regarding the liberation of Buchenwald. One referred to the Nazis and their last minute plan of extermination, a story of the narrowest and most dramatic escape from looming Armageddon, though often narrated in a rather dry manner. The other was a leftist narrative of resistance and successful uprising that contributed to the later canonization of the heroic story of Buchenwald under the Communist regimes. Both of them were told in alternative ways and are therefore worth exploring in some detail.

In the case of the former plot, the following three examples may illustrate the contrast between style and content: “During the last week they tried to exterminate the whole of the Jewry. I was sick and was hospitalized.”131

There were altogether 80,000 people in the camp. 56,000 were taken away at the beginning of April. They wanted to murder the 24,000 weakened and sick ones, including me, who stayed in Buchenwald. They did not manage to do this since the Americans arrived just an hour in advance and hindered the execution of their plan.132

I only found out later that we were in mortal danger. The SS Commandant of Weimar had ordered the execution of the whole Lager but they did not have enough time. The Americans were already very close and the Lagercommandant of Buchenwald decided to flee. We were thus saved from certain death.133

Another witness tells the same story from a particular angle: he explains that he heard about the plan of extermination from an SS man who towards the very end of the war attempted to strike a deal with the surviving Jews.

Suddenly they wanted to take us to Buchenwald. An SS man, who was among our custodians and who was an ethnic German from Poland, told us that the SS had been given orders to take us to Buchenwald and murder us all there. He treated us well and expected us to justify his behavior once we fell into the hands of the Americans.134

In another report, one finds a more controversial way of narrating the plans and practices of the SS. In this report, a Hungarian Jewish survivor largely reproduces the rather apologetic story he came to hear from a friendly German soldier:

The SS were told in the spring [of 1945] that those who would want to exterminate the Jews should apply. A German soldier who treated me very well told me this. Grenades were handed out and 600 Jews were supposed to be killed, but very few men applied and nothing came of the plan.135

In addition to the narrative conveying the sense of impending doom that accompanied the experience of liberation, another one was in relatively wide circulation regarding the last moments of the Nazi camp that concerned the uprising of the inmates and their defeat of the SS. One Hungarian Jewish witness even claimed to have participated in it:

We took rifles from the external factories into the camp earlier and now we finally rose up against the SS. There were 200 of us and many of us died. The SS consisted of around 400 men. We took many of their rifles and so we managed to acquire more weapons and were ultimately victorious.136

According to another survivor, some French inmates but especially the Russian prisoners of war were the key actors in the successful uprising: “Another Frenchmen managed to cut the wires by sacrificing his life. Electricity was gone. Russian prisoners of war got hold of rifles in the nearby ammunition factory and defeated the SS in six hours.”137

Another version of the self-liberation story held that cooperation between the inmates and the American liberators led to the successful operation: “With hidden weapons and American help, the Häftlings [Inmates] captured 90 percent of the SS men.”138 An alternative narrative focused on the Spanish inmates of Buchenwald while also assigning a significant role to the Americans:

By this time the white flag flew over the entrance of the camp. In the meantime we found out that the Spanish inmates had managed to cut the high-voltage cables and attacked the SS from behind, getting hold of their weapons. They captured some 200 of them. In subsequent days, the Americans captured the rest.139

Not only did these heroic stories of liberation have strong political connotations in early postwar Hungary but several accounts included explicit statements regarding the benevolent role of Communists in the camp.140 According to one such story,

German, French and Russian comrades hindered the evacuation of the camp, which would have meant certain death. They provided us with packages from the French Red Cross even though they were not supposed to be given to Jews. It is thanks to Hungarian Communists that the majority of Hungarian Jews managed to return home from Buchenwald.141

Other accounts emphasized how well-organized and powerful the Communists were among the inmates of Buchenwald. One account argued that “the Communist organization was in control of the situation in the Lager,”142 while another explained that “there was a very strong Communist organization in Buchenwald, they even managed to provide the last transport with 200 rifles,”143 whereas a third maintained that “the leaders and the Blockaltersters were German Communists and Social Democratic Party members, Frenchmen and Dutch. The camp had its autonomous leadership, which would distribute the little they had received from the Germans in a just manner.”144

Survivors Approaching the Program of Extermination in 1945–46

Hungarian Jewish survivors of Buchenwald might not have possessed all the evidence on the extent and coherence of the Nazi Judeocide in 1945–46 but several DEGOB accounts strongly suggest that they grasped the basic features of the unprecedented program of extermination and were also well aware of the means that were used to murder the large majority of Hungarian Jews (i.e. the use of gas).145 Various accounts make references to the crematorium of Buchenwald—one of them being the account of Hungarian Jews who had to work there. Other survivors addressed one of the basic tensions at the heart of the German war economy: the program of economic exploitation and that of extermination were only reconcilable within limits beyond which Nazi Germany had to determine its priorities. Some persecuted Jews not only discovered this tension (which was way too often “resolved” in favor of extermination), but often argued that, when it came to their specific cases, the recognition of the value of their labor overruled the politics of genocide.

At the same time, even those Hungarian Jewish survivors who seemed fully able to grasp as early as 1945–46 the basic features of the catastrophe that befell Jewry were struggling to find ways to describe it. As part of this, they employed conventional phrases that could only prove misleading in the case of the Holocaust. For instance, one of the witnesses used gendered discourse, as if only adult men had been murdered, while others had survived: “The cold was unbearable, every single day seven or eight people passed away in each wagon. They were simply thrown out and onto the roads. Many of these men are still expected to return home by their mothers, wives and children.”146

Other survivors addressed the program of extermination but had problems doing so in direct speech. In the two locations of the Buchenwald sample where the extermination of European Jewry was most explicitly referenced, the form chosen was that of the dialogue: “The Blockältester remarked to us ‘Dirty miserable Jews, you believe that even if the Germans were to lose the war, we would not have the power to kill you all? Either way, you will not leave this place alive!’”147 A second report offers an even more explicit but similarly dialogical instance: “When I slowly entered the gate of Buchenwald, an SS man hit me. I asked him why he had done this and he answered me, ‘You are a dirty Jew and we sentenced all of you to death.’”148 The choice of the particular form, i.e. making a German Nazi speak, is all the more conspicuous, since otherwise it was hardly ever employed in these records.

The method of gassing appears in two notable places. One witness referred to his fear of being gassed in the following manner: “I looked around and saw that the place was used for showering. I immediately thought that we would be gassed, that this must be the reason why so many people had been herded into such a place.”149 Another witness maintained that gas was actually in use in Buchenwald to murder those whose labor was not needed:

When a larger group needed to be burned, they were taken to Buchenwald, where four crematoria were in operation day and night. They told people that they would have to take a shower, they were given soap and towel and then they arrived in a room with showers. When all of them were inside, they closed the door and let gas enter through the showers. The Germans had one single goal: to murder everyone who was no longer useful for them, who could not work for them, was sick, too old or just a small child.150

As already noted, there were discrepancies between different agencies of Nazi Germany during the program of extermination on the question whether the priority was extermination of the Jews or the exploitation of Jewish labor. Several DEGOB reports refer to this tension. According to one, for instance,

An SS man, supposedly a Hungarian doctor, arrived from Buchenwald in January 1945. His opinion was that people should not be murdered but given time to rest, so they could be made to work again. I heard that he was the one to initiate the transport of some 1,200 Häftlings, including me, to Buchenwald.151

There are two further brief discussions on how working as a prisoner for the German war economy could prove lifesaving in the context of the immoral rationality of certain perpetrators: “Since they were satisfied with our work, they sent back a message stating that the factory owner needed us. This is how we escaped death.”152 Second, “they were satisfied with our work and needed it too. It would have made no sense to employ superfluous cruelty and thereby make us unfit for work. They would have thereby robbed themselves of their work force.”153

The crematorium of Buchenwald was usually briefly discussed, for instance, “I got the worst impressions upon arrival. The crematorium was the first thing I saw. I do not need to emphasize how uncomfortable I felt.”154 Or to cite another example, “There was a crematorium in Buchenwald too. On average, there were 5,000 deaths per day.”155 By far the most detailed evidence was offered in the report in which inmates who had to work there discussed their experiences:

We worked at the crematorium of Buchenwald for some three weeks. Our job was to move the coal from the wagons to the basement. There was a five meters deep pit in the courtyard of the crematorium. Due to the narrowness of the space, the misfortunate ones selected for extermination had to push each other. They pushed each other into that pit, whether they intended to or not. The murderers of the SS helped this process from behind while their cronies stood below. The latter pushed iron hooks through the maxilla of the poor victims and they hanged them up on the wall there in the basement like cattle hangs in the meat shop. They started hitting them with rubber that had some wires in it too. We heard terrible shouting and crying. We would have been executed too, had the Americans not arrived. They only let the employees of the crematorium live for three months.156

Conclusion

Contrary to influential assertions on the early postwar silence surrounding the extermination of European Jewry, in Hungary, as in a number of other countries, extensive documentation of the Holocaust had already begun in the mid-1940s. Long before the era of the witness, in addition to the postwar trials, published memoirs and early historical works, thousands of Hungarian Jewish survivors articulated their experiences in the offices of the National Relief Committee for Deportees (DEGOB). The above analysis of 349 Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald concentration camp recorded in 1945–46 describes this select group of DEGOB interviewees in terms their gender, age, locations of their ghettoization and routes of deportation. Beyond quantitative issues, the paper has in turn focused on definitions, descriptions and assessments of Buchenwald, on discussions of the prevailing conditions, various manners of dying and states in-between life and death, on how the experience of violence and ethnic identifications were discursively related, on stories of liberation, resistance and chance escape, as well as on the scattered references to the overall Nazi program of extermination.

The study of these early accounts reveals that whereas a number of witnesses understood their escape from the Jewish camp group as the key to their eventual survival, many tended to employ ethnic labels to identify the perpetrators of violence against them, and this frequently meant references to Eastern European collaborators. It also becomes clear that previous camp experiences, such as experiences in Auschwitz and horrible train journeys, often provided bases for comparison that made Buchenwald appear in a less unfavorable light—in spite of the brutal violence, severe hunger, terrible cold, insufficient space, poor hygiene, harsh working conditions and, ultimately, mass death. At the same time, some of those who survived Buchenwald and were interviewed at the DEGOB offices shortly afterwards were clearly aware of the general characteristics of the Nazi program of annihilation, though they preferred to discuss it in indirect ways in the immediate aftermath of its horrors.

Archival Sources

Records of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság Number 9, 13, 15, 22, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33, 37, 45, 48, 60, 66, 80, 83, 87, 90, 97, 120, 159, 161, 162, 174, 177, 189, 190, 192, 196, 226, 237, 244, 258, 289, 323, 324, 326, 327, 330, 335, 346, 347, 363, 370, 373, 387, 388, 391, 392, 395, 416, 470, 477, 478, 483, 487, 489, 498, 522, 538, 540, 551, 552, 554, 565, 574, 601, 608, 611, 619, 623, 534, 636, 645, 651, 653, 664, 669, 675, 692, 696, 716, 728, 730, 731, 738, 739, 752, 754, 756, 757, 810, 818, 823, 841, 848, 855, 857, 864, 874, 885, 905, 906, 908, 911, 913, 940, 952, 968, 973, 994, 998, 1030, 1036, 1039, 1041, 1055, 1080, 1109, 1133, 1163, 1177, 1178, 1183, 1195, 1205, 1219, 1228, 1232, 1239, 1273, 1280, 1295, 1297, 1309, 1313, 1318, 1328, 1333, 1348, 1349, 1358, 1364, 1368, 1417, 1430, 1436, 1455, 1457, 1500, 1538, 1582, 1584, 1590, 1597, 1616, 1633, 1638, 1639, 1669, 1670, 1671, 1673, 1675, 1676, 1677, 1683, 1686, 1687, 1692, 1694, 1727, 1729, 1744, 1750, 1757, 1761, 1762, 1771, 1788, 1803, 1808, 1811, 1830, 1851, 1852, 1855, 1884, 1890, 1902, 1925, 1939, 1946, 1959, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1994, 1995, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2024, 2032, 2046, 2049, 2052, 2066, 2072, 2073, 2077, 2096, 2100, 2102, 2127, 2132, 2133, 2134, 2137, 2158, 2160, 2162, 2176, 2195, 2203, 2227, 2234, 2235, 2241, 2245, 2264, 2272, 2278, 2319, 2321, 2327, 2341, 2365, 2374, 2377, 2378, 2386, 2387, 2418, 2432, 2463, 2475, 2492, 2504, 2519, 2524, 2541, 2566, 2569, 2570, 2576, 2580, 2586, 2590, 2601, 2618, 2623, 2657, 2687, 2692, 2705, 2706, 2720, 2724, 2760, 2785, 2786, 2789, 2794, 2798, 2804, 2826, 2839, 2847, 2862, 2865, 2900, 2905, 2910, 2920, 2926, 2943, 2945, 2947, 2968, 2973, 2988, 3006, 3023, 3029, 3033, 3048, 3050, 3066, 3068, 3074, 3091, 3095, 3099, 3103, 3104, 3119, 3128, 3158, 3172, 3213, 3232, 3237, 3251, 3253, 3261, 3260, 3289, 3290, 3291, 3314, 3348, 3356, 3373, 3388, 3399, 3402, 3407, 3412, 3416, 3440, 3465, 3471, 3474, 3480, 3490, 3491, 3497, 3499, 3510, 3514, 3515, 3520, 3553, 3554, 3574, 3587, 3588.

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