Gábor Gyáni

Migration as a Cultural Phenomenon

For a long time conceptual explanations of mass migrations rested on economic and social premises. The notion of chain-migration, for instance, was given considerable reinforcement with the adoption of the economic “cost-benefit” terminology, as was the phenomenon of transplanted networks. In time, however, scholars began to consider structural mechanisms less and aspects of individual selection more. The latter included giving greater attention to cultural factors. However, mass physical relocation, explained with reference to series of individual decisions either accepted or encouraged by the community, goes against the attachment to place necessary for the strengthening of the nation state, which finds form in the institutionalization of citizenship. Growing internal (national) integration and the social disintegration that accompanies mass migrations makes it necessary to devise compulsions that encourage and hasten assimilation. Under its influence, the significance of foreignness and the phenomenon of otherness as a fact of everyday life intensifies. In the case of Hungary, this is illustrated the most clearly by the metaphorical conflation of Budapest’s alleged “foreignness” with its alleged “Jewishness.”

keywords: chain-migration, citizenship, mass migration, assimilation, nation state, networks

For a long time the decisions of multitudes to migrate were explained primarily with reference to material needs and promptings. Both in public discourse and in scholarship poverty was considered the most powerful stimulus to venture to new lands, and it was considered self-evident that material considerations explained the floods of masses to urban settlements, as well as the decision of huge numbers of Europeans to depart for the Americas. Over the course of the past several decades, however, there has been a change in approach regarding this question. Gradually there has been increasing recognition of the fact that while pressing economic exigencies often influenced (and influence) trends in migration, in fact it is the motivational mechanisms that raise awareness of economic interests that determined and determine the intensity of processes of migration, including both destination and scope. When scholars began to pursue more nuanced inquiry into the influences of push and pull factors, it became possible to offer an analysis according to which the decision to migrate was almost never motivated solely by material considerations. In other words poverty or impoverishment alone were never enough to prompt people to leave their homes and set out for unfamiliar lands.

While economists referred in their explanations of trends and tendencies to the distinction between so-called push and pull factors as early as the 1920s and 1930s,1 historians by contrast only began to adopt and adapt this distinction and these terms in the 1960s.2 The fact that these terms first came into use in the study of economics explains why their adoption often involved the implicit or even explicit use of the cost-benefit analytical perspective in examinations of the social phenomenon of migration. This later led to the widespread acceptance of chain-migration as a concept of general validity. Chain-migration implies that migratory processes are induced by the destinations themselves, if not initially, then with the passing of time. Thus the role of pull factors is decisive. The emergence of chain-migration as an explanatory principle in the dynamics of migratory processes also implies that the decision to migrate cannot be explained by the influences of material promptings, at least not entirely. Thus the theory of migratory networks came to the fore, a theory that was dubbed “transplanted networks” by Charles Tilly3 and was used decades later to great advantage by historian John Bodnar,4 who himself drew on the scholarship of Rudolph Vecoli.5 Network theory also rested on the foundations of the principle of cost-benefit, as the more recent definition of the concept illustrates:

Migrant networks are sets of interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through ties of kinship, friendship, and shared community origin […]. Network connections constitute a form of social capital that people can draw upon to gain access to foreign employment. Once the number of migrants reaches a critical threshold, the expansion of networks reduces the costs and risks of movement, which causes the probability of migration to rise, which causes additional movement, which further expands the networks, and so on.6

The fact that scholars and historians came to focus less on masses of migrants and increasingly on individuals in their study of migratory processes was also related to the above-sketched changes in the explanatory models. The individual migrant became the primary subject of research, not the general economic and social circumstances of the local communities of migrants or macro-groups (such as poor peasants). The narrowing of perspective seemed to favor the rise of sociological and, even more so, psychological approaches and theories. Sociological explanations of migratory processes in general set out from the premise that the subject in the interactive process of migration is not the isolated individual, but rather the person (or agent) who himself or herself is deeply embedded in societal processes. In this case, however, the influences underlying the decision to migrate are felt primarily on the cultural and social level, and first and foremost in the network of personal relations.7

In the course of the adaption of the structural and functional sociological approach of Talcott Parsons8 considerable emphasis was given to the concepts of norm, status, and institution. According to this approach, changes in norm, status, and institution alone were enough to explain trends in migratory phenomena, both from the perspective of the place of departure and the place of arrival.

The psychological analysis of the proliferating promptings that thus influenced patterns of migration also did not seem an inaccessible path of inquiry. In this case the conceptual point of departure was the following: who was it who sensed the external influences that prompted and even enticed people to migrate, and when and how? Thus the distinctive personality characteristics of the migrating individual (who was potentially mobile) became the focus of study, and from this perspective the selective mechanisms of migration seem adequately explainable. One still could not completely ignore the incentives and motives of the process of this selectivity that lay beyond individual agency, more precisely above the individual level, in the economic and social structure. Nonetheless, an increasing number of scholars on the subject agree that in the course of arriving at an explanation one must also take into consideration factors that are first and foremost cultural (one might even say spiritual or psychological).9

Thus if we propose that a physical change of place is the consequence of a series of individual decisions in which cultural forces also play a part, then we must give thorough consideration to the cultural-historical problems of social diversity, the vast majority of which arose precisely as a consequence of migrations. This mix is relevant with regards both to ethnic diversity and the composition of mass society in large urban centers. I address these questions separately in this essay.

Migration Versus Nationalist Attachment to Place

The first big wave in the internal and interregional (even intercontinental) migratory movement came in the nineteenth century, a period of history during which the modern European nations and nation-states developed or were becoming more firmly established. Drawing on the work of Ernest Gellner, we tend to associate national development with modernity, by which we mean market economies, class-based societies, and the liberal constitutional state. According to this interpretation, the modern nation as a construct is both a precondition and a consequence of cultural homogenization: “The general emergence of modernity hinged on the erosion of the multiple petty binding local organizations and their replacement by mobile, anonymous, literate, identity-conferring cultures.”10 Modern (national) societies burn with the fever of continuous growth, a force that drives them ceaselessly to reject traditions. One of the natural concomitants of this unparalleled dynamism is the similarly ceaseless physical change of place of huge masses of people, which is both a source and consequence of social mobility as well.

Gellner’s influential (if also often passionately contested) theory of nation and nationalism thus links the concept of modern (industrial, urban, civic) society to the process of national and cultural homogenization, a process that occurs in the symbolic sphere. One discerns a paradoxical temporal coincidence that was widespread across Europe at the time, namely the concurrence of the process of national homogenization, itself a precondition of economic, social and political modernity, and the immensely intense process of internal and intercontinental migration. The mutually reinforcing relationship between the two is self-evident, expressed for instance in rapid urbanization, unbridled industrialization, and in general the spread of notions that placed increasing emphasis on the individual. Thus migration itself is one of the indispensable driving forces and fundamental mechanisms of the process of modernization. The question arises, what is the effect of migration, which by its nature creates disorder, disarray, and diversity (heterogeneity) on national homogenization, which is also an essential goal of modernization? This is the real problem here, or more precisely the riddle, a riddle that merits a thorough inquiry that does not simply fall back on customary approaches or explanations.

The pressing need for national integration and the creation of a unified nation arose over the course of the long nineteenth century under circumstances in which migration had evolved to an earlier unknown scale and, as a result, the possible sources of social disintegration had proliferated. Earlier (and for a relatively long time) scholars and historians emphasized this latter consequence of the process of migration in the modern era by using the metaphor of uprootedness. At the same time they used this notion as a principle of explanation to which they also attributed a narrative function. As a social reality, this scholarly notion of mass uprootedness created by migration, however, merely represents a mapping of the ambivalent relationship of nationalism with any human phenomenon that constitutes a challenge to sedentariness. This is entirely understandable, since migration and the destabilizing consequences it has clearly do not pave an easy path to the fashioning of an “imagined community, ”to use Benedict Anderson’s term. On the contrary migration seems to set the stage for immeasurable and lasting internal social differentiation and chaos. The indisputably paradoxical nature of the situation lies in the fact that migrants continuously put the “engineers” of national inclusiveness and exclusiveness to the test. Indeed they put the liberal nation state itself to the test, and even themselves, since the formation of the nation as an imagined community takes place through simultaneous gestures of inclusion and exclusion.

One should not forget that under these circumstances, actual or symbolic migrants almost always found themselves standing at a crossroad. They were continuously faced with two dilemmas. The first, if they were to integrate into a (modern) national community, they would be compelled to pay the price of “membership” (as it were), namely some loss of distinctive cultural identity. Acculturation involves some assimilation, in other words to some degree the abandonment of one’s original ethnic/cultural identity and the replacement of this identity with another. True, their chances of mobility in a modern society would improve, and this would offset the cultural loss. The second, if, in contrast, they did not wish or simply were unable for whatever reason to integrate (or assimilate) then their chances of mobility would decrease. Of course in this case they would not suffer a crisis of identity and they would not be compelled to change their cultural affiliations.

Thus from the perspective of integration on the one hand and the maintenance (whether by choice or not) of a distinct, separate cultural identity on the other, the decisions that were reached with regards to the question of migration are of great significance, since migration eases even if automatically does not occasion direct connection with the process of national assimilation. If an individual conspicuously and successfully managed to resist the forces that otherwise would have prompted migration, then he or she would be able better to resist the inducements (sometimes spontaneous, sometimes violent) of national assimilation. The possibility of adapting to the majority (national) culture arises on the one hand, while on the other one has the chance to escape this kind of national assimilation (which in the given case amounts to the adoption of the Hungarian cultural identity) by departing for other lands, for instance beyond the seas. The mass influx of Slovaks residing in the lands of the Hungarian kingdom into Budapest offers a paradigmatic example of the first, while the departure of Hungarian Slovaks in equally large numbers for America is an example of the second. If the Slovaks moved to the Hungarian capital, they nonetheless grew distant from the culture of the Slovak people more rapidly and utterly than those who remained in the communities of their birth.11 In contrast, among those who left for America quite the opposite trend can be discerned. Influenced by their decision to migrate to the other side of the ocean, they became crucibles of Slovak national consciousness.12

One explanation for the latter phenomenon lies in the fact that the Slovaks who emigrated to the United States did not integrate into any kind of “mother” (more simply put majority) nation, but rather formed (by choice or compulsion) somewhat discrete communities, strengthening and in some cases even creating for the first time an awareness of their own ethnic-national identity: “In the second wave of American immigration, the period of the so-called ‘New Immigration’ from the 1880s, the American public was not very friendly to immigrants. In the interests of their own survival, the immigrants were forced to join together and economically support themselves on an ethnic basis.” This in fact enabled them to acquire experiences of national emancipation even before members of the Slovak national community in the Hungarian lands, which in part explains the phenomenon noted by Elena Mannová and Roman Holec: “Before the First World War, the American Slovak community already financially supported the Slovak national movement in the Kingdom of Hungary.”13

The Hungarian Jewry, which was similarly mobile but which unlike the Slovaks migrated only internally in this time period, from rural settlements to urban communities, constitutes an example of a group of “aliens” who were particularly susceptible to assimilation into the national community. In contrast, Hungarian Roma and Ruthenians, who were markedly immobile, successfully resisted the pressures to assimilate.14 This may well be the reason why, as Hungarian historiography ascertained long ago, “assimilation did not much effect territories inhabited predominantly by national minorities, the dividing lines did not change discernibly.”15

Thus to no small degree the ability of individual local ethnic communities to resist the pressures to assimilate culturally determined the effectiveness of the nationalities policies of the era. Gérard Noiriel came to a similar conclusion in his assessment—and reinterpretation—of the French version of the melting pot. Noiriel characterized the process of French national assimilation as a form of forced integration, and in doing so contested the widespread notion according to which the political nation is a distinctively French historical model.16

In the case of migration we are speaking of more, however, or rather of something other than a mere phenomenon of allocation of a work force on the labor market (to summarize briefly the manner in which historians have often addressed this question). Nor is migration simply the expression of some development in the history of settlements and population shifts (the manner in which social history has tended to regard it). Migration (including overseas migration) has immeasurable historical significance from the perspective of the evolution of social (national) integration. Emigration, then, can (also) be understood as the latent manifestation of individual everyday decisions (for the most part unconscious) taken in the matter of national assimilation. This decision is not particularly influenced by when this “national assimilation” takes place, or even whether it really takes place or not.

If this conjecture is correct, then the contradictory situation, so often referred to as paradoxical, is perhaps not as contradictory as has been presumed. As I have noted, the physical movement of people and peoples in Europe reached massive proportions precisely when social integration as a process characterized by movement towards national homogeneity reached its peak. Earlier the suggestion was also often made that the growth in the tendency to emigrate offered a kind of choice in the face of the pressures to assimilate to a national culture, a response that could be seen as affirmative or negative. This was entirely independent of the question of the actual reasons and exigencies that lay behind an individual’s decision to emigrate (for instance the hope of earning higher wages, flight from famine, or simply the desire for greater personal freedom).

Oddly enough, the process of national (cultural) homogenization met with the greatest successes where the communities were the most diverse, both from the ethnic and the social perspective, namely the big cities, which were homes to growing migrant communities. It is commonly acknowledged that integration, or rather assimilation, has always been the most palpably rapid in the melting pots of large cities. From this perspective, migration is an important stage and motor of cultural enervation and dissimilation, a catalyst that exercised its influence through the mechanism of rapid urbanization. If one regards migration as a cultural phenomenon par excellence, then it is reasonable to venture the following contention: the masses of people who made the decision to move to the cities were addressing a question in which the fundamental issue at hand was the issue of social integration. Thus while the decision to stay or depart may well seem at first glance to be determined merely by economic considerations, its consequences and often (if not always) the promptings that underlie it touch quite directly on the successes and nature of the process of national homogenization.

I do not believe, however, that migration as a cultural phenomenon is entirely independent of the broader historical context. Migration can only have this significance and these implications in relation to the endeavors towards internal integration that accompanied the processes of nation building of the nineteenth century. Borrowing the distinction drawn by Robert K. Merton, the cultural significance I ascribe to migration is relevant with respect not to its manifest function, but rather to its latent function. Merton sets out from the premise according to which in sociological scholarship the conscious motives of social behavior are often conflated with the objective consequences of this behavior. By doing this, Merton contends, we confuse motives with functions. In order to preclude misunderstandings, he suggests drawing a distinction between manifest and latent functions. Merton defines manifest functions as “those objective consequences contributing to the adjustment or adaptation of the system which are intended and recognized by participants in the system.” By contrast, latent functions are “those which are neither intended nor recognized.”17

Over the course of the twentieth century migration (or more precisely immigration) in Canada and the United States, countries the cultures of which could hardly be said to have resembled the nation-building cultures of Europe, did not really play this kind of cultural role, neither in the manifest nor in the latent sense. This is precisely what gives true meaning to the notion of the cultural melting pot and the various models of assimilation that are associated with cultural pluralism. In this case of this kind of cultural mix, the kind denoted by the metaphor of the melting pot, integration is not uni-directional assimilation, a matter of carrying into effect a dictate issued from “above.” It represents rather the evolution of a new national identity through the admixture of diverse groups. According to the models of cultural pluralism, immigrants are no longer expected to acculturate. This allows for ethnic enclaves to develop and thrive, and also to become the foundation of a kind of community built on the coexistence of structurally separate constituent societies. It would be inappropriate in the case of North American to speak of assimilation, since the adaptation did not take place according to the rules familiar from the nation building processes of Europe of inclusion versus exclusion.18 This is why American scholars of migration today speak of “incorporation,” instead of using the term assimilation (or integration) to describe the processes in question.19 And they use this term in reference to the mechanisms of social integration with which today some European (primarily Western European) societies are gradually compelled to acquaint themselves (and indeed accept) in part because of unanticipated consequences of immigration that took place after the Second World War. One thinks of the communities of Turkish immigrants in Germany, Muslim (primarily Pakistani) communities in England, and Arab immigrants in France. These developments are for the most part unknown in Hungary. However, if one thinks of Chinese immigrants in Hungary and the questions of identity and belonging these communities (and the reception they are given by the “national” culture) raise, it gradually becomes clear that these issues will soon be (or already are) of pressing immediacy in Hungary as well.20

The Big City as a Metaphor for Alienness

The disarray, diversity, and chaos of migration come about when there is a flood of people from villages and rural homesteads into cities. The process of urbanization, which is a crucial part of the formation of the modern nation-state, is a paradigmatic example of modernity. Whether we are speaking of emigration or internal migration, the intense physical movement of people (and peoples) that is always one of the primary stimuli of urbanization directly imperils the basic values of human existence that seem (and for a long time have been understood as) natural and fundamental. It disrupts the life of a community and an individual by undermining attachments to stability (permanent settlements, continuity of place), an ideal that never dies out entirely, even in so-called modernity. It is worth noting that the shift that occurred in the speed with which people traveled, a change that was brought about by rail travel in the nineteenth century, had a dramatic and even a traumatic effect on the notions of time and space as they had been traditionally grasped, and more specifically on the human perception of time and space.21

With regards to the contradictory responses with which continuous mass migration was met in the context of modernity, the historically new concept and construct22 of national identity lies at the heart of the matter. Bound to spatial terms that correspond to the territorial assertion of the nation state as the embodiment and prerogative of political power and will, communal identity wins a new meaning, a meaning that, crucially, is invested with exclusive and absolute validity. In the ideological and cultural sense, the universalization of national identity, expressed in “biological” metaphors, stem from this. This constitutes as assertion of the “natural” obligation of belonging, which applies with equal force and validity to everyone who was born, lives, and will die in the sacred homeland.

So what became of the multitudes that choose, instead of remaining in the communities of their birth, to emigrate in search of a better life? First, one could ask what became of those who did not happen to have been born in a country like Hungary, but who made their new homes there? If one applies the biological metaphor so prominent in the discourses of “authentic” national identity in order to describe their place (their identity), they were “rootless,” in part because they had left the physical place of their origins (the place of their “national” identity) and thereby had lost their “roots,” and in part because they were not laying new roots in the “national” soil. As people who had come from “outside” (from abroad), from the ethnic or denominational perspective they were aliens and remained rootless for the rest of their lives. Second, one could ask what became of the floods of people who migrated into the cities (in the case of Hungary this meant primarily Budapest), thereby moving merely to a different kind of settlement, from village life to urban life? Regarding their “classification” from the nationalist perspective, the designation of their place in the allegedly “natural” social order of the “homeland” was no less categorical. This question arose in the context of the discourse on Budapest at the turn of the century in Hungary, and this discourse had a vibrant kind of afterlife in the interwar period.23 But at the same time one can hardly afford to overlook the fact that the entire problem was directly affected by experiences and view of physical mobility, i.e. the physical change of place, something that was made possible, at least in part, by increasing social mobility.

The identification of “alienness” as such was closely tied to the discourses on civic and bourgeois culture and life and on Budapest itself. If one considers, for instance, the writings of László Németh, an author of fiction and essayist who expressed his views on the subject on many occasions, one finds an unsparing assessment of Budapest, not to mention congruence or rather overlap of his disapprobation of bourgeois society and Jewish society. Németh was of course by no means the first or only person to write of the “alluvial character” of the big city, which in his view was what gave the city its non-Hungarian character from the perspective of national culture or society. Quite unsurprisingly, when he writes on this question he makes frequent use of geographical and biological (botanical) metaphors. Budapest, he contended in one of his writings, came into being by “sucking in” the great hoards of peoples living in the “Hungarian Basin,” i.e. the plain lands, and then swelled to number 1.5 million.24 In his essay Kisebbségben [In the minority], which to this day continues to be a subject of heated debates, Németh used a similar metaphor but wrote in an even more condemning tone: “In the half-century since 1860 this Budapest has done nothing other than swell, as the capitalist order and the new centralized state have commanded.” And he does not fail to mention the bloated city’s character as an “assortment of wash and waste.”25 The “natives [of the city] are Germans and Jews […] and those who have been swept there, the fortune hunters of a multi-lingual empire of twenty-million people: fewer Romanians or Serbs, more Slovaks and Schwabians than would be proportional, and in the middle Hungarians.” If one acknowledges this, Németh notes, one can hardly be surprised to see that “here Germans and Jews have been more at home than Hungarians.”26 He draws the conclusion: “under these unfortunate circumstances a ‘provincialism of the capital’ had to develop in Budapest, which was saved from complete apostasy not so much by the Hungarians who stood out so conspicuously as by the fact that its non-natives had also come from the provinces as the acolytes of a dilute Hungarian-ness.”27

In Németh’s assessment, Budapest was just like the Hungarian bourgeoisie and middle class, which both were the products of the monstrous capital city: it was a Hungarian province created by them. When Németh writes critically of the phenomenon of the middle class, again he often uses biological metaphors, for instance, in a lecture held in the city of Kolozsvár (or Cluj by its present Romanian name) in 1940:

It was necessary to build a new, modern Hungarian state [following the Compromise of 1867], with a plethora of bureaus, with an administrative intelligentsia and other kinds of intellectuals, and industry and the economy had to grow with it, the most dizzying pace of growth that Europe had ever seen at the time. This Hungarian state and Hungarian intelligentsia grew steadily. I cannot say whether it swelled tenfold or twentyfold over the course of a half-century, but it is quite certain that the swollen city had far less in common with Hungarian traditions and the millions who remained at the bottom than what it replaced. […] Why did the threads, which elsewhere [in France, in Germany] grew thicker, break among us? Every rapidly growing organism draws what it needs from where it finds sustenance. The bureaucratic capitalist state drew the necessary intelligentsia from where it could be found the most quickly and readily: the people of the cities […] To our misfortune, however, there were many aliens among the inhabitants of the cities.28

It is quite telling that Németh chose the title Ágak és gyökerek [Branches and roots] in an essay in which he recommends, as a kind of antidote to what he saw as the alien mentality and social life of Budapest, “those who wish to be Hungarians and truly to display Hungarian identity.” “We must be Europeans, naturally,” he wrote. “But like the French or the English, true to place. For them, as West Europeans, for us, as East Europeans. For true Balkanism is not to be at home in the Balkans, but rather to be there and not be at home.”29

The popular practice of classification that was part of the nationalist sentiment and manner of thinking lurking in this rhetoric drew a clear distinction between ethnic qualities (groups) on the basis of an assumed link between individual and place. Regarding the culture of Budapest and the notion of the alienness of the Jewry (and the German speaking communities) so closely interlinked with Budapest culture, it is worth considering the question in the broader context of social history and the history of mentalities. I offer a modest attempt to do so in the following.

What was it, then, about Budapest that made it “Jewish” in the eyes of Németh and others? Principally, it was the fact, that it was “bourgeois.” And what made it that made the city “bourgeois”? Primarily the fact, that it was “Jewish.” Was a numerical minority really capable of exercising such an influence on the whole of the urban population?30 And if so, then how? The answer that is often given to this question is the following: social mobility gave this numerical minority an exceptionally large influence.

At first in Budapest only the middle class is alien [non-native]. But then the middle class grows rich and a certain percentage becomes upper class. By the time the mentality of the rural schools, which itself has undergone a change, in turn changes the profile of the higher order of educated people at the university, in literature, in the arts, in scholarship and in the press an almost unchangeable situation awaits the new army of intellectual life: the false-Hungarian lifestyle that has developed in the meantime of the industrialists, wholesalers, financiers of Budapest, which again has become alien.31

The majority (and not only the majority in Budapest, but the majority in Hungary) sought to find the “Hungarian” in the city, which was vain of its Hungarian character and indeed presented itself as a model to be followed, even if it was “for the greater part Jewish, Schwabian, and international.” Yet Budapest was a false place, a “European quarter,” and not “the splendid, magnificent flower of our roots and tree of life.”32 The hostility to the city at the time was aggravated by the intricate intertwining of the notion of the Jewry as a non-native element with the milieu of urban society. This “European quarter” was also foreign to allegedly “authentic” Hungarians, according to Németh’s maxim, because it was dominated by an alien, Jewish spirit (although not all Jews lived in Budapest, a city in which they were, furthermore, a numerical minority). And while only part of the upper classes of Budapest consisted of members of the Jewry, much as at most only individual segments of the middle class were comprised of Jews and furthermore the bulk of the political and in particular the intellectual elite could hardly be said to have been Jewish,33 this in no way seemed to cast into doubt in Németh’s mind his contention concerning the fundamentally “Jewish” character of the city. These facts were rendered rhetorically meaningless through the frequent use of terms like “elzsidósodás” (“Jewified”) and “elzsidósodott” (“gone Jewish”), and in the anti-Semitic political vocabulary of the Horthy era “zsidóbérenc,” or “Jewish hireling.”

The expression “gone Jewish” implies that a “Jew” has also undergone a transformation to some extent, for in order to be able to assimilate to the other, to the “pure” Hungarian, he must strip himself in part of his foreignness or alterity. How else would he be able to exercise an influence on the Hungarian or induce the Hungarian to adapt to him? These questions foreground the complexity of the issue of assimilation as it was conceived of at the time.

Assimilation demands mutual accommodation, in other words some resignation of the self, from everyone, and anyone who participates in this interaction clearly both is able and desires to become someone different. However, regarding the question of who assimilates and who is assimilated, perceptions are likely to vary. This is in part because at least on the level of everyday life this process is experienced more as one of dissimilation, an experience that gives both sides the sensation of loss, including those who do not partake, i.e. who do not choose to be assimilated. An orthodox or rural Jew could easily think that the neolog Jews of Budapest had irrevocably estranged themselves from the “flock” (to borrow a Christian metaphor), and thereby also from their own identities as Jews. Christian inhabitants of Budapest or (even more so) of a rural community, on the other hand, could easily have felt that by “going Jewish,” Budapest had become entirely foreign to them, even if it had donned a “Hungarian guise.”

Seen from the perspective of everyday social practices, actual historical experience is never entirely congruent with the views held by the “social imagination.”34 A more penetrating inquiry into lifestyles, for instance, reveals that the urban (“Jewish”) character of consumption, social survival strategies (such as the education of children), and numerous other practices of the urban community was in general an integrating factor at the time, which put Jews and Christians, Hungarians and Germans almost without exception into a well-defined bourgeois and urban social order.35 This was not the case beyond the borders of Budapest, where the organizing principle of daily life in most cases was not urban bourgeois society (even if some trace of this is nonetheless discernible in places). Nonetheless, a non-Jew living in “Jewish” Budapest could give voice to the stock phrases according to which Budapest was a hotbed of Jewish influence, even if in his everyday life he was in no way immune to the “Jewish” (bourgeois or middle-class) culture strictly speaking (indeed Németh, who was born in Budapest and for the most part lived there, does precisely this). This, however, is at most an ideology, in other words a distorting representation, to borrow from the ideas of Mannheim.36

Those whose everyday lives and lifestyles in contrast were not “Jewish” could explain the foreign character of Budapest (particularly with reference to the “Jewification” of the non-Jewish population of the city) with the contention that it stemmed from the essential (and inevitable, unchangeable) strangeness of the city. In other words, for them Budapest was a kind of Moloch that devoured the hapless people continuously flooding into it, people who originally had not shared its character, in other words, Hungarians. Seen from the outside (from the provinces, and from the social substrata), the “Jewishness” of Budapest thus was no longer merely a matter of ideological conviction, but rather was understood as a genuine experience that resulted from the manifold nature of lifestyles at the time, the large-scale diversity, and the tremendous (historically almost paralleled at the time) dissimilarities. This latter variety of the discourse, however, still has little in common with the actual world of metropolitan society, which was experienced and indeed was portrayed as a kind of other. Nonetheless it speaks to (and of) the exterior conditions of the conceptual and sentimental construct of otherness and the actual circumstances, bound up with social life, of the ways in which this otherness was experienced at the time.

Epilogue

One of the concomitants of modernity has been the mass movements of peoples. Indeed mass migration can even be seen as a clear manifestation of modernity. When one considers the phenomenon of mass migration in the context of the constructing the nation state, however, then from the perspective of modernity it can at times seem dysfunctional, for it exerts its destructive influence as a process that upsets integration and can cause newly forged unities to unravel. Social imagination has often foregrounded this aspect of processes of migration in order with the passing of time to nourish ideological imaginaries. The widespread use and acceptance of the metaphor of rootlessness remained powerful for some time thanks in part to nationalist discourses, but also to the sustenance it was given as a species of scholarly theory. It constitutes a striking example, pregnant with significances, of the manner in which terminologies weighted with meaning and assumption are fashioned.37 Almost limitless physical and social mobility as a precondition and consequence of modernity (and also one of its primary virtues) collided with the principle of continuity of place that was so dear to nationalist doctrines. In this context, migration became a frequent subject of harsh assessments on the part of those according to whom continuous mass movement gives rise to a form of foreignness and otherness that cannot be undone. The true peculiarity and significance of migration as a cultural phenomenon may well lie in this.

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Karády, Viktor. “Egyenlőtlen elmagyarosodás, avagy hogyan vált Magyarország magyar nyelvű országgá?” [Uneven Magyarization, or How Hungary Became a Hungarian Speaking Country]. In Viktor Karády, Zsidóság, polgárosodás, asszimiláció. Tanulmányok [Jewry, Embourgeoisement, Assimilation]. 151–96. Budapest: Cserépfalvi Kiadó, 1997.

Katus, László. “Szlovák politikai és társadalmi élet Budapesten a dualizmus korában” [Slovak Political and Social Life in Budapest in the Dualist Era]. In A pesti polgár. Tanulmányok Vörös Károly emlékére [The Citizen of Pest. Essays in Memory of Károly Vörös], edited by Gábor Gyáni, and Gábor Pajkossy, 137–51. Debrecen: Csokonai Kiadó, 1999.

Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1936.

Mannová, Elena and Roman Holec. “On the Road to Modernization 1848–1918.” In A Concise History of Slovakia. Edited by Elena Mannová, 185–240. Bratislava: Historicky ústav SAV, 2000.

Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal.” Population and Development Review 19, 3 (1993): 431–66.

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Németh, László. “Ágak és gyökerek” [Branches and Roots]. In Németh László, Sorskérdések [Questions of Fate]. Edited and with notes by Ferenc Grezsa, 609–11. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó–Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1989.

Németh, László. “Kisebbségben” [In the Minority]. In Németh, Sorskérdések, 408–82.

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Translated by Thomas Cooper.

Heléna Tóth

The Historian’s Scales: Families in Exile in the Aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848

This essay examines political exile in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions from the perspective of the history of the family on the basis of case studies from the Habsburg Empire and the German lands. I focus on two processes: first, the ways in which family members of political refugees (and political prisoners) became refugees themselves; and second, the role of family members of political refugees in obtaining amnesty for the entire family. Although officially most of the family members of political refugees were immigrants who went through the official channels to obtain passports, they treated their own migration as a political matter and, equally importantly, they were treated by bureaucrats in their home countries as political migrants. These perceptions, in turn, had consequences when the family decided to return from abroad. An understanding of the process whereby families became unwilling migrants in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 sheds light on how amorphous the practice of political exile was in the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as on the breadth of the collective aspects of this punishment.

keywords: political exile, 1848 revolutions, history of the family, Habsburg Empire, Germany, refugees

There are many ways in which historians of migration think of political exile during the nineteenth century: we look at individual biographies, we study groups defined by political affinities, or we choose a geographical approach and look at the home countries of émigrés and the countries in which they lived as exiles.1 We seem to alternate roughly between two levels of analysis: the individual biography and a politically or geographically defined prosopography. This article chooses a level of inquiry that lies in-between: the family. The family is not a new category of analysis in the secondary literature on exile in this time period. Rosemary Ashton’s classical study on German political émigrés in London, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain, contains an entire chapter on women in exile, including the “wives of exile,” and Sabine Sundermann also includes extensive material on women and families in her exploration of the same émigré community.2 A collection of biographies edited by Sabine Freitag contains several essays on politically engaged couples, and Christian Jansen writes in detail about family relations in his prosopography of representatives of the left-wing of the Paulskirche parliament.3 In the literature on Hungarian political émigrés, Hajnalka Merényi has called for a general conceptualization of women’s role in exile and individual biographies also often incorporate the history of family life, as does Tibor Frank in his biography of Gustav Zerffi.4 Most of these articles and book chapters explore one of four questions: the ways in which women experienced exile; the degree to which exile challenged traditional gender rolesi, the role women played in building new lives for their families abroad; and finally, the political significance of family relations in exile.5

This article poses two different questions. Instead of looking at family life in exile, I take a step back to explore how families went into exile in the first place and the role they played in obtaining amnesty for political refugees. Studying the various ways in which families became unwilling migrants in Central Europe in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 sheds light on the breadth of the spectrum of political exile in the middle of the nineteenth century and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of exile as a form of punishment.

Exile in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: The Collective Aspects
of Punishment

A wide range of acts committed in the upheavals of 1848–1849 resulted in punishment in the aftermath of the revolutions. Clearly, the commission of violent acts (whether as part of the Hungarian war of independence against the Habsburg Monarchy or the republican uprisings across the German lands) had to be accounted for after the military defeat of the revolutions. In addition, various non-violent acts, such as denouncing the monarchy, signing petitions, publishing critical articles, supporting the revolution publically, or supporting the revolutionaries in some tangible way, were also grounds for persecution and punishment.6 The criteria of what counted as a political crime remained amorphous to some degree, since the political reforms, which had been accepted as legitimate in the spring months of 1848 and had won the approval of individual monarchs, were gradually revoked as early as the fall of that year. Political trials were initiated years after the events had taken place.7 The broken promises of monarchs played a key role in the émigrés’ perceptions of themselves as representatives of a political counterculture.8 One of the most brilliant pieces of political satire published in the 1850s was a collection of newspaper articles from 1848 compiled without commentary in order to illustrate that something that had seemed politically acceptable in March 1848 could become the basis of a political crime within the space of only a few months.9

For all its various forms, ultimately the basis of a political crime was a breach of loyalty, which compromised the bond that connected the monarch to his subjects.10 In theory, therefore, the “unit of punishment” was the individual. In practice, however, punishment for political crimes often took collective forms, which included not only the culprit but also his (most often it was a he) most immediate social environment. Forms of collective punishment included the confiscation of property (common practice in the Habsburg Empire and the Grand Duchy of Baden), the imprisonment of family members, and also political exile.11

The most tangible and perhaps extreme example of collective punishment was a series of imprisonments in the Habsburg Empire in the fall of 1849. In August 1849 the remnants of the Hungarian army crossed the border into the Ottoman Empire and requested political asylum. Amongst the refugees were soldiers of all ranks (from foot soldiers to the highest echelons of the army), Lajos Kossuth, the head of the first independent Hungarian government, and a number of camp followers. As the Habsburg Empire initiated diplomatic negotiations with the Ottoman Empire for the extradition of these refugees, several of the refugees’ family members were arrested at home.

The case of Richard Guyon, a general in the Hungarian army, offers an example. His wife, three small children, mother-in-law and sister-in-law were imprisoned on charges of treason in August 1849. Similarly, the wife of General Mór Perczel was also sent to prison.12 It was not difficult to find evidence in the private correspondence of these families indicating that they had supported the war of independence, which, in the face of military defeat, amounted to treason. That, however, was not the only reason why these families were singled out for this punishment. The main rationale behind their imprisonment was a double one. First, they were suspected of knowing where family members of Lajos Kossuth were hiding. Second, they were held captive to put pressure on political refugees to return home. Ultimately, the imprisonment of these families failed to produce the desired results on both counts. Kossuth’s wife fled with a fake passport and joined her husband in exile in January 1850, and none of those refugees whose family members had been arrested returned from Ottoman asylum. In the end, responding to public pressure, the government in Vienna decided to release also Kossuth’s children, who had been arrested with their tutor in the meantime, and allow them to follow their parents to exile in the Ottoman Empire.13

For some of these women and their children, imprisonment was the first station on a longer journey that ended in political exile. Their release from prison often amounted to an expulsion from their home country. Although their departure from the Habsburg Empire was registered as emigration, in practice the wives of émigrés were often treated as political criminals. For example, although Guyon’s wife was allowed to leave prison with her children and join her husband in Constantinople in March 1850, she was given hardly any time to organize properly the relocation of her family from the Kingdom of Hungary to the Ottoman Empire. During the journey, the family was accompanied by an “inconspicuous” policeman “in civilian dress,” who made sure that they did not change their travel destination on the way.14 The travel costs for the family (wife, children and a nursemaid) were paid by the Habsburg authorities. At least in part this financial support was a diplomatic gesture on the part of the Habsburg Empire towards Great Britain. Richard Guyon had been born in England. He had joined the Habsburg army in the 1830s, married Mária Splényi, and bought some land near Pest before the revolution of 1848. Upon hearing of her release from prison and the conditions of her journey to the Ottoman Empire, Guyon’s wife turned to the British foreign secretary for help as “the wife of an Englishman and the mother of English children.”15 In her letter she explained that the Habsburg government had confiscated her property as punishment for her husband’s role in the war of independence and she had no means of her own to undertake the journey. Great Britain had been observing with great interest the heated diplomatic negotiations taking place in the fall of 1849 between the Habsburg foreign ministry and the Ottoman Empire about the internment of the refugees of the war of independence, and it is likely that the Habsburg authorities considered the investment, i.e. the costs of the journey of the Guyon family, a relatively cheap way to avoid further diplomatic problems. Although officially not registered as exile, the relocation of the Guyon family amounted in practice to banishment.

Banishment from prison to exile was the most radical form of a broader practice, in which family members of refugees became refugees themselves. In most cases, family members of refugees had, at least theoretically, some room for agency in determining whether or not they wanted to reunite the family in exile. For example, when the wife of Pál Hajnik, former minister of police, applied for permission to visit her husband in exile in Paris, she did not receive a regular passport, only a document that served as a one-way pass. The passport contained a clause, “not for return,” and amounted in practice to permission to emigrate. It was up to Henrietta Hajnik to decide whether to undertake the journey to France. But she knew that were she to do so, her decision to visit her husband effectively would amount to emigration from the Habsburg Empire.16 Since she was a “politically compromised” person, her wish to travel abroad with her two children to visit her husband was seen as evidence of her unreliable political loyalty to the Habsburg House. In her decision to travel or not she literally had to choose between her home (her parents and extended family) and her husband.

On the surface, Henrietta Hajnik faced essentially the same choice that many other spouses had to make when they fled the Kingdom of Hungary clandestinely with falsified documents. As the wife of diplomat Ferenc Pulszky formulated eloquently in a petition in 1855, “Led by a natural sense of duty and on account of the oath I gave my husband, Ferenc Pulszky, at the altar: that I would not abandon him in any turn of fate; that I would share sorrow and happiness with him, I followed him into exile with my three children… in 1849 and now I am in England with him.”17 According to this letter, the duties of the wife had priority over other loyalties, including the loyalty to the Habsburg House. When Theresa Pulszky used the word “followed,” she referred to the fact that she had fled the Habsburg Empire using falsified papers. Six years later she applied for a regular passport to legalize her status in London. Although the choice Theresa Pulszky and Henrietta Hajnik had to make between home and exile was similar, the institutional frameworks in which their decisions were made were significantly different. In the case of Theresa Pulszky, the foreign ministry could argue that by having illegally crossed the borders of the Habsburg Empire, she had forfeited her citizenship rights, which included her right to emigrate legally. In this spirit, her application for a regular passport was rejected in 1855. In turn, the case of Henrietta Hajnik, who went through the proper legal channels, made clear that the price of visiting her husband abroad was to join him permanently in exile. Thus, even if a spouse used the proper legal channels, her choice remained either permanent separation or emigration, which amounted to political exile.

Special passports with the clause “not valid for return” were not reserved exclusively for the family members of émigrés. People who were “politically compromised” during the revolution of 1848 and wanted to travel abroad were also given such passports: Albert Kövy, for instance, who had been an officer of the artillery and applied for a passport in Pest to visit his uncle in the United States. Because he had participated in the war of independence and publically denounced the Habsburg House, he received a passport valid for departure from the Habsburg Empire, but not for return.18 Similarly, when he decided to follow the Kossuth family to exile, Ignác Karády, the tutor of Kossuth’s children, was given a passport valid for emigration. In 1857, when Karády’s parents applied on their son’s behalf for permission to return, the ministry of foreign affairs acknowledged that “without doubt, Ignác Karády is not a political refugee in the usual sense of the word, since he left his fatherland with legal permission and at a time when there was no cause for prosecution against him or any other form of intervention by the authorities.” Nonetheless, he was considered to have “exiled himself” when he used a passport that had not been valid for return.19 Thus, voluntary emigration became the de facto punishment for a wide range of people, including those who participated in the events of the war of independence, those who were associated with emblematic figures of the revolution, and family members of émigrés.

The contours of this practice, however, remained amorphous. This became most apparent when the spouses of refugees, who were banished as “voluntary emigrants,” decided to return to their home countries. There was considerable confusion regarding the proper procedure. For example, when Henrietta Hajnik decided to return from France to be with her parents in Pest in 1851, the petition she handed in at the consulate in Paris went unanswered for months. Time, however, was of crucial importance for her, as she was expecting her third child and was eager to return to Hungary precisely so that she would be able to give birth at home. Her request was forwarded to the ministry of the interior in Vienna, but she received no answer.20 She waited more than two months for official permission before finally setting out on the journey without the proper documents. She made it all the way to Dresden, where she applied for a visa again. It was only when her brother, who lived in Vienna, contacted the foreign ministry on her behalf that her case was opened again. From Dresden she was officially allowed to continue her journey to Pest. Her bold decision to travel without documents and the fact that she made it all the way to Dresden surprised the authorities.21 Henrietta Hajnik’s case was not unique. The wife of Zsigmond Thaly, a general in the Hungarian army, also had left Hungary for France with permission to emigrate, but she returned in 1851 to give birth to her child. Her request for a visa went unanswered at first, as had Henrietta Hajnik’s, and she too began her journey home without a valid passport.22 In both cases, the foreign ministry eventually gave in and issued a passport valid for return. This decision was not based on a consistent principle, however, but rather simply on the fact that both women had taken a risk and thereby created a situation that the Habsburg authorities could not ignore. The fact that both of them made it to Dresden forced the ministry of foreign affairs either to grant or refuse a visa officially. Considering that each of the two women was nearing the end of her pregnancy, it would have reflected badly on the Habsburg Empire had they been refused permission to travel. It was no coincidence that both women framed their initial, unanswered petitions in apolitical terms, appealing to “general human empathy.”23

Most spouses of émigrés left the Habsburg Empire with permission to emigrate, but their emigration had political significance. When Richard Guyon died and his wife applied for permission to return from Constantinople with her children in 1857, her application prompted the ministry of foreign affairs to reflect on the status of the spouses of political refugees in general. The consul in Constantinople “seems to work under the impression that the return of the spouses of political refugees to their home countries depends on special permission from the imperial government and thus that [their stay abroad] equals banishment.”24 Certainly this was an impression shared not only by the consuls but also by the spouses of political refugees. Aware that their emigration was emigration only in form, spouses of émigrés asked for permission to return in the same manner as political émigrés who requested amnesty if they wanted to return. Like the petitions for amnesty of émigrés, the applications of their spouses for permission to return home were judged case by case. In arriving at a decision, authorities took into account the behavior of the applicant in exile, the political activities of their husbands during the war of independence as well as in exile, and, finally, the political history of their extended families. In most respects, therefore, the families of émigrés experienced their migration, consciously, as political exile.

The practice of sending families into exile in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions was neither unique to the Habsburg Empire nor restricted to the political elite. In Baden and Württemberg, a traditional way to relieve the judicial system was to sentence people to forced migration, or exile (usually to the United States), instead of prison.25 The aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 presented a formidable challenge, both to the courts and the prisons, generating thousands of cases. The practice of “amnesty on the condition of emigration” accomplished two goals in this context: it cut the costs related to the investigation (including the costs incurred by the courts and the prisons) and it relieved the prison administration of the burden of having to manage overfilled prisons.26 In exchange for their freedom, political prisoners promised to emigrate across the Atlantic and never return to their home countries. The act of migration did not abolish the prison sentence, however. Were the emigrants to return, in theory they would be imprisoned and would have to serve the remainder of their time. Although the hope that distance would effectively hinder the movement of political ideas was increasingly becoming an illusion in the middle of the 19th century, a period that bore witness to the rapid growth of transportation and information infrastructure, the practice of sending political trouble-makers from prison abroad remained widespread.

The exchange of a prison sentence for migration was the result of extended negotiations, which involved not only the prisoners and the state but the entire family. In Baden, where the state financially supported the emigration of political prisoners in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, prisoners often made it a condition of their migration that they receive travel subsidies for their families as well. Franz Lederle, for example, a political prisoner who considered emigrating with his family from Baden, even gave a specific sum. He was willing to go to America, he wrote, on condition that the state paid him at least 3,000 florins to enable him to support his family of six children. It is striking that Lederle used the expression “on the condition” in his letter, the same term used by the state to designate this particular kind of banishment: amnesty on the condition of emigration.27 We know little about the outcome of these negotiations, but the fact that requests of this kind were made suggests that appeals for financial support for an entire family must have met with approval in some cases at least. Amnesty on the condition of emigration was a possibility not only for prisoners but also for some individuals whose cases were still under investigation. Wilhelm Köhlreuter, for example, a pharmacist in the small township of Malsch, left Baden with official permission to emigrate before the investigation against him had been completed. In 1849 he served as the leader of the local Volksverein. He publically denounced the Duke of Baden and was a member of the local militia. After the revolution, Köhlreuter emigrated to Switzerland with his wife and children, while his case was still open. His departure did not bring an end to the investigation, however. In absentia, Köhlreuter was sentenced to nine months in the penitentiary and his property in Baden was confiscated.28

In the Kingdom of Württemberg, the same practice existed but on a smaller scale and in a form that allowed more agency for the family. In Württemberg, it was the prerogative of Wilhelm I to grant amnesty on condition of migration, and he used this to add to punishments he found too lenient and ease sentences he found too harsh. The judicial system was thoroughly reformed in Württemberg in August 1849, when the practice of trial by jury was introduced, a reform that survived the end of the revolution.29 This meant that the removal of prisoners through emigration, a practice that had existed before the revolution, acquired a new political significance, when Wilhelm I used it to revise verdicts that had been reached by a jury. Families in Württemberg used several strategies to try to convert a prison sentence to emigration. Most often, they promised to cover the costs of the relocation of the family overseas. To demonstrate their willingness to contribute to the process of substituting emigration for a prison sentence, some families would actually move to the United States before amnesty on the condition of emigration had been officially granted, and they then would continue to submit petitions from abroad. On the surface, these cases resembled instances of regular chain migration, only with reversed gendered roles.30 For instance, Johannes Reichle, an innkeeper from the small town of Tuttlingen, was imprisoned because he freed the local bookseller, a well-known Democrat, from prison in 1849.31 His wife, Elisabeth Reichle, corresponded for years with the ministry of justice, requesting amnesty on the grounds that the absence of the family provider punished the entire family. It was only after Reichle’s father offered to pay the cost of relocating his son, his son’s wife and their children across the Atlantic, however, that the ministry of justice was willing to consider granting him amnesty.32 Elisabeth Reichle moved to New York with her children a year before her husband was allowed to follow. Similarly, in the case of August Spreng, a young waiter and former soldier, his mother moved to New York to guarantee that upon being released from prison her son would also emigrate.33 Elisabeth Reichle and the mother of August Spreng from Württemberg or the family of Wilhelm Köhlreuter from Baden were emigrants from regions that already had high rates of migration to North America. Yet their decisions to emigrate, like the decisions of the spouses of Hungarian political refugees to emigrate, amounted in effect to a collective form of political exile.

“I pardoned the abovementioned Eduard Zeller on account of the services
his father rendered me:” Reversing the Logic of Collective Punishments

If the breach of loyalty between one family member and the monarch usually had consequences for the entire family, families often closed ranks as authors of amnesty petitions and tried to make the same logic work in the opposite direction. This strategy allowed them to “bundle together” compromised and uncompromised relationships of loyalty to the monarch within a family, so that one would balance out the other. While the prisoner or émigré had broken the bonds that connected him to the monarch, the rest of the family, so went the argument, had not. This asymmetry served as the basis for most petitions framed with reference to an entire family.

These petitions can be divided roughly into two groups, based on the arguments that were made. The first type of argument emphasized relationships of dependency and the injustice of collective punishment. According to this argument, the removal of the family provider in prison or exile punished collaterally those who depended on him financially. In these petitions, family members asked for mercy not for the prisoner or émigré (an act that would have implicitly questioned the punishment itself), but for themselves or for their children. When Christine Rau, the wife of Württemberg’s best-known Democrat, Gottlieb Rau, wrote a petition for clemency on behalf of her imprisoned husband in 1853, her argument echoed and reinforced the arguments of many other petitioners: “Should a man’s crime not seem to deserve merciful consideration, then I ask for clemency for my family.”34

Most of the authors of this first type of petition argued from a position of supplication: they presented themselves (and often were indeed), widows, wives, mostly people with no independent income, who placed themselves and their families at the mercy of the monarch.35 They did not contest the justice of the punishment their sons or husbands received. Yet these letters, whose language was often not significantly different from the pre-revolutionary era, had a subversive ring to them in the years following the revolution of 1848 nonetheless. Instead of dutifully accepting the punishment meted out on the revolutionaries with all of the corollaries of exile or a prison sentence, the authors all implicitly pointed to the inherent injustice of collective punishment. Few of them were as bold (or as desperate) as a certain Friederika Storz from Markgröningen (Württemberg), who made this point clear in her petition on behalf of her husband: “What good does it do to ruin our family?”36

If the first type of argument measured innocence against guilt, the second type emphasized the value of loyal service. Just as the first type of petition, the second type, too, had a subversive element. After all, instead of treating their yearlong loyal service to the monarch as the basis of the natural order of things, the authors used their service almost as grounds for certain entitlements. Such was the argument marshaled by Martin Schwenk, a decorated veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, on behalf of his son in Württemberg in 1853. Schwenk referred to his own military service as a foundation for his claim according to which he should be able to spend his old age in comfort and not have to fear being deprived of his sole source of financial support.37 Theoretically, this strategy could have worked, since Wilhelm I, the king of Württemberg, was particularly fond of the military and the Napoleonic Wars were a formative period in his own biography. Nonetheless, Schwenk’s petition was rejected in 1853, presumably because the crimes of the son were considered grave enough to warrant a longer prison sentence. In the case of Eduard Zeller, however, the king of Württemberg granted a pardon explicitly because of the services Zeller’s father had rendered him. In a handwritten note on Zeller’s letter of amnesty Wilhelm I wrote, “I pardoned the abovementioned Eduard Zeller on account of the services his father rendered me.”38 Unfortunately, the archive in Stuttgart did not preserve the father’s petition on behalf of his son, but his letter of thanks to the king for having granted clemency, only a brief note, survives.39 Zeller the elder was a doctor, and although there is no mention of the specific services he rendered, it is likely that at one point he treated the ailing king, who was over seventy years old by that point. Ultimately, it is difficult to generalize about the extent to which the financial difficulties of the extended family or the loyalty of parents functioned as political capital for political prisoners or émigrés when it came to evaluating petitions for amnesty. They were certainly among the many variables that were considered, and it is safe to say that in many cases they may well have been the grounds for a positive response.40

The scores of petitions written by family members or the appeals to the loyal service of parents and spouses to the monarchy, however, were no substitute for the émigrés’ personal participation in the amnesty process. Even the most “bieder and loyal” parents could not be the sole spokespeople for their children in exile.41 Punishments for political crimes had several collective aspects, but reconciliation between monarchs and their subjects was handled individually. If “bundling together” compromised and uncompromised bonds of loyalty served as a basis for collective punishments (whether the exile of a family or the confiscation of family property), the restoration of the bonds of loyalty retained a personal element. Most importantly, until the general amnesties of the 1860s, one necessary component of the requests for amnesty was some expression of supplication. The form of supplication varied depending on place and time.

In Baden, petitions for amnesty from those who had been amnestied on the condition of emigration were considered only if the petitioner returned to his home country, risking the completion of his prison sentence.42 To take the example of Wilhelm Köhlreuter again, in 1856 Köhlreuter’s wife returned to Baden from Swiss exile and wrote several petitions on her husband’s behalf. She argued, as did her mother-in-law in similar letters, that the personal trials of the family in the years they had spent abroad amounted to a punishment much worse than nine months in the penitentiary (Köhlreuter’s original sentence) would have been. It was, however, not until Köhlreuter himself returned from exile and put himself at the mercy of the authorities that his case was opened again and he was amnestied.43 Had Köhlreuter waited one more year, in other words until after the amnesty decree of July 9, 1857, the procedure would have been faster and he would not have had to go to prison.

The amnesty decree of 1857 in Baden made return easier for all émigrés who had been sentenced to less than eight years in prison.44 In other words, this amnesty institutionalized the logic of the argument that Köhlreuter’s wife had made: the eight years émigrés had spent in exile were now considered equal to eight years in prison. Yet even this streamlining of the amnesty process did not abolish the importance of personal supplication. According to the files of the Upper Rhine district (Oberrheinkreis), return followed a similar pattern across the region. Émigrés traveled directly to their hometowns, where they announced their wish to partake in the amnesty and declared remorse for their past acts. They were told, in return, to abide by the law. After this point, émigrés did not have to compose long petitions to state their cases. Formalities were dealt with orally. The declaration of intent and remorse remained compulsory elements of the process. As late as 1860, it was still duly noted that Friedrich Müller, an inn-owner, “was dragging his feet” with his declaration. “He excused this with illness, and by the time we ordered a medical examination, he had already returned to Switzerland.”45 Similarly, Hermann Friedmann, a lawyer who had been sentenced only to half a year in the penitentiary in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, was still not officially amnestied in 1860 after he had returned from exile because “he has not yet stated his assurance regarding his remorse in front of the court, so he has not fulfilled the condition [of the amnesty].”46 Although this did not mean that Friedmann was arrested (by the 1860s émigrés were treated with more lenience) he was not fully instated in his civil rights either. The decree of amnesty therefore was not tantamount to an entitlement to return or automatic reintegration into the body politic. It only made the evaluation process of the applications faster and ensured the outcome if the application fulfilled all formal requirements.

In the Habsburg Empire, émigrés did not have to return from abroad in order to apply for amnesty, but the declarations of intent and remorse were just as indispensable parts of their petitions as they were in Baden. The inclusion or omission of such a declaration was an important element in the report from the consul’s office that accompanied individual petitions. Some consuls merely noted whether the applicant complied with this requirement or not. Others, notably the consul in Brussels, took a more active role in the application process and “reminded” émigrés to include the clause in their petitions.47 This requirement remained constant even as the overall framework for evaluating petitions for amnesty was changing. Increasingly, the “content” of exile evolved into a defining element in the decision regarding possible reconciliation between the emperor and his subjects. By the middle of the 1850s, investigations into the events of 1848 were closed and petitions for amnesty were judged on the basis of the information already available on individual cases, and, most importantly, in light of everything that had happened since the revolution. This shift in the criteria of the evaluation of petitions for amnesty was at the core of the proposal made to Franz Joseph by the Council of Ministers in July 1856. The petitions were either to be accepted or rejected “on the basis of circumstances which are to be carefully considered.” The circumstances included émigrés’ behavior in exile and their family background.48 Even so, a favorable overall assessment of an émigré’s suitability for amnesty merely laid the ground for an application that had to include a clause expressing some form of remorse.

Even if the declaration of remorse was little more than a phrase that an applicant for amnesty had to say in the office of a local clerk in Baden or include at the end of a letter when prompted by the Austrian consul in Brussels, it fulfilled a crucial role. It propped up the fiction according to which exile had had a reformatory effect on the applicant, similar to the effect a prison sentence was supposed to have. In contrast to imprisonment, political exile was a punishment with no set time frame or structure, so it was up to the applicant for amnesty to demonstrate that the time spent abroad had resulted in a change of behavior and views or that he was at least willing to speak the political language of the post-revolutionary era.49 Only the general amnesties in the 1860s closed the chapter of individual petitions for amnesty.50 Although the general amnesty did not mean that “forty-eighters” were all reconciled with their home countries, it created a framework for émigrés to return home without necessarily compromising the ideas for which they had fought during the revolution.

Conclusion

Political exile in Central Europe in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 was an established practice, but one with amorphous boundaries. Lacking overseas colonies and vast territories, where political delinquents could be officially exiled, as it was done in the British Empire or in the Russian Empire, states in Central Europe developed different strategies to make exile work as a punishment. Political refugees broadly fell into two categories. The first category consisted of former revolutionaries who left their countries without official permission, mostly in the course of military events, or with falsified papers in the aftermath of the revolution. Most of the refugees of the Hungarian war of independence belong to this category as do the members of republican militias in Southwest Germany. The second category was made up of former revolutionaries who traded their prison sentence for migration. Such was the case, for example, for the above mentioned inn-keeper from Tuttlingen, Johannes Reichle. For both groups, political exile had neither definite temporal nor geographic boundaries. In other words: exile was not meted out for a specific length of time and neither was it connected to a special place. Even in cases where a prison sentence was traded for emigration to North America, Central European states lacked the infrastructure to effectively control that the former prisoners, now migrants, in fact permanently settled in America as they were supposed to do. For both groups, the length of exile depended on how convincing the deterrents against returning were: threats of imprisonment or even worse punishment upon returning home. Individual and group amnesties provided a venue for negotiating the terms of returning and thereby for setting the boundaries of exile.

The case studies discussed in this article revealed further aspects of the amorphous borders of exile as punishment in this time period. Although family members of former revolutionaries often officially emigrated with all the necessary documents in order to unite the family abroad, they thought of themselves and were treated by authorities in their home countries as political refugees. Notably, if they wanted to return from abroad, they often had to go through an application process that was not unlike the procedure political refugees followed when they applied for amnesty. Their stories suggest that various forms of migration closely intertwined in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth century revolutions.

Besides functioning as units of migration, the families of former revolutionaries often closed ranks as effective lobbies in amnesty processes. In their petitions, they used the family not only as an actual social resource but also as a frame of argumentation. If the state often punished the entire family collaterally and collectively for the political crimes committed by one family member, the authors of amnesty petitions often reversed the logic of collective punishments to plea for clemency on behalf of exiled or imprisoned former revolutionaries. Although reverence and gestures of supplication characterized the language of petitions, the argument of the petitions also contained elements of subversion. As such, they reflect the peculiar mixture of continuity and change that characterized the emerging political culture of the post-revolutionary era.

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Tibor Frank

Approaches to Interwar Hungarian Migrations, 1919–1945

The social upheavals that followed the First World War drove astonishing numbers of people in all directions. Russian and Ukrainian refugees escaped Bolshevism in Belgrade; Poles were relocated into reemerging Poland; Hungarians escaped from Romania and the newly established states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Many people went on substantial and extended study tours to Germany, much as others had done before the war. Migrations were not limited to Jews suffering from the political and educational consequences of the White Terror in Hungary. Yet Jewish migrations were a definitive pattern of the 1920s, when the “Numerus Clausus” act of XXV: 1920 excluded many of them from college. A significant, though smaller, group of non-Jews also left Hungary at the same time. Motivated by anti-liberal politics, poverty, or curiosity, gentiles of mixed convictions and confessions hit the road and tried their luck in Paris, Berlin, or Hollywood.

keywords: intellectual migration, interwar period, Jewish-Hungarian emigrants, prosopography

1

Research on the history of intellectual migrations from Europe, a broad and complex international field, was based initially on eye-witness accounts which served as primary sources, rather than on scholarly literature.1 Laura Fermi’s classic study on Illustrious Immigrants, which focused on intellectual migration from Europe between 1930 and 1941, falls into this category.2 Research proper first began to yield results in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Soon after Fermi’s pioneering venture, Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn significantly extended the period of investigation through a series of related articles in their work, The Intellectual Migration – Europe and America, 1930–1960.3

From the outset, German-Jewish emigration was the most thoroughly researched sub-topic, a pattern that was partly reinforced by H. Stuart Hughes’ The Sea Change – The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965, an excellent survey of the movement of European thinkers and thinking before and after World War II.4 By the end of the 1970s, the first guide to the archival sources related to German-American emigration during the Third Reich had been compiled.5 The 1980s produced a much-needed biographical encyclopedia, which paved the way for further quantitative research.6 Soon the results of this research became available in a variety of German, English, and French publications focusing on German, German-Jewish, and other Central European emigration in the Nazi era.7 The primary foci of the research of the 1980s were the émigré scientists and artists who fled Hitler, with growing interest in U.S. immigration policies during the period of Nazi persecution of the Jews of Europe.8

In contemporary statistics and journalism, most refugees from Germany were hurriedly lumped together as “Germans” or “German-Jews” without their actual birthplace, land of origin, mother tongue or national background being considered as they were forced to leave Germany. This unfortunate tradition has persisted in the otherwise rich and impressive historical literature on the subject. The great and unsolved problem for further research on refugees from Hitler’s Germany remained how to distinguish the non-German (including Hungarian) elements: people, problems, and cases in this complex area. This is important, not only for Hungarian research, but also because it may result in a more realistic assessment of what we should (and should not) consider “German science” or “German scholarship” of the interwar period.

Laura Fermi was probably the first person to notice the significant difference between German refugee scientists and Hungarians forced to leave Germany. Her Illustrious Immigrants included a few pages on what she termed the “Hungarian mystery,” referring to the unprecedented number of especially talented Hungarians in the interwar period.9 The systematic, predominantly biographical treatment of the subject was begun by Lee Congdon in his eminent work, Exile and Social Thought, which surveyed some of the most brilliant careers of Hungarians in Austria and Germany between 1919 and 1933.10 Physicist George Marx made a similar contribution, mostly biographical in nature, to our understanding of the achievements of the great Hungarian-born scientists of this century.11 In a recent book, the outstanding chemist and historian of science István Hargittai assessed the achievements of five of the most notable Hungarian-born scientists who contributed to the U.S. war effort.12 My own Double Exile, on which much of this article is based, is an extensive history of this generation.13

2

Intellectual fermentation in Hungary, particularly in fin-de-siècle Budapest, brought about and was created by a uniquely gifted generation. Changes in the structure and organization of Hungarian society, along with the distinctive features of Hungarian assimilation, helped to nurture a typically Hungarian, and more specifically Budapest, talent. These patterns of assimilation in pre-World War I Austria-Hungary and Hungary, as well as in the United States, share a number of remarkable similarities.

This article discusses some of the impulses that influenced a generation of mostly Jewish-Hungarian emigrants, presenting them by way of prosopography, a vision of a group rather than merely a series of personal biographies. Severeal of these émigré Hungarians were not Jewish, but the overall nature of emigration from Hungary in the interwar period was in fact Jewish. In an effort to identify the conditions of “Hungarian genius,” one can make the following propositions.By the late nineteenth century, feudal privilege was on the decline in Hungary, with hereditary prerogatives challenged and occupational status gradually evolving as a source of prestige.14 This constituted a particularly welcome opportunity for the transformation of a variety of marginal ethnic, social, and religious groups that had never had access to hereditary privilege, and this social change encouraged the greater participation of Jews in the world of learning—in exchange, as it were, for their growing willingness to assimilate. The fact that the state wished to increase the number of people self-identified as Magyars in the multiethnic country opened doors that were closed elsewhere, at least for a time. Previously excluded groups flooded into these professional domains and made a mark for themselves.

The rapidly developing economy15 of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy put a premium on the development of technology, mathematics, medicine, science, and finance, whereas conservative control was often exercised over the humanities and the arts, which were viewed as more political.

The newly established (1873) capital city of Budapest played an outstanding role in generating this new, modern culture and spreading an innovative spirit in and out of the country. Budapest developed as a center of economy, culture, and learning, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the special social and intellectual chemistry of the city resulted in unusually creative and productive thinking, with mathematics and music as the most evident examples.

Because of the traditionally elitist nature of Hungarian (and Central European) education, universities could absorb only a fragment of the available research talent, and many great minds found themselves teaching in high schools. Moreover, as the very definition of the teaching occupation included original research, gifted students at the best schools encountered brilliant researchers at a much earlier age than they did in the U.S. or, sometimes, even in Western Europe.16

Intellectual, artistic, and musical talent was accorded high prestige. A cultural premium on the idea of competitive knowledge poured into education. Practices such as student competitions and specialized journals for high school students, designed to help identify outstanding talents, led to the celebration of gifted students and provided a different kind of prestige than occupational status alone. Cultural emphasis on modernism paved the way to an increasing educational experimentalism, mainly in the best schools of fin-de-siècle Budapest, which prized inductive reasoning, pattern-breaking innovation, less formal relations between teacher and student, and personalized education.17 

3

In the new political framework of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (based on the 1867 Compromise between Austria and Hungary), Hungary bore witness to unprecedented and unrepeated economic expansion, social transformation, and cultural upsurge.18 In the period that began with the unification of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda in 1873 and ended with the outbreak of World War I, the newly established capital city of Budapest became a thriving metropolis. Migrations in and out of the multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual Habsburg Empire produced a vivid, lively, and flourishing cultural climate in which Jews made significant contributions to a blossoming urban lifestyle. The rapidly changing social structure, the appearance of daring social ambitions, and the emergence of new classes all contributed to a need for a modern school system, which was, after Habsburg beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, largely imported from Germany.

The gimnázium (a type of grammar school) was an elitist institution for the burgeoning middle class. It offered academic studies and approaches that were recognized as appropriate tools for training the mind and nurturing talent. Teaching was typically based upon providing factual knowledge with the intention of using inductive reasoning. Most of the best high schools were under the direct control of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist, or Lutheran Church, which represented a high level of discipline and strict moral expectations. They also had faculties that included highly educated and very demanding priests. The Mintagimnázium was a state school (established in 1872, its official name was the Magyar Királyi Tanárképző Intézet Gyakorló Főgymnasiuma) experimental in nature and different from the average gimnázium in many ways. It represented a forerunner of modern educational principles.

Mathematics education was given particular emphasis and promoted by professional organizations, journals, and competitions. Competition was strongly supported and advocated. Outstanding students in mathematics enjoyed both acknowledgment and appreciation.

German influence had a long tradition in Hungary. Hungarian city dwellers were mostly German-speaking, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. Partly because of the influence of the Habsburg court, German was the language of government and administration before the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, and German played a prominent role among members of the mercantile class well into the 1870s and 1880s. German was the language of culture in general, and as a lingua franca in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy it functioned as a bridge between Germany and the Monarchy. For example Hungarian students often attended universities in German-speaking countries.19

A subsequent step in the transfer of educational expertise occurred after 1919–1920, when émigré scholars and scientists took the fruits of their outstanding Hungarian education with them as they left the country, mostly for Germany and then on to the United States.

It would be tempting to think that a careful analysis of the conditions under which talent prospered in fin-de-siècle Budapest would yield a reliable method for the creation of genius. When discussing the achievements of mathematician John von Neumann (János Neumann, 1903–1957) and his near equals, a cautious distinction has to be made between talent as teachable and genius as inborn. Furthermore, formal education, however innovative and exemplary its methods may be, existed within the larger social context of the culture and its many influences on the mind of the student.

In a pioneering inquiry into the nature of problems and their solutions, Michael Polanyi (Mihály Polányi, 1891–1976) raised one of the most crucial questions of his generation: “To recognize a problem which can be solved and is worth solving is in fact a discovery in its own right.” Declaring this as the creed of his generation in a 1957 article for The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,20 Polanyi spoke for and of his generation when discussing originality and invention, discovery and the heuristic act, investigation and problem solving. “The interpretative frame of the educated mind,” he continued, “is ever ready to meet somewhat novel experiences and to deal with them in a somewhat novel manner.” Polanyi had his own views of genius:

genius makes contact with reality on an exceptionally wide range: by seeing problems and reaching out to hidden possibilities for solving them, far beyond the anticipatory powers of current conceptions. Moreover, by deploying such powers in an exceptional measure—far surpassing our own as onlookers—the work of genius offers us a massive demonstration of a creativity which can never be explained in other terms nor taken unquestioningly for granted.21

The extraordinary intellects nurtured by the Mintagimnázium or the Fasori gimnázium (a Lutheran grammar school in Budapest, founded originally in 1823 in Pest) and other élite schools of fin-de-siècle Hungary cannot be attributed exclusively to the unique social and cultural features of the period, the innovative educational approaches, or the characteristics of innate genius, but to an unusual confluence of these three powerful factors, none of which exists in isolation. While we should attempt to discover talent at an early age and continue to cultivate it through personal attention and acknowledgment, creating a competitive spirit and training minds through problem solving, simply by instituting more of these educational practices into today’s pedagogy we would still remain unable to recreate the Hungarian geniuses of the past as long as we are not also able to ensure that the other economic, social, political, and cultural factors that helped create Hungary’s legendary minds are brought into play.

Culture transfer helped shape the arts and sciences in Hungary near the highest level of European education. The influence of the Prussian school system and of European art, music, and science, directly benefited Hungary and had a major impact on teaching, learning, and research. Much of the result was once again exported by eminent exiles—from Hungary to Germany, and then from Germany to the United States.

4

The period of 1918–1920 marked the end of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and historical Hungary within it, and heralded a vastly different period in national history during which some of the best minds, most of them Jewish-Hungarian mathematicians, scientists, and musicians, found themselves compelled to leave the country.22

The social and legal interplay of Jewish-Gentile relations—which included religious conversion, mixed marriages, forced and voluntary assimilation (Magyarization) and ennoblement—had become prevalent by World War I. Post-World War I social dynamics coalesced to give rise to a significant intellectual and professional emigration from Hungary. It was in this post-War social upheaval, and particularly at the time of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság) of 1919, that professional and intellectual emigration became widespread; moreover, intellectual emigration came to be seen as one possible solution to the problems of Hungary’s upwardly mobile and suddenly overgrown Jewish middle and, particularly, upper-middle classes, the Jewish-Hungarian intellectual élite.

Most of the people who left Hungary in 1919 and the early 1920s were directly involved in the so called “aster revolution” of 1918 (headed by the government of Count Mihály Károlyi, who led the first republic in the history of Hungary) or the Bolshevik-type Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and/or were, as a consequence, threatened by the ensuing anti-Semitism unleashed in the wake of this disastrous political and social experiment. It is sadly ironic that most Hungarian Jews who felt endangered after 1919 were from the perspective of many of their everyday cultural habits more Hungarian than Jewish, representing mostly an assimilated, Magyarized, typically non-religious middle or upper-middle class which had profoundly contributed to the socio-economic development and, indeed, modernization of Hungary. Their exodus was a tremendous loss for the country and a welcome gain for the countries in which they chose to settle.

For the intellectually gifted Hungarians, often of Jewish origin, who started their migration toward other European countries and the United States after the political changes of 1918/1920, the typical choice was to move to one of the German-speaking countries, most often Austria or Germany, but also Czechoslovakia and even Switzerland, all of which boasted prestigious German-speaking universities. Berlin was certainly not the only destination, though many of the emigrants chose to settle there and the German capital became a powerful symbol of interwar migration centers. After what often proved to be the first step in a chain- or step-migration, most Hungarian émigrés found that with the rise of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany they had to leave the countries in which they had settled and continue on their way, in most cases ultimately to the United States. This was not the only pattern that emerged, but it was the most typical.

5

As a European phenomenon, professional migration after World War I was not peculiar to Hungary. The War was followed by immense social convulsions that drove astonishing numbers of people in all directions. Russian and Ukrainian refugees escaped Bolshevism, Poles were relocated into reemerging Poland, Hungarians escaped from the newly established (or aggrandized) states of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and tried to find some place in the new Hungary.23

Outward movements from Hungary in the 1920s were part of this emerging pattern and cannot be defined as emigration proper. Many people went on substantial and extended study tours of varied length—just as others had done before World War I. Contrary to general belief, migrations were not limited to Jews suffering from the political and educational consequences of the counterrevolutionary White Terror in Hungary, a reaction to the two revolutions of 1918/1919. A significant, though smaller, group of non-Jews also left Hungary at the same time. Motivated by anti-liberal politics, poverty, or curiosity, gentiles with dramatically mixed convictions hit the road and tried their luck in Paris, Berlin, or Hollywood. Future Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986), authors Sándor Márai (1900–1989) and Gyula Illyés (1902–1983), artists Aurél Bernáth (1895–1982) and Sándor Bortnyik (1893–1976), and other prospective gentile luminaries were among the most distinguished émigrés after 1919.24 Yet Jewish migrations were a definitive pattern of the 1920s, when the “Numerus Clausus” law of XXV: 1920 excluded many of them from colleges, limiting the number of students attending university on the basis of the proportions of the religious and ethnic groups in the Hungarian population.

In an effort to increase their chances of getting into the United States, many Hungarians who left the successor states of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy deliberately identified themselves as “Romanians,” “Czechoslovaks,” or “Yugoslavs,” since the U.S. Quota Laws of 1921 and 1924 enabled very few Hungarians to enter the country. Nevertheless, most migrants were directed to centers in Europe, primarily in Germany. German centers of culture, education, and research represented the pre-eminent opportunity for young Hungarians searching for patterns and norms of modernization.

6

One of my intentions in this article has been to show and document both the transit role of Germany, and particularly Berlin, in the history of Hungarian intellectual migrations and the role of Hungarians in the great exodus from Germany after the Nazi takeover.

Links between the two countries were anything but new. During much of its modern history, Hungary in some way formed a part of or was strongly influenced by the greater German cultural realm. Indeed it developed on the fringes of German civilization. The tendency to frequent German cultural and educational centers was natural for the Hungarian upper and upper-middle classes throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Most Hungarians who went to Germany after World War I were of Jewish origin. Many were forced to leave Hungary because they had been politically involved in the Hungarian revolutions of 1918/1919. Others became innocent victims of the anti-Semitic campaign and legislation that followed the abortive Bolshevik-type coup in 1919, the first of its kind in Europe. These groups typically spoke good German, had been educated in the German cultural tradition, and had had many earlier contacts with Germany and other German-speaking cultural and scientific centers in Central Europe. It seemed natural for them to seek what turned out to be temporary refuge in the intellectually flourishing and politically tolerant atmosphere of Weimar Germany.

Though the Hungarian government realized the potential loss the country would suffer from intellectual exile, most émigrés resisted official endeavors to lure them back to Hungary and chose to stay in Germany until Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933.25 Hungarian scientists, scholars, artists, musicians, filmmakers, authors, and other professionals enjoyed recognition and prestige in Weimar Germany. This “German” reputation helped them rebuild their subsequent careers in England and, particularly, the United States, where after 1933 most of these “German” Hungarians were headed.

The rise of anti-Semitism and the Nazi takeover reminded Jewish-Hungarians in Germany of their earlier experiences in Hungary, and this historical déjà-vu often spurred them to take action more quickly than many native Germans did. Prompted by the lessons of their double exile, several Hungarians played important roles in rescuing victims of Nazi Germany and also became active in anti-Nazi movements and instrumental in promoting the A-bomb and other Allied efforts to defeat Germany and Japan.

Continuing research is needed to provide further statistical evidence regarding the actual number of immigrants in Weimar Germany, including the number of émigré Hungarians and their social composition. It would be important to learn more about social networking, bonding and inter-group relations among the various émigré groups and individuals, including Hungarians, as well as the relationship between immigrants and the German population. Little is known of the politics of many of the immigrants: their political sympathies, party affiliations and political organizations await study.

Individual immigrant groups had specific ways of thinking, communicating and arguing. A comparison would offer insights into their cultural differences and their varied contributions to German civilization. A systematic study of the pre-Nazi German periodical literature might well cast more light on the achievements and contributions of Hungarians and other émigré intellectuals in Weimar Germany.

7

Many refugee Hungarians were mistaken by American agencies and individuals as German refugees. Born in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Jewish-Hungarian professionals often spoke German as a mother tongue and had attended some of the best schools of the Monarchy. Many of them had studied and received their degrees in Germany and been employed by German universities and other institutions. Members of the large group of Hungarian-Jewish scholars and scientists with German training were often invisible to immigration authorities because they were lumped together with German and German-Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi Germany. This raises the question as to whether in the case of scholars and scientists it makes more sense to speak of the country (or culture) of origin or the country (or culture) of education as the site of natural connection.

Many requests for assistance were denied by the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars in the U.S. because the applicants had Hungarian rather than German citizenship. Until 1938, when the first anti-Jewish Bill was passed in Budapest, Hungarians did not seem to be an endangered species, and the Committee focused its efforts on the Germans and German-Hungarians who were in acute trouble. This explains why the Committee (and probably several other organizations) turned to those Hungarians who were closely associated with Germany, were German citizens, had German jobs, and were under actual threat after the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.

Ousted from Germany in or soon after 1933, many Jewish-Hungarian professional and intellectual refugees were still able to return to Hungary to work or visit. Between 1929 and 1938 (the year of the first anti-Jewish bill), Hungary provided a modicum of shelter for its Jewish population, increasingly an illusion that proved to be deceptive and ultimately lethal.

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Peace Treaty of Trianon eliminated much of the geographic and social mobility in the area or made it very difficult. Escaping interwar Hungary was, in fact, not only a form of geographic relocation, but also a vehicle of social mobility. Weimar Germany was one of the great European centers of modernization, science and culture. It attracted migrants from all regions, mostly the peripheries of Europe, as did the United States, which from a global perspective had also increasingly become such a center. Emigration facilitated the transfer of Hungarian middle class values and possibilities into the much larger and more articulate German and American middle-class. This made the integration of newcomers usually quick, effective, and lasting, and led to professional success. Upon arrival in the U.S., immigrants from socially backward Hungary found themselves in an incomparably larger, more modern, dynamic, and professional middle-class where talent was appreciated and fostered. American middle class values and institutions made integration relatively easy, both socially and mentally.

Rescue operations in the pre-World War II period were made extremely difficult by the restrictionist 1924 quota law (in effect until 1965), raging unemployment, and growing anti-Semitism in the U.S. As only the top people from even the German group were wanted, the agencies carefully skimmed the very best and turned away “second-class” professionals. The growing need of European professionalism and know-how, and especially the later demands of the war effort, made it imperative for the U.S. to allow the immigration of the most brilliant specialists.

Refugee organizations in the United States were not based on charity. They had their own American professional motives and interests and served their country and institutions, while also saving European lives. Interwar migration did not stop upon arrival in the U.S., but continued from institution to institution until the newcomer found his/her “final” place or destination. Step-migration was to become an almost global phenomenon.

Networking, cohorting, and bonding were strong among the Hungarian refugees, and some, like physicist Leo Szilard (Leó Szilárd, 1898–1964) and engineer and aviation pioneer Theodore von Kármán (Tódor Kármán, 1881–1963) did their best to help fellow refugees.26 Their “private” or combined private/institutional rescue operations were part of U.S. relief, an effort often shared by outstanding American scholars, themselves mostly of European origin.

Jews arriving from Hungary seemed to have been more Hungarian than Jewish (at least from the perspective of their observable cultural habits), though the question of their religious affiliation awaits further research. Assimilation in Hungary certainly left a lasting imprint on their faith. Many of the American citizens initiating or participating in the rescue missions were themselves Jewish and were driven by special sensitivity to the bond of shared background, as well as a more keen sense of danger.

Contrary to common belief, not all émigré Hungarians were Jewish in the period of 1919–1945. Though the overwhelming majority of exiles were Jewish, a relatively small group of Hungarian gentiles, politically liberal, radical, or leftist, also left the country, as did others who simply hoped to pursue more rewarding careers. Some of them returned to Hungary at a later point, though many such as Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi and author Sándor Márai left again after 1945.

The lack of a sufficient knowledge of English isolated many of the immigrants and hampered their social integration into the American community. However, their repeated traumata in interwar Europe led them to become militant anti-Nazis and anti-Communists, who looked upon the United States as a bulwark of freedom and fought against all forms of totalitarianism. Coming from this background, some of the very best and ablest minds joined the U.S. war effort and contributed to the fall of tyranny in Japan and German-dominated Europe.

The number of notable Hungarian-American refugees in the interwar years is difficult to assess. I have compiled a list of some 250 eminent Hungarian professionals who immigrated to the U.S. between 1919 and 1945 that is attached as an appendix to my book Double Exile.27 Though the list is incomplete, it presents a wide variety of outstanding specialists whose presence in the United States was, and in some cases still continues to be, an important contribution to American science, education and culture. That the bulk of this outstanding group lived relatively happy and successful lives in America is further evidenced by their life span. As documented by the list, a surprisingly large percentage of immigrant Hungarian-Americans lived well into old age: approximately 33 percent lived to 85 or more, 20 percent to 90, and 1,5 percent to more than 100. In other words, every third member of this group reached an age that was unusual even for Americans, as the elderly U.S. population during the period between 1920 and 2000 represented only 0,2 to 1,5 percent of the total U.S. population.28

The group of Jewish-Hungarian refugees may be considered to have had something of a group-biography. One can look upon the members of this large and diverse group as having lived essentially the same life and write their shared, common biography in terms of a prosopography. Yet, this prosopography must not fail to transmit the extent to which Hungary’s loss of some of its most outstanding talent remains a source of pain, pride, fear and anger in the national consciousness. Hungary’s fundamental educational contributions to these outstanding minds, in combination with the energizing modernism of Germany and other western European countries, were fertilized again by the nurturing soil of their new homeland in the U.S. The step-migrations of this transient generation, tossed and turned as it was by the traumatizing historical-political events of the era, produced a range of contributions that are rightly owned by many countries, and can be seen as foreshadowing the emergence of a global human identity in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Barraclough, Geoffrey, ed. The Times Atlas of World History. Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, rev. ed. 1984, repr. 1988.

Bentwich, Norman. The Refugees from Germany, April 1933 to December 1935. London: Allen and Unwin, 1936.

Bentwich, Norman. The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: The Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933–1952. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953.

Breitman, Richard and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought. Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria 1919–1933. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Fermi, Laura. Illustrious Immigrants. The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930–1941. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Fleming, Donald and Bernard Baylin, eds. The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930–1960. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.

Frank, Tibor. Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.

Good, David F. The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914. Berkeley–Los Angeles­–London: University of California Press, 1984.

Hanák, Péter. „Problems of Jewish Assimilation in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In The Power of the Past. Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, 235–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Hargittai, István. The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hughes, H. Stuart. The Sea Change. The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Jackman, Jarrel C. and Carla M. Borden, eds. The Muses Flee Hitler. Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930–1945. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 1983.

Kármán, Theodore von, with Lee Edson. The Wind and Beyond: Theodore von Kármán, Pioneer in Aviation and Pathfinder in Space. Boston–Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1967.

Komlos, John. The Habsburg Monarchy As a Customs Union: Economic Development in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Kröner, Peter, ed. Vor fünfzig Jahren. Die Emigration deutschsprachiger Wissenschaftler 1933–1939. Münster: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1983.

Marx, George. The Voice of the Martians. 2nd ed. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997.

Palmier, Jean Michel. Weimar en Exil. Le destin de l’émigration intellectuelle allemande antinazie en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Payot, 1988.

Polanyi, Michael. “Problem solving.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science VIII, no. 30 (1957): 89–103.

Ránki, György. “Die Entwicklung des ungarischen Bürgertums vom späten 18. zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert.” In Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich. (Eine Auswahl), edited by Jürgen Kocka. Vol. 1 of Einheit und Vielfalt Europas, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 230–48. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995 [1988].

Rider, Robin E. “Alarm and Opportunity: Emigration of Mathematicians and Physicists to Britain and the United States, 1933–1945.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 15, Part I (1984): 107–76.

Spalek, John M. Guide to the Archival Materials of the German-speaking Emigration to the United States after 1933. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

Strauss, Herbert A. and Werner Röder, eds. International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Munich–New York–London–Paris: K. G. Saur, 1980–1983.

Sugar, Peter, Péter Hanák, Tibor Frank, eds. A History of Hungary. Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Szögi, László. Magyarországi diákok németországi egyetemeken és főiskolákon, 1789–1919. [Hungarian Students at German Universities and Colleges, 1789–1919], vol. 5 of Magyarországi diákok egyetemjárása az újkorban [Hungarian Students at Universities Abroad in the Modern Times]. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Levéltára, 2001.

The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2012. New York: World Almanac Books, 2012.

Balázs Ablonczy

Instead of America. Immigration and Governmental Influence in the Hungarian Émigré Community of France between the Two World Wars*

Using the typology of French sociologist Stéphane Dufoix, this essay attempts to discern the moment at which an emigrant community based on political opposition begins to function according to a dynamic of center and periphery. Following this shift, influential figures of the home country take its institutions and its direction from their political opponents. A physical fight that broke out in August 1929 in Roubaix, an industrial city in northern France, between Hungarian communists and Catholic workers offers a case study that sheds light on the change of strategy of the Hungarian government in its approach to the Hungarian emigrant communities. Before 1914, the liberal politicians of the time made little effort to organize the several hundred-thousand Hungarian speaking emigrants living abroad, for the most part in North America (in part because the national minorities of Hungary were overrepresented among the emigrants). In contrast, after 1918, at a moment of history when the notion of the nation as an organic entity had risen to prominence, Hungarian speakers living outside Hungary were seen self-evidently as subjects of political policy. After 1920, the United States closed its gates to immigrants from Eastern Europe. France consequently became important, in part as a country in which there was a dire need of labor for reconstruction following the war. While the community of Hungarian emigrants was never as large numerically as the Polish, Russian, or Italian communities, by the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s there were some 50,000 Hungarians living in France. This essay is an examination of the political policies adopted with regards to them.

keywords: emigrant community, center and periphery, political opposition, diaspora

Research into the history of the émigré community does not at present represent one of the favored research topics of the Hungarian historical profession. After the proper historiographical perspective emerged, historians in Hungary were expected and allowed to deal with these topics only from the viewpoint of the history of the labor movement, and in any event delving into the topic did not hold out the promise of a major historical synthesis. The situation did not change radically after 1990 either: exploration of the history of the emigration remained largely stuck in the same place, with the initiative in many cases passing into the hands of sociologists and ethnographers.1 In France, meanwhile, exploration of the history of the Hungarian emigration in France has not gone beyond a few doctoral theses at best; the focal point of these, moreover, falls rather after 1945. Linguistic barriers obviously play a role in this fact, as does the circumstance that even at the height of immigration the Hungarian community never numbered more than a few tens of thousands and, as such, in terms of institutional structure does not bear comparison to the mass of Russian, Polish, Portuguese or Italian migrants, not to mention those arriving more recently from the countries of the Far East and the Maghreb.2

In what follows I shall attempt, out of an case almost encountered by chance, to discern a few of the basic motifs in the history of the Hungarian émigré community in France, reflect on the historiographical topoi linked to it and try to explore the social and political motivations of those involved in the events. According to my hypothesis, a brawl that took place in a northern industrial town, its presentation and treatment not only tell us much about the event but also demonstrates the preconceptions and expectations of interwar Hungary concerning her own economic and political émigrés as well as the instrumentalization of certain organizations and individuals. In addition, the case presented here serves also to capture the shift in strategy of the émigré (or, from the viewpoint of the receiving country, immigrant) community.

The Battle

An answer to the question “what happened?” is not impossible, though somewhat complicated. On the afternoon of August 18, 1929 a group of Hungarians in the French city of Roubaix celebrated Saint Stephen’s Day in a ballroom not far from the city center, on the Rue Saint-Antoine. This venue was provided by the benefactor of the local Hungarians, a spinster from a well-to-do industrialist family, Louise Derville, for the Saint Stephen Circle (Szent István Kör), an organization gathering together the Catholic Hungarians of the northern industrial town. While we do not know the precise schedule of the festivities for that year, the program for 1928 has survived: this included a celebratory mass, ceremonial assembly, and cultural evening, followed by a ball. The mass was celebrated by Imre Kurcz, the parish priest assigned by the bishop of Szombathely to minister to the spiritual needs of the locals; the children appearing in the cultural performance were taught by the missionary sisters Mária Logojda and Irén Tergina, while organizing work was overseen by László Ölvedi, the secretary assigned by the Hungarian Association of Paris (Párizsi Magyar Egyesület – PME). According to the data uncovered during the subsequent investigation, at around six-thirty in the evening a group of some fifty to seventy, consisting overwhelmingly of Hungarian men, appeared at the entrance. They struck the caretaker, Géza Pálinkás, in the head; then about twenty people remained outside on the sidewalk in front of the cultural center (making sure that those inside did not receive reinforcements), while some thirty to fifty forced their way into the building. Here they first began singing the Internationale, then cut to pieces the garments hanging in the coatroom and set about breaking the furniture. Upon hearing the noise, the members of the Catholic workers’ circle streamed out of the upstairs auditorium and tried to repulse the attack. Soon brass knuckles, knives and other striking or cutting weapons appeared in the hands of the attackers, and a desperate fight ensued in the stairwell of the building, during which a part of the stairway was also destroyed. After a struggle lasting about half an hour, the male members of the crowd of approximately 150 inside forced the attackers out. In the meantime 15 (according to other sources 16) were wounded, six of them seriously (one of the attackers was slightly wounded). The Hungarians’ benefactor, Louise Derville, also received a punch, while others were stabbed (like Secretary Ölvedi) or suffered contusions. The police forces notified after the scuffle set about rounding up the culprits that very night, and a day later six persons were under remand and the first interrogations and even witness confrontations had taken place. And already on August 19 the examining judge went out to the crime scene in order to reconstruct the events.3 The leaders of the perpetrators were caught, and during a judicial proceeding held in October 1929 11 of the 12 defendants received prison sentences ranging from three months to half a year, with one acquittal. The defendants were even obligated to pay for the financial and physical damages. A sad postscript to the story was that one of those sentenced, a twenty-eight-year-old loader named Márton Molnár, committed suicide. His funeral provided an occasion for a Communist demonstration in Wattrelos (near Roubaix) in April 1930.

The Battle Scene

Before attempting to uncover the background, antecedents and epilogue to the events, it is worth reviewing two competing historiographical interpretations of what happened. In 1982 a researcher at the Institute for Party History, Anna Pécsi, after numerous preliminary studies, published her synthesis of the history of Hungarian workers’ movement in France between the two world wars. In it she covered the happenings in Roubaix in a separate subchapter, under the title “The Bloody Saint Stephen’s Day in Roubaix” (A roubaix-i véres Szent István-nap).4 On these pages (based partially on the source materials used by the present author, too), she offers an interpretation of what happened that fully tallies with the Communist propaganda of the era: in her view the attackers who could be connected to the Communist Party had been lured into a trap; the Catholics were ready for them and “awaited the leftist Hungarians armed with knives and rubber truncheons.” The latter, however, held their ground, since “they dealt more blows than they received.” The text does not discuss what precisely the Communist workers were doing at the gathering of the Catholic circle. In her presentation, the affair appears as a sort of self-defense, which was intended to stem the continuous ideological encroachment of official Hungary and to eliminate the provocation represented by the Saint Stephen Circle. In Pécsi’s interpretation, the French police pounced on the workers despite the “justifiable self-defense” and the trap, and together with the court they had served definite class interests when meting out the punishment. Rounding out the passion story, she depicted Márton Molnár’s death, too, as if the French jailers had thrown him out the prison window and he had not taken his own life.5 It must be added that already at the time of its appearance this one-sided and orthodox party approach garnered critics. In the journal of the Institute for Party History, János Johancsik expressed his displeasure thus: “The historical appraisal nevertheless becomes questionable when the brave determination and heroic sacrifice of the movement’s participants gain expression in actions aimed at asserting an erroneous line. Thus, for example, the description and appraisal of the disruption of the Saint Stephen’s Day celebration in 1929 may confuse today’s reader.”6 Pécsi therefore fully identified with the discourse used by the party historiography of the era, was highly selective in her use of the available sources (the Hungarian National Archives, as well as the documents of the Archives Nationales, which she herself had probably filmed in Paris and for which she prepared the finding aid at the Institute for Party History, later Institute of Political History, etc.), and in every respect accepted the descriptions of the incident by Frigyes Karikás, the Hungarian party functionary reporting on the case, as well as the Communist press and brochure literature. All this she wrote, however, in the language customary of the era’s scholarship, with the expected (albeit occasionally somewhat difficult to retrace) scholarly apparatus, and even if the correct spelling of names (in the cases of Kurcz, Ölvedi and party delegate Wolf) occasionally caused her trouble, her work follows standard academic models. Thus it may appear that, freed from the clichés of the history of the workers’ movement, the narrative may provide a credible answer to the question “what happened?”

The situation is different with the work of the theologian and canonist József Borovi (1917–2005).7 The relevant chapter of the well-structured work of church history, despite the fact that its author conducted research in both the episcopal archives of Szombathely and the Hungarian National Archives and analyzed some of the press material of the era, is simply unaware of the Roubaix affair. (Its handling of sources, however, is quite weak, and the citations, where given, cannot be verified.) Although from the correspondence and the documents available to him he detected the existence of some sort of tension between the local Hungarians and the French ecclesiastical and secular authorities, leading all the way to a trial, he saw the roots of this in something completely different. He wrote of the “events of September 18, 1929,” in the course of which the Bishopric of Lille raised an objection to Imre Kurcz’s service there, particularly because the priest was conducting propaganda in favor of territorial revision and against the Treaty of Trianon.8 Aware of the legal trial as well (but completely misunderstanding its purpose), Borovi writes as though it had been conducted against the Hungarian Catholic pastor of Roubaix. He detects the conflict and fashions a narrative in order to fill in the gaps in information. He, too, has trouble with the correct spelling of certain names (e.g., Ölvedi), while at the same time the clerical and anti-Communist outlook brings about a text which squares with such an arbitrarily assembled series of events on only very few points. In his attempt to fill in the gaps in the story, the author of the text, which is openly empathetic to the church, produces a narrative which fails to mention the very circumstance that launched the sequence of events (the fight). In this way the two competing narratives (Catholic and Communist) each give a false interpretation to the events. The present author (without thinking himself the champion of a kind of absolute truth either) believes that use of the available sources (sources available to the two authors presented above as well) makes it possible to draw a much more nuanced and differentiated picture. And the fight, which obviously is impossible, and even inadvisable, to describe,9 creates an excellent opportunity for discussing the social structure of the Hungarians of France and the nature of Hungarian-French relations.

Commanders

The year 1929 was an eventful one in the history of Hungarian-French relations and in Hungarian history generally. It was at this time that relations between Budapest and Paris, which had deteriorated notably following the franc forgery scandal in 1925–26, seemed to improve: in June 1929 Prime Minister István Bethlen was cordially received in Paris.10 In the so-called Optants’ Trial—with and at French urging—the Hungarian and Romanian positions moved beyond the impasse.11 In August 1929 the World Congress of Hungarians opened in Budapest, the famous tale writer, Elek Benedek passed away in his native village of Kisbacon, and the Third World Scout Jamboree was held at Arrowe Park in England, where the Hungarian troop achieved a fine success. And the average newspaper reader would have been preoccupied by the growing reports about the later infamous arsenic murders in the villages of the region of Tiszazug. It was in this context that the fight in Roubaix would for a few days become a short-lived sensation.

A few circumstances not widely known at the time also may have helped to mythologize what happened. In fact, on either side of the fight two literary intellectuals confronted one another. The organizing secretary of the Hungarian Association of Paris sent to northern France was by no means unknown to the literature-reading public of the era. Born in Érsekújvár (today Nové Zámky, Slovakia) in 1903, László Ölvedi appeared on the Hungarian literary scene in Slovakia with his poems in the early 1920s.12 His first volumes, Valakit várunk (Waiting for Someone, 1922) and A bányász éneke (The Miner’s Song, 1923) were enthusiastically received by the critics. Thanks to the backing of the newspaper Prágai Magyar Hírlap his name was soon being mentioned alongside that of the noted Catholic priest and poet László Mécs, and he was touted as one of the great hopes of Hungarian lyric poetry in former Upper Hungary. Following his university studies abroad, however, Ölvedi was unable to return to Czechoslovakia because—allegedly—he had vehemently spoken out against the Czechoslovak state at an international student debate in Geneva.13 (At the same time, this is contradicted somewhat by the fact that as late as the late spring of 1929 the poet was still a Czechoslovak citizen and attempting to evade the Czechoslovak recruiting board).14 In early 1928 he was sent from Paris to the industrial region of northern France to help to develop local Hungarian institutions. Ölvedi assiduously sent his reports, but he encountered many problems. In 1928 the jurisdiction of the Hungarian Association of Paris, which ideologically stood close to the government in Budapest (it described itself as “apolitical”), was extended to all of France. The decision did not always meet with the approval of the local communities. The Saint Stephen Circle in Roubaix was the chosen center for organizational work in the north. In operation since 1926, the Catholic-run association was the only such organization in provincial France, the political mobilization of the Hungarians having been monopolized until then largely by the Communist, and to a lesser extent the Socialist, workers’ movement. Ölvedi was soon sending dissatisfied reports from the northern textile city: the leaders of the Circle were at times too lenient with Communist sympathizers and did not accept the instructions of the Paris headquarters. The caretaker, István Szalay, three times tore down a resolution of the PME decreeing the expulsion of one of their fellow members, and he declared that he did not takes orders from the Parisians.15 And in 1928 they had wanted to hold their vintage celebration right when the Hungarians of the neighboring settlement were preparing for the house-warming of their own social circle, and they were dissuaded from their plans only with the utmost difficulty.16 The focal point of organizational work in the north was soon transferred to nearby Hénin-Liétard (today: Hénin-Beaumont, Pas-de-Calais Department), where a vibrant Hungarian cultural life unfolded under the leadership of Ödön Bodnár, a teacher commissioned by the Julian Association from Budapest and with Ölvedi’s collaboration. Soon a singing circle and an amateur theatrical group were formed. The Saint Stephen Boy Scout Troop was also established with 12 members, and the local Hungarians were regularly visited by the doctor of the Hungarian House in Paris, Karola Papp (in certain cases she treated Communist patients as well), which likewise enhanced the Circle’s popularity. However, apparently Ölvedi not only encountered trouble with the Hungarians of Roubaix but also quarreled with the circle’s benefactor, Mademoiselle Derville, in late 1928. In fact, in the spring of 1929 his superiors emphatically warned him a number of times to observe accounting and financial discipline, and on one occasion they even reproached him for his “sleepiness,” because of which he had been late to important meetings.17

He was injured in the fight of August 1929, though his injury could not have been serious because on September 2 he was already back at work. His position, however, changed: he was transferred to Paris, and then in December 1929 he left France and went to Budapest, citing among other things his illness. “And I would be very happy if through two or three months of expensive medical treatment I could avoid the operation,” he wrote, then adding bitterly, “this, too, is one of my fond memories of the PME.”18 In Budapest he found work at the headquarters of the Hungarian National Alliance (Magyar Nemzeti Szövetség), which engaged in domestic and foreign propaganda, and continued his literary activity. His illness did not improve, however, and only worsened following a trip to Sofia in 1931: the young poet passed away in June of that year in Budapest, soon after his twenty-eighth birthday. Although the obituaries appearing at the time of his death did not mention the cause of death, already in that year there appeared the first small booklet tracing the cause back to a kick received in the fight with the Communists.19 A decade later, according to Marcell Jankovics (and along with him Lajos Tamás, who wrote an appreciation of the poet), Ölvedi had been kicked about by Communists in Paris, and this was the cause of his premature death.20 For his part Lajos Turczel in the encyclopedia entry he wrote mentions the cancerous knife wound that hit a lung as the cause.21 Because there is no record of Ölvedi having been attacked a second time in Paris, the knifing probably must have been the “scratch” received in Roubaix. Naturally, we do not know Ölvedi’s exact illness, but there is no doubt that he was ailing already prior to August 1929: in late 1928 he requested leave citing the fact that the climate was undermining his health.

Although he did not take part in the fight (in fact he was not even in the town during these days), Frigyes Karikás (1895–1938; according to other sources 1942), who acted as the official leader of the Hungarian Communists in France, similarly played a key role in the events. A locksmith by training, the party worker was sent to France by the External Committee of the Communist Party of Hungary (KMP) in 1928 to restore the party organizations, riven by earlier factional battles and expulsions. After the fall of the Republic of Councils in 1919, Karikás fled via Vienna to the Soviet Union, where he obtained a diploma. There his career as a writer, during which he portrayed mainly the battles of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, also commenced; the film A harminckilences dandár (The Thirty-Ninth Brigade, 1960), which would become a ritual element of remembering 1919 in Hungary during the Kádár era, was based on his cycle of short stories. From Karikás’s reports there emerges the portrait of a Communist activist, one ready for action who occasionally even dispensed with the party jargon and who under the names “Fritz” and “Ferenc Virág” dashed off his letters and reports to the party headquarters in Vienna. His relationship with the latter was far from harmonious,22 firstly because in the factional battles raging within the KMP in the 1920s between Béla Kun and Jenő Landler,23 he had taken the latter’s side, and after the politician’s death in 1928 this did not cast too favorable a light on Karikás. Secondly, the leader of the organization in France made no effort to conceal his objections about the state of affairs prevailing in the headquarters in Vienna: he criticized the uncoordinated personnel policy, confusion and doctrinaire direction. Nor were his spirits dampened by the constant disparagement he regularly received from Vienna. Karikás developed good relations with the leader of the short-lived Hungarian People’s Republic in 1918–1919, Count Mihály Károlyi,24 who happened to be living in France and who in this period was turning ever more resolutely towards the Comintern. Karikás succeeded in winning over the prestige and bearing of the count, the “Hungarian Kerensky,” for numerous causes important to the Communist movement.25 In the second half of 1929 Károlyi acted on behalf of Communist prisoners conducting a hunger strike in the prison at Sopronkőhida, and the party devoted a role to him in the Roubaix trial as well, even though the count had not been present during the clash. Karikás at the same time approved of and encouraged physical violence against the “embassy fascists.”26 Roubaix was by no means an isolated case: there had been an attempt to disrupt the celebration of the Saint Stephen Circle (in Communist parlance, the “Stevie Circle”) on August 19, 1928, but Ölvedi’s action had prevented this at the time.27 And that the happenings in Roubaix had by no means come about spontaneously is unmistakably indicated by Karikás’s account as well: “back in the spring we decided we would take care of them when the opportunity arose.”28 In October 1928 the Communists beat up Ödön Bodnár, the Hungarian teacher in Hénin-Liétard, and Kálmán Ivics, a miner in Méricourt. Karikás did not at all disapprove of the brawl in Roubaix in August 1929 and in fact sang the praises of the perpetrators. Over the course of 1930 similar such attacks befell the Hungarian Students’ Association of Paris (Párizsi Magyar Diákegyesület), meeting in the Hungarian House in Paris, as well as the participants in the Hungarian revisionist rally gathering in the Wagram Hall in Paris.29 In 1931 Karikás (undoubtedly because of his clashes with the party leadership as well) was recalled from Paris and illegally sent to Hungary. In 1932, together with the leaders of the illegal party, Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst, he was arrested and sentenced to death. Due to international protest in 1935 he was released to the Soviet Union, where during the Stalinist terror in 1938 he was arrested, convicted and sent to the Gulag. He likely perished in 1942.

Of the story’s other, central figure we know substantially less: Imre Kurcz, born in Szentpéterfa and of Croat nationality, went out to northern France as a young chaplain, having been consecrated a priest in the Diocese of Szombathely in 1924. The fight did not enhance his renown either: although the truth is difficult to piece together from József Borovi’s euphemisms, it appears that his participation in irredentist propaganda (the Circle joined the Revisionist League in July 1929) embarrassed the superior French ecclesiastical authorities, namely the bishop of Lille, Liénart, and the auxiliary bishop of Paris, Chaptal; the latter was entrusted within the episcopate with supervising the pastoral care of the foreign-speaking faithful living in the country. Kurcz must not have enjoyed himself in France, because in June 1930 he was transferred to Paris, then in late 1931 he returned home and served in smaller parishes under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Szombathely: between 1932 and 1936 in Tótszentmárton, and later in Vaskeresztes.

Combatants

After the First World War, France, which emerged from the war victorious though calamitously bled dry and to a great extent (in the north and east) lying in ruins, was in urgent need of labor. Taking advantage of this economic trend, tens of thousands of Hungarians took to the road to try their fortune in Paris or some industrial region. Their exact number is difficult to estimate, especially because a significant portion of the incoming workers resided in France illegally, and in addition the occasional shifts in economic trends also seriously impacted the colony’s numbers. In 1922–1923 emigration received new impetus from the unemployment generated by the closing of mines in Hungary: the size of the Hungarian colony multiplied from the few hundred persons previously resident in France to several tens of thousands by the middle of the 1920s.30 To illustrate the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, let it suffice here to point out that whereas Hungarian publicists estimated the number of Hungarians living in Paris and its environs at between 15 and 30 thousand, a police report dated 1932 put their number at nine thousand.31 The geographical distribution within France, too, was uneven: a significant portion of them tried to earn a living in the capital and its immediate environs. Another major group was formed by those working in the northern mining and industrial region (Lens, Méricourt, Lille, Valenciennes, Sallaumines, Hénin-Liétard and Roubaix). The third major group was employed by the large towns and industrial establishments of the Rhône Valley: of the Hungarians of Lyon, Grenoble and Isieux the contemporary chronicler noted that almost all hailed from the town of Sárvár; the closing of the silk factory there had prompted them to try their fortune in France. In the east, larger-sized Hungarian populations could be found in a few industrial establishments in Alsace: Mulhouse and for instance (briefly) the industrial works of Creutzwald–Falck. Hungarian colonies existed in other major cities (Bordeaux, Marseille and Rouen) as well; Sándor Molnár, general secretary of the Hungarian Association of Paris, estimated the number of Hungarians living in Algeria under French administration at a further 4,000–5,000 in 1931.32 Regarding the number of Hungarians living in northern France, once again we can rely only on estimates, but their number may be put at several thousands. According to one report well acquainted with the local conditions, in 1929 the Hungarians of Roubaix numbered 900, approximately 100 of whom had arrived from Czechoslovakia.33 Another report that emerged almost simultaneously provides an entirely precise figure: it indicated 635 Hungarians living in Roubaix – true, it cannot be known whether this number also included the labor force of the industrial establishments that had virtually grown together with the city.34

The “French Manchester” of the nineteenth century and one of the international centers of the textile industry, Roubaix experienced its golden age in the years prior to the First World War. The nearly four years of German occupation had bled it dry, and the repeated crises of the industry made the instability permanent. The city had its greatest number of inhabitants in 1896 (124,000), but from this time on the population entered into a gradual decline (today 30,000 fewer live here); in 1929 the city had around 117,000 inhabitants.35 In the period between the two world wars the municipality was led by a socialist mayor: Jean-Baptiste Lebas (1878–1944) was not only a successful city leader whose socio-political program in some cases was ahead of its time, but as the labor minister in the first Blum government (1936–1937) he had a key role in introducing, for example, the forty-hour work week, paid vacation and other socio-political measures. Lebas belonged to that group of French socialists (SFIO: Section française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) who immediately following the break at the Tours Congress had displayed an aversion to the Communists.

We find in the city a sharply divided Hungarian community, which—unlike the miners, who enjoyed relatively good living conditions—had to struggle mightily for its daily bread. Nearly half of the local Hungarians worked as wool-combers, which was quite toilsome and exhausting work, and approximately eighty found employment at one of the iron or timber enterprises. The employers as a rule were satisfied with the Hungarian workers, whom they considered more conscientious than the Polish guest workers typical of the region; the Hungarians also showed a lesser propensity to commit crime than the latter. One point of interest from the reporting of the bourgeois radical monthly merits particular attention: a significant number of Hungarians were “living in sin” because it was necessary to wait months, or even years, for the official procedure due to the slowness of the Hungarian consulate in Paris.36 The majority of Hungarians arrived from two regions of Hungary: from along the eastern border (the vicinity of Csenger, Sima and Nagygéc) and from the industrial region of the central part of Transdanubia: Felsőgalla, Bánhida, Oroszlány and Lábatlan. Of the 11 captured combatants whose personal data we know, five (or six) came from this region. One person was born in Hódmezővásárhely, while the tragically deceased Márton Molnár was the only one born in Budapest.37

However, this Hungarian community, the size of a small village, lived its everyday life amidst rather profound political and ideological antagonisms. In the (at least) three-way field it is undoubtedly the Communists who appear the most organized. According to contemporary observers (and the reports of the party organization), workers connected to the party in one way or another, either as party members or members of the Communist-controlled trade union, the CGTU (Confédération générale du travail unitaire), may have numbered between 150 and 200 persons. The disciplined group, which appeared closed to outsiders, was one of the most active Communist groupings in the region. Although comprising only 33-35 party members, 175 copies of the Communist-run Párisi Munkás were circulated in their circle. The group organized regular gatherings, balls, excursions and proletkult lectures for its members, indeed (and here it is impossible not to recognize the allusion to the church liturgy) on Sunday mornings at ten o’clock they listened to the broadcast of Radio Moscow together. Information on the exact content of the gatherings may be provided by an extant leaflet about the celebration of September 1, 1929, which the Roubaix group organized along with the Hungarian workers of Lens, Méricourt and even Brussels. Here, the program of the festivity, which was combined with a picnic, included a chess tournament, football match, dance and proletkult lecture. Children paid nothing, and the organizers even thought to have someone with local knowledge meet the comrades coming from farther away at the end-station of the tramline to direct them. “Supporting this celebration of the revolutionary Hungarian working class is a comradely obligation!” emphasized the leaflet.38 According to a police report, thanks to this deliberate, disciplined conduct there were almost as many Hungarian members in the local Communist party organization as there were French. The local party organization as a rule gathered at a local café, the Prolétarienne, or in restaurants. In view of this type of organized operation, it appears inconceivable that the Hungarian party organization would have attacked the Catholic workers’ circle without the knowledge of the higher party organs (especially since there were French workers among the attackers as well, one of whom was even brought to trial).39 The party inspectors visiting them, including Ernő Gerő (one of the later leaders of Communist Hungary, who visited in 1928), declared their satisfaction with the group’s activity. The weight of the locals is indicated by the fact that outside of Paris only Roubaix was allowed to send three delegates to the national conference held under the aegis of the CGTU in 1928, the rest had to make due with fewer.40 At the same time, by 1929 the signs of stagnation, in certain cases a retrogression, began to show in the Roubaix organization, too, thus the presence of the Catholics’ circle meant increased provocation to the Hungarian Communists active in the industrial region. This closed, sectarian behavior obviously was not independent of the policy reversal implemented by the French Communist Party in 1927 on the orders of the Comintern, which called for an intensification of the class struggle and rejected any form of cooperation with other left-wing forces, including the “social fascists.” As a consequence of this policy, the party would record a significant setback in the 1928 parliamentary elections: its number of deputies fell from 24 to 12.

The Socialists also possessed a group in the town (Világosság), but it was not nearly as populous and in numerous respects was divided in its estimation of Hungarian politics. In addition to politicians from the mother country (e.g., Károly Peyer), émigrés also visited them (Sándor Garbai, Mihály Károlyi), and at some unspecified date (at least according to the recollection of one of the founders, Ernő Bóta) the Hungarian League of Human Rights (Emberi Jogok Magyar Ligája) had also possessed a branch organization in the town. A few of the leaders of the Socialist groups living in the surrounding towns (Sándor Cézár) sought out the Hungarian Association of Paris, for example, to partake in the medical treatment provided by the Hungarian House.41 Their number in Roubaix amounted to a few dozen.

The other circle comparable to that of the Communists was that of the Catholics; several times in 1927–1928, though, it was deemed undeserving of the Hungarian legation’s trust (despite the fact that the sponsor, Mademoiselle Derville, had also received a high Hungarian state decoration in November 1927). The teacher in Hénin-Liétard, Ödön Bodnár, considered the missionary sisters and Father Kurcz unsuitable for directing the local Hungarians. He wrote in a letter that “due in part to incompetence, and in part to the excessive bias stemming from their calling they are incapable of overseeing the Circle’s cultural leadership and organizing the Hungarians outside of it,” noting also that their program included an overabundance of frivolous pursuits, such as dances.42 At these occasions (including the ominous August 18) 150–200 persons regularly appeared—even if fewer attended the masses.

Strategy and Consequences

As we mentioned, the brawl could not have been an accident. The Communists felt their hitherto exclusive sovereign territory to be in danger, and by no means without reason.

From the mid-1920s on numerous actions, initiated partly locally and partly in Budapest, were launched in France which were aimed at organizing the non-left-wing (in official usage: “apolitical”) émigrés. Teachers, priests and missionary sisters arrived. The Catholic Church reacted somewhat earlier than the Reformed, but in the late 1920s permanent Reformed ministers also appeared among the Hungarians of France. To counter the Párisi Munkás, in the summer of 1928 the Párisi Magyarság was launched; published by Sándor Pető, it was actually edited by Ferenc Honti, secretary of the Revisionist League in Paris and the later founder of Le Monde diplomatique. The aim of the biweekly paper, which at first struggled with difficulties and later changed format several times, was to hold the communities together and serve as a kind of newsletter among the scattered colonies. After a lengthy period of construction and wrangling, in June 1929 the new center of the Hungarians in Paris and France, the Hungarian House of Paris, was inaugurated. Located along the Rue Vaugirard, on the Square Vergennes, the house not only provided a home for the Hungarian associations (athletic clubs, singing circles, students) and Hungarian clergy operating in Paris, but also served as a school, assembly hall, employment office and, not least, a medical clinic, where patients found doctor’s and dentist’s consulting rooms furnished with modern equipment subsidized by the Hungarian Ministry of Welfare. Likewise in 1928–29 the building of a Collegium Hungaricum in Paris, intended for Hungarian students studying abroad, also nearly became a tangible reality: ultimately this project was thwarted by the world economic crisis. This was not the only field of the offensive: in 1928 the children’s summer holiday campaign was launched. Through this program, which likewise exerted a significant attraction, special trains took Hungarian children in France to the resorts of the Children’s Defense League in Szigetmonostor and Bakony in Hungary.

Under such circumstances physical violence, even if not leading to lasting results, in any case left its mark on the community. The pamphlets of the Hungarian Communists, which agitated against the “Hungarian cleric whores,” the “lackeys of the franc forgers” and the “Trianon imposters,” hit their target to the extent that in the spring of 1930 the local prefect wrote that in Roubaix the “Hungarian Fascists and Communists” had gotten into a fight.43 This was largely reminiscent of how the French state viewed the clashes between the Fascists and leftists within the Italian community in France. The local, and indeed the national, public sharply condemned the events: while the national papers (except, naturally, for the paper of the FCP, L’Humanité) generally blamed the “foreign Communists,” the Journal de Roubaix wrote uniformly about the “foreign subversives coming to France,” without regard to their ideological stance.44 In contrast to the idealism of the period immediately following the war, the attitude of the French administration and public at this time became much more reserved, even outright closed, towards the immigrant workers. This conduct would become even more explicit in the crisis milieu of the thirties and become filled with stereotypes.45 At the same time, the Hungarian community in France always remained small in number in comparison to the members of other nations; thus, it did not form its own distinct stereotypes around itself, but rather judgment of it followed the judgment of the great masses of immigrants.

At the judicial proceedings of the Roubaix affair in October 1929, the Communists produced Mihály Károlyi and the secretary of the local Red Aid, the later resistance fighter and pre-eminent mayor of Montreuil, Daniel Renoult (the latter had to be removed from the trial for insulting the court) as witnesses. Both drew parallels with and highlighted the oppressiveness of the dictatorship in Hungary: the Catholics were operating a spy network in the town, and by paving the way for revision they were plotting to ignite a new war in Europe. The Communist press also presented the affair in this light.46

In fact the propaganda did succeed: the intensity of the Roubaix Hungarian Catholic circle’s activity receded, temporarily fewer people attended the events, the pastors were replaced in rapid succession, and Kurcz’s successor, Ferenc Kozma, a religious instructor from Zalaegerszeg, also remained in his post for a brief time only. In addition, the doctor’s visits, viewed as the main attraction, were also eliminated in 1930. The Circle nearly ceased to function.47 Furthermore, in the 1930s unemployment caused by the economic crisis, and later the winds of the approaching war, diminished the number of local Hungarians. By 1941 barely eighty Reformed Hungarians “worthy of care” remained in all of northern France, and the number of Catholics could not have been considerably higher either.48 At the same time the émigré Communist movement also suffered a blow: the Párisi Munkás, which had been appearing for six years, was banned by the French authorities in November 1929 (formally for insulting the police prefect of Paris, Chiappe). Until mid-1930 it was able to appear under five other names (Harcos, Új Harcos, Fáklya, etc.); after some hesitation, however, all met this same fate. A seemingly permanent Hungarian-language Communist press publication would appear again only in the late thirties, in the form of Szabad Szó.

Conclusion

As we mentioned in the introduction, the 1929 brawl in and of itself is uninteresting: much rather it is those tensions and processes which led to the explosion of violence. And the seemingly simple Sunday brawl conceals motifs which point far beyond the simple struggle over hegemony or the urban space or the local Hungarian community. In his summary work about ethnic diasporas, the French sociologist Stéphane Dufoix, who began his scholarly career by researching the Hungarian community in France, has distinguished four operating modes of the diaspora: 1. the centroperipheral mode (mode centro-périphérique), when the mother country plays a key role in the life of the community through its official institutions, be it the consulate, the embassy or the cultural institute; 2. the enclaved diaspora mode (mode enclavé), which is characterized by locality, meaning a local community organizes itself and it is not citizenship but rather identity that plays the decisive role in its functioning; 3. the antagonistic mode (mode antagonique), designating that situation in Dufoix’s categorization in which the community living abroad defines itself along political principles against those in power in the mother country, and not infrequently the groups of the exile polity (expolitie – Dufoix) oppose one another as well; and 4. the atopic mode (mode atopique), which defines itself along transnational principles, but not necessarily against something, but rather it is precisely the (ethnic or religious) diaspora, dispersion, that is the true form of identity. In each mode what is important is the attitude to the space and/or the state, or to the lack thereof.49

In the late nineteenth century the Hungarian state and administration, in accordance with their liberal principles and latent nationality policy stance, (i. e., that the national minorities living in Hungary were strongly overrepresented among the émigrés) for a long time ignored the masses of émigrés. Tending to those who immigrated to America, too, was long confined to dispatching pastors or teachers. Like the other communities, the Hungarians in America had begun to live lives independent of the mother country, and new forms of identity also appeared which did not fit easily into the social and political model of the mother country.50 However, the shock of Trianon, the appearance of a new, more bellicose and organic (or thought to be so) Hungarian concept of nation and its official adoption no longer recognized “lost souls,” thus the previous enclaved diaspora model (United States) or the antagonistic mode, as the great masses of Hungarian workers pouring into France at first were drawn by left-wing organizations under their intellectual and cultural direction, was no longer acceptable to the mother country. The 1928 Saint Stephen’s Day brawl is an important stage in a process, beginning sometime around 1927 and reaching its culmination by the end of the decade, whereby the antagonistic diaspora model was gradually replaced by the centroperipheral model: the mother country offers members of the diaspora social assistance (medical treatment, subsidies, organizing holidays for children), cultural services (press) and institutions (school), organizing its activity around a central core, and it attempts to turn the masses away from the political emigration hostile to it. For its part, the left-wing emigration, and its Communist wing in particular, sensed the threat facing it: the meeting of the dynamic Hungarian government offensive and the revisionist movement threatened the positions of the local Hungarian Communists, who had just entered into decline and turned in a strongly sectarian direction, and their leaders believed terror as political means to be legitimate and permissible. And the colliding, seemingly inextinguishable tempers exploded into a bloody fight.

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Trénard, Louis. Histoire de Roubaix. Dunkerque: Éditions des Beffrois, 1984.

Translated by Matthew W. Caples.

Matěj Spurný

Czech and German Memories of Forced Migration

Individual memories are neither a simple mirror of the official narrative of memory nor are they simply its photo negative. In this essay the author examines the ways in which the Czech and (Sudeten) German master narratives of the post-war forced migration of the German speaking inhabitants penetrated into individual memories. Collective remembrance often replaced the memories of actual experiences. However, examples taken from particular interviews from recent years reveal that individual experiences and memories, which earlier were not considered acceptable in the public sphere and in some contexts had even been dangerous, can at least be integrated as exceptions into the structure of national master narratives, which in consequence lose their incontestability. The study of the memories of the post-war expulsion of Germans has been an important task for historians over the course of the past twenty years or more. But this has been a topic of interest not only for historians. These often contrasting memories have figured prominently in one of the most important post-1989 political and identity debates in Central and Eastern Europe. The article compares the development of memories and narratives of post-war flight and expulsion in Czechoslovakia and (West) Germany. The author considers how the individual memories of flight and expulsion compare with the collective memories, and he also attempts to identify the circumstances under which the individual memories offer an alternative vision of the past.

keywords: individual memories, collective remembrance, expulsion, Sudeten Germans, identity

The Post-War Politics of Memory

The politics of the memory of the flight and expulsion began to take shape before the expulsions had come to an end. The participants, whether victims or the people of the states responsible for the expulsions, sought to shape collective memory to fit their interpretations. The historical narratives of “victims of world history” on the one hand and “guilt and punishment” on the other played an important role. And just as the opposing camps began to stake their claims, the Iron Curtain fell, hindering all further exchange of memories and perspectives between East and West.1

West Germany: The Europeanization of the Discourse of Victimhood?

Even in West Germany the integration of millions of refugees and dispossessed individuals was an unavoidable task. In a democratic society this cannot be accomplished through a relativization of identity. Conservative politicians quickly realized that the large number of refugees constituted an important demographic problem. Their exceptional position thereby gained some political support, and their painful losses, the loss of the homelands from which they had been expelled and belongings and properties of which they had been stripped, were not only officially acknowledged, but also frequently brought to the fore. From the political perspective this took concrete form in the so-called “Lastenausgleichsgesetz,” a law adopted in 1952 that provided financial compensation to refugees for their losses. The law was testimony to the prominent position of the refugees and the dispossessed in West German society in the Adenauer era.2

The remarkable attention that the victims of the expulsions were given was not merely part of a political strategy to curry their favor as voters. The sufferings of the German casualties of war also played an important role as “a functional equipollent to the massive confrontation with the horrors of the Nazi persecutions.”3 As Constantin Goschler persuasively demonstrates in his article on reconciliation and the question of victimhood, in the first decade after the war little distinction was drawn in the public life of the West German state between the victims of National Socialism and the German victims of the war or the period immediately following the war. By portraying the larger part of German society as victims, an attempt was made to place all responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime on a small group of party elite surrounding Hitler and Himmler.4

This approach to the questions raised by the immediate past should by no means be misunderstood to imply that the individual memories of the refugees were acknowledged automatically, nor did it mean that the refugees themselves were actively integrated into German society. The experiences of pain and loss to which the refugees gave voice became a part of the German master narrative of the post-war era, and yet there was often a lack of empathy for the sufferings of those who had been forced to leave their homelands and resettle in Germany.

In the 1970s the discourse regarding the war began to change. The National Socialist regime and, first and foremost, the Holocaust itself began to be treated as unique and incomparable phenomena of history.5 The victims of the expulsions were thereby cast as “second class” victims or even “undesirables.” The feeling, common among many of the victims of the resettlements, that even in West Germany their fates were a taboo topic (even into the 1990s) stems from this period. The associations of refugees began to disappear from the political sphere. While the idea of the victimhood of the German casualties of war, which in earlier decades had been widespread, gradually was divested of its legitimacy, the discourses through which this notion found expression were preserved in refugee circles, very much as if in a hall of mirrors, where un-interrogated images of the past could proliferate unhindered by any exterior influences.

In the 1980s the question of the expulsions again began to emerge as a topic of discussion in public discourse, strengthened in part by the question of the reunification of Germany. The revival of the debates regarding the expulsions, however, by no means meant a return to the 1950s. They have taken place in a pluralist society in which the influence of the refugee associations has clearly been far less significant than it was in the first decade after the war.6 Although according to surveys almost half of the population of Germany still considers the subject of the forced resettlements of Germans important and in some manner or another occupies itself with or reflects on the questions the forced resettlements raise, only a small minority associates this topic with the refugee associations, which for the most part are assessed quite critically.7

Following the reunification of Germany and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the topic, which until then essentially had been a question of interest really only for Germans and Germany, gradually became a subject of European interest, and indeed on different levels.8 On the one hand the master narrative of the Sudeten Germans was transformed into the language of political demands, which had the emphatic support of the provincial governments of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria and the more half-hearted support of the Christian Democratic Union of the federal government. In this context, memory was linked to lost properties or at least the rhetoric of the lost “homeland.” At the same time, however, attempts were being made to put the historical scholarship on the expulsions into a new spatial and temporal context. This scholarship, which in the 1950s (primarily because of the influence of the refugee circles) had documented the extent of the tragedy and in the 1970s and 1980s had been pursued with less intensity, in the meantime had been liberated from the confines of a monologic perspective. This gives reason to hope that we may yet see a more nuanced discussion of this part of German history, incorporating differing perspectives, a discussion that avoids both forced forgetting and a-critical discourses of victimhood.

Czechoslovakia: Between National Master Narrative, Taboo, and Mediation

In Czechoslovakia the master narrative of the righteous first Czechoslovak Republic emerged very quickly, even simultaneously with the events of the expulsions. According to this narrative, the Germans had rejected the generous offer of the Czechs and in the end had betrayed the Republic.9 The expulsion of some 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans (referred to in Czechoslovakia as “odsun,” in German “Abschub” from the verb “abschieben,” meaning to deport) thus was cast as a logical consequence of earlier events. The flight of some 250,000 Czechs from the borderlands in 1938 was also referred to as “odsun,” in harmony with this interpretation, in order to blur the differences between the two. The second “odsun” was from this perspective merely a logical consequence of the first. While the first was interpreted as a sign of German cruelty, the “odsun” of the Germans was considered an act of historical justice. It is worth noting on the one hand that this Czech version was an appeal in support of the argument for the international recognition of the forced resettlements of the Germans, although the separation of the Sudetenland in 1938 had also been the result of concerted international negotiation and therefore, in principle, endorsement. On the other hand, the claims regarding historical justice and the contention according to which the expulsions in no way contradicted or belied the notion of the Humanist Czech tradition should be re-interrogated.10 Although in 1947 some people who had been brutal in their treatment of the Germans were publically accused, thereby making it clear that at least (and at most) members of the state army or police would be held responsible for the excesses against the Sudeten Germans, in the collective memory these acts were considered minor transgressions on the part of some “criminal elements.”11

Following the rise to power of the Czechoslovak Communist Party certain elements of the historical narrative were no longer tolerated. The first Czechoslovak Republic was critically reassessed because of its alleged “bourgeois nationalism,” and thus the notion of a just and generous attitude on the part of the state towards the German minorities lost its foundations. At the same time the party was anxious to integrate the some 200,000 Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia into the new socialist society, as well as to maintain good relations with the German Democratic Republic. Given these considerations, it is hardly surprising that the anti-German rhetoric began to abate after 1948.12 The interpretation of the expulsions, which from the start had had the unambiguous support of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, could not be substantially rewritten, however, without a considerable loss of credibility for the Party. The forced resettlement of the German speaking minorities was still cast as a historical necessity, and the expulsions were now seen from the perspective of the events that followed them.13 The national “Revolution,” in this interpretation, had been a necessary precursor to the genuinely meaningful social “Revolution.”

The Czechoslovak Communist Party found itself in a precarious position between conflicting ideologies, the nationalism of the immediate post-war period and the internationalism of Marxist dogma. This balancing act and the general awareness of the entanglement of the state in the events of the expulsions gave rise in the early 1950s to an anxious urge to eliminate any memory of the expulsions from the collective consciousness.14 This state-led push for forgetfulness reached its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s, as a generation came of age that had had no personal experience or knowledge of the events of the immediate post-war period, but also often no real knowledge of the role of the Germans in the history of Bohemia in general. The topic simply vanished, both from school textbooks and from public discussion.

The attempt to expunge all knowledge of the Germans and the expulsions from historical consciousness, however, was unsuccessful, for there were individuals who remembered the events and historians who were not content to remain silent on the matter. In the landscapes of the regions vivid traces of the forced resettlements of the German communities remained. After 1968 the question of the expulsions could only be raised in so-called Samizdat publications15 or in the journals and newspapers of the exile circles. These publications contributed to the formation of a critical discourse on the expulsions, however, that later played an important role in the debates that took place following the changes of 1989–1990.

After 1989 the question of the treatment of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia again began to garner public attention. This was in part due to the long suppression of the topic as taboo in public life, but also in part to its international political brisance. The debates were polarized from the outset. Former dissidents, with Václav Havel at the vanguard, shocked the public by presenting the question of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans as an unsolved moral problem.16 The notion of the necessity of protecting the country from the “Sudeten German revanchists,” an idea that had been propagated for years, suddenly flared up in the minds of many politicians. In part for this reason, the majority of Czech politicians did not consider it their role to mediate and nurture a critical reassessment of this difficult subject, but rather saw themselves as advocates and champions of the post-war order. They met with widespread support in public opinion. Defense of the post-war laws, which were described as the “cornerstone of our rights,” became something of a mantra in the political posturing regarding the events of the early post-war years.

The public discourse regarding the expulsions of the post-war period took shape both through the earlier critical discussions of the dissidents and through the widespread ignorance of the general population, in which there subsisted an intuitive fear of the return of the “German peril” and an un-interrogated faith in the justice of the forced resettlements, a notion that had been a pillar of the official interpretation of history for decades.17 By the second half of the 1990s, representatives of the younger generation were able little by little to revive the discourse and bring it back into public discussion. It was significant that they managed to link a critical engagement with the events of the post-war period with the actual problems of the region and society in the border areas in which German speakers had lived, and thereby to de-politicize the topic, at least to some extent.18

Individual Remembering and Forgetting

Individual memories are neither a simple mirror of the official narrative of memory, nor for that matter are they simply its photo-negative, as it were. In interviews with contemporaries, individual experience and collective narratives of different times are intertwined, so that it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. This combination of authentic and adopted memory makes individual memories an exciting topic for anyone who seeks to understand how both history and identity are constructed.

One of the most significant attributes of human memory is that people usually remember injustices (perceived or actual) and sufferings that they had to endure themselves more vividly than they do the sufferings of others. Having been one of the privileged is regarded as “normal” or insignificant, while the experience of having been discriminated against often becomes a milestone in the narrative of one’s (remembered) life. In this sense, individual and collective memory is similarly structured. In other words, the structure of memory tends to appropriate the national master narrative if the master narrative is constructed as a discourse of victimhood. However, contemporaries sometimes contradict or resist collective memory and the manipulation of memory because of individual experiences that complicate the simple plotline of a master narrative. As is the case in many other narratives of memory, in Czech and German memories of forced migrations individual experience and an appropriated master narrative (into which this individual experience is in principle supposed to be integrated) are entangled, even if they at times actually contradict each other.

As a result of narratives of victimhood and the suppression of the memories of the sufferings of the others, National Socialism doesn’t play any noticeable role as the actual prehistory of the expulsions in the memories of many Sudeten-Germans. Until recently, publications were printed by the so-called Heimatmuseen or Heimatarchiven in which there is little mention of the time between 1938 and 1945.19 These peculiar narratives portray the Czechs as wild barbarians who suddenly, after years of peaceful cohabitation, came to the homeland communities of the Germans to torture, rob and expel them. In interviews, Sudeten Germans in general speak in great detail about the war years. As people who had been children at the time, they speak about growing up without a father, about prisoners of the war, and about “Bombenflüchtlinge” [bomb refugees] or Wehrmacht soldiers who spent their vacations in the picturesque Sudetenland. However, they speak less or not at all about the repression of Czechs, Jews and others. The years between 1945 and 1947 are the symbolical center of the memories of the great majority of Sudeten Germans, and therefore also the symbolical center of their identities. Alongside the authentic memories of what were often very dramatic experiences, one can identify many appropriated collective images of camps or transport trains. To divide the events that were personally experienced from collectively shared images that were appropriated is not always possible for the people who lived through these events themselves, and even less so for the historian. However, especially after 1989, many Sudeten Germans endeavored to contribute to efforts towards reconciliation. This included giving voice to experiences that contradict the master narrative of their community, such as the following:

A troop of Czechs came, they smashed the door and got in the stationmaster’s apartment, who lived below us. They damaged the flat, we heard the children screaming and crying. Then they came up to our place. We were all trembling with fear. And then something happened—something that one cannot forget: other Czechs who knew us came, they stood in front of our door and said: Mr. Czerny lives here, and he was one of the people who behaved kindly and helped the Czechs. No one will hit him.20

Of course, people had cherished memories like this long before 1989. It seems, however, that experiences that relativize national or community narratives and stereotypes of victims and perpetrators have been given more attention since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

An interconnection or contradiction between the appropriated master narrative and the memories of individual experiences or people are very characteristic for Czechs who came to the borderlands immediately after the war. These people came to know the Germans either before the Germans found themselves compelled to leave their homes or at the time of their forced resettlement. The Czech narrators, if speaking about “the Germans” as a collective category, primarily seem to be attempting to justify moving to the borderlands and appropriating property that had belonged to Germans. While constructing the story in this way, they use the Czech master narrative, which is very useful in the legitimation of the post-war decision to settle the borderlands. They contend that the Germans “did not want to live with us,” “betrayed our state,” and had been punished justly. According to this story, “the Germans” had transmuted into fanatical Nazis, and it would not have been possible to live alongside them anymore.21

However, many of the same early Czech settlers had lived with a German family under one roof, usually for several months, before these Germans were displaced. Speaking about the everyday lives with “their Germans,” they essentially tell a story about “kind people, who helped us a great deal.” Sometimes they even admit that they “cried when our Germans had to go.”22

As is evident, individual experience that contradicts the master narrative of collective memory does not necessarily prompt an individual to reject this collective memory. It is likely that, on the contrary, the motifs and plots of collective memory in many cases replaced memories of events through which individuals had actually lived. In many cases, memories of kind Germans or the brutality of their forced resettlement were driven from the minds of the people who had personal experience of the events because they didn’t fit into the widespread, even officially sanctioned story.

In this context it is significant that problematic aspects of the forced resettlements of the post-war years have been discussed and have become a part of the discourse in the Czech Republic. This questioning of the collective memory of the expulsions has enabled the people who lived at the time to speak about some of their experiences, experiences that in some cases they had suppressed almost entirely. Because this didn’t prompt them to refuse the master narrative, however, which had been appropriated and had become a deep-seated part of their memories in the meantime, it is interesting to analyze how people deal with the contradictions. Often, the contradictions create a defensive reflex. Fragments of the master narrative appear again and again in the flow of individual memories, even when they seem to contradict aspects of the personal story, as ritual formulas.

As an example, I cite an excerpt from an interview with Mrs. Kučerová, an old Czech settler from Osek, a town in the predominantly German region of northern Bohemia. She had to leave her home in 1938, when the region became part of Germany, and returned in May 1945. She described the expulsion of her former neighbors:

The people here did not take part in the bad actions against Germans. Revolutionary Guards from Kladno came and they were really the mob. As they expelled the Germans, our people stayed at home, because they were ashamed, because we have a different character than the Germans who had oppressed us! The guards took the Germans somewhere, to the market or I do not know exactly. On one occasion they had to cross the mountains on foot. I remember a disabled boy in a wheelchair who lived next door, he was maybe forty or fifty at that time and the others had to wheel him all the way. And many other bad things, but that was the war! We were not the only ones who did things like that. And we did not want this war… In Teplice there are two streets near the railway station where all the Germans committed suicide. But that is how it was, for everything, you have to pay… I understand that the Germans felt miserable, and I know what homesickness is. But they had been so unkind to us! They held pogroms when they came in 1938.23

The so-called Revolutionary guards were not the only group to become a target of criticism among Czechs in recent years. Many old Czech settlers from the borderlands, who like Mrs. Kučerová had known the displaced Germans personally, also criticize the new settlers in the former Sudetenland. The main target of this critique is the desire for German property. Memories of how Czech newcomers had robbed and plundered flats, houses or hotels hardly would have been mentioned some thirty or fifty years ago, as the resettlement of the Czech borderlands had been decidedly celebrated as a part of the construction of the new, better society.

Epilogue

In general, of course, collective memory is really a collage of differing individual recollections. Although the collective master narratives that had been passed on by no means vanished after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they did however lose some of their earlier, unquestioned authority. This process can be seen quite clearly in the Czech Republic, but also in other post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. This pluralization of memory is less visible, however, among circles close to the associations of refugees or displaced persons from the Sudetenland. Their master narratives seem to have survived the end of the Cold War without having undergone any significant revision. Yet even in these circles, one discerns the traces of some doubts regarding the collective narrative of their past, which over the course of decades grew rigid. These doubts have arisen in part through an engagement with the realities of life in the Czech Republic today.

Memories that in previous decades were “undesirable” or possibly even dangerous for anyone who gave them voice today can be integrated into the national master narratives as exceptions to the general flow of the “plot.” It seems that historical consciousness, conditioned by a recognition and acknowledgement of personal recollection, is becoming plural, and even collective narratives are shifting. Indeed it seems that the collective memory is subject to change by individual memory. To give individual memory space for expression is to be prepared to accept the recollections of others with empathy. The tension between communities with contradictory collective experiences can be lessened not through forgetting or denial, but rather through the pluralization and complication of memory.

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András Lénárt

Emigration from Hungary in 1956 and the Emigrants as Tourists to Hungary*

* With the support of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (project number: 81636, project leader: Ernő Kulcsár Szabó).

This essay examines the history of visits made to Hungary by a group of first generation 1956 refugees. The members of the group attended middle school together in Austria. Some of the refugees, who were teenagers at the time, were put into schools by the Austrian authorities in 1957. Temporary schools were established with Hungarian as the language of instruction, and the refugees were able to complete their secondary school studies without even as much as a year’s delay while also learning German. Some of these students went on to seek livelihoods elsewhere, but many of them settled permanently in Austria. In the first section of the essay the author offers a survey of the statistical features of emigration from Hungary following the suppression of the 1956 revolution. This is followed by an examination from the perspective of the social sciences of the reception of the wave of 1956 emigrants. Then, on the basis of interviews, the essay analyzes how the identities of the emigrants changed, the social situations in which these changes were palpable, and how their images of Hungary changed in the wake of their visits to their homeland.

keywords: emigrants, 1956, tourism, images, oral history

Following the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 some 200,000 people left Hungary. The vast majority of them settled abroad permanently, and proportionally very few returned. Given its scope, this sudden wave of emigrants could be considered one of the great traumas of twentieth century Hungarian history, at least if one were to remember it as such from the perspective of the present. The territorial losses suffered after the First World War, the material and human losses of the Second World War, and the turbulent events of the 1956 Revolution, however, have somewhat obscured the fact, significant both in the short term and in the long term, that in the space of only a few months almost two percent of the population of the country essentially vanished. In comparison with the tragedies of the wars, of course, one cannot speak of terrible losses of human life. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the national life of Hungary it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to contend that the citizens who left were “lost souls.” Their departure created a void that had to be filled and completely altered and in some cases severed the individuals’ relationships with the country and its people. They became the newest wave of Hungarian refugees, referred to in the discourses in Hungary as “dissidents,” and later, as they were called in many places, English, German, Australian, American (etc.) Hungarians.

People found opportunities to leave the country in the wake of the events of the Revolution up until the spring of 1957, though admittedly with increasing difficulty and risk, and the countries in which they sought refuge were accommodating, which is to say that they met the basic preconditions according to migration theories that are based solely on economic considerations.1 These theories, however, are inadequate in this context, since in the twentieth century history of Central Europe the chance to cross an international border had proven something of an exception, and an exception that was likely only to be temporary.2 On both the eastern and the western side of the Iron Curtain this opportunity to cross the western border of Hungary was seen as fleeting.3 The willingness among those who welcomed the refugees to offer humanitarian and economic assistance grew. Had the borders actually opened for the long term or had there been any prospect of protracted emigration, the countries of the West would have had to consider limiting the number of immigrants they would accept, but in 1956 this was not a serious concern. Aristide Zolberg makes this argument in his influential essay, The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing World. Zolberg examines the policies of the socialist states regarding travel in general and the liberalization of travel in the 1980s.4 As would be expected of autocratic states, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries within its sphere of control did not simply obstruct travel abroad, but also declared those who left or intended to leave enemies of the homeland.5 The prohibition of travel abroad had both political and economic reasons. From the political perspective, departure could be interpreted as a form of resistance, while from the economic perspective, because of the dearth of labor, in exchange for the education and social benefits it had provided the state expected young people to enter the work force as they reached the age of majority. At the same time, in some of the more strained moments of the Cold War—for instance at the time of the Cuban missile crisis or the demonstrations across much of Central Europe in 1956 or 1968—the decision to allow people to leave the country was a means of easing internal tensions. As a measure of lack of support for the regime, illegal flight from one of the communist countries, in other words dissidence, remained one of the delicate questions of the era.6 The willingness of the countries of the West to accept immigrants from communist countries palpably decreased with the easing of international tensions. Dissidence lost some of the value it had had as a propaganda tool. Thus the immigrants arriving from Central Europe were seen less and less as heroes, victims, or refugees and more as “normal” immigrants, subject to the same strict stipulations and expectations as all immigrants.

Statistical Sources

The number of people who left Hungary between 1945 and 1953 is estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 110,000 people, in comparison with roughly 340,000 people in the period between 1953 and 1989. Of this 340,000 people, approximately 200,000 left in the space of only eight months after the 1956 Revolution. The actual task of reaching and crossing the western border of the country was trying, in particular by December 1956. It nonetheless seemed possible, at least in comparison with conditions in previous years, since in the summer of 1956, as one of the signs of international political rapprochement, the various technical apparatuses with which the borders had been sealed at the end of 1947 had been taken down.7

In 1957 the Central Statistical Office issued a report that remains one of the most important sources of statistical data on emigration from Hungary, and a source that was treated as secret for some 30 years.8 Excerpts from the report were included in a publication of the Central Statistical Office entitled Statisztikai Havi Közlemények [Monthly Statistical Publications] (1957.4), but the state did not allow it to be published in a forum for the larger public. The official migration statistics compiled by the countries that welcomed the refugees provide relevant data that was available before 1989, even if in some cases it was examined only much later. These are kept for the most part in the Austrian Central Statistical Office, the Austrian Ministry of Interior, the UN Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), and the office for Hungarian refugees in Austria, the so-called Ungarischer Flüchtlingshilfsdienst.

The sources agree on the numbers of emigrants from Hungary. Approximately 194,000 people left the country, and by the summer of 1957 some 11,500 had returned, in part because of the amnesty that had been offered by the Kádár government. Some 5,000–8,000 remained out of the country only temporarily (first and foremost in Austria) and returned without the knowledge of the authorities. In May 1957 the Ministry of Interior permitted 12,345 people to leave the country legally, primarily to enable them to be reunited with family members.

Statistics on the Emigrants

The Central Statistical Office gathered personal information on 151,731 people on whom forms for departure were prepared at the order of the Ministry of Interior. If one also considers the 827 forms that arrived later and were not taken into consideration in this assessment,9 the results essentially agree with the Austrian data. Referring to sources from the Austrian and Yugoslav Ministries of Interior, the report asserts that 193,885 people left the country illegally. Of these, 174,704 fled to Austria and 19,181 to Yugoslavia. The report, which is divided into ten chapters, breaks the data down according to place of dwelling, date of departure, gender, age, marital status, occupation, actual whereabouts following flight, and whether or not the person returned to Hungary. It also examines the demographic effects of this emigration (or flight) on the remaining population and gives data concerning those who left the country legally. As the report makes clear, the majority of the people who left the country had been inhabitants of urban communities (half of the émigrés came from Budapest), and most of them came from Transdanubia or counties in the western part of the country, near the border with Austria. Two-thirds of the refugees were men, and half of them were less than twenty-five years of age. The percentage of people who had been gainfully employed is also surprisingly high, again two-thirds of the total number of refugees. 63.5 percent of them had been manual laborers (34.6 percent of this group has worked as skilled laborers) and 25 percent had had academic or intellectual occupations. 3,200 of the dependents had been college or university students, a number that at the time represented more than 10 percent of the student body in higher education.

According to a study done in 1960 and commissioned by the United Nations, most of the refugees settled in the United States (44,110), Canada (39,190), Australia (15,390), West Germany (14,400), Great Britain (13,670), and Switzerland (10,480).10 It is worth noting that according to the summaries that were prepared in 1957 there were far more refugees in Europe many of whom in subsequent years left to settle in other continents. This explains how in comparison with its population at the time Canada welcomed the largest number of Hungarians (0.25 percent), but Switzerland (0.21 percent), Australia (0.16 percent) Austria (0.14 percent) and Sweden (0.1 percent) also took in far more than the average. It is also interesting to note that the historically close ties between Hungary and Italy do not seem to have played much role in the decisions of the 1956 refugees regarding the countries in which they settled. In 1960 there were only 120 Hungarian refugees registered officially as living in Italy. The countries that welcomed the refugees showed solidarity and humanitarian compassion, but they also kept their own economic interests in mind. It was a time of global economic growth, and the countries were eager to entice young people who could join the work force.

Figure 1. Arrival and reception: Hungarian refugees, 1956–1957
Source: Peter Hidas, Arrival and Reception: Hungarian Refugees, 1956–1957, 233.

Demographers have also studied the mass emigration that took place following the suppression of the 1956 Revolution. In a study published in 1996 and in expanded form in 2006, László Hablicsek and Sándor Illés examined the long term effects of 1956 on demographics and population growth in Hungary. Simply put, they sought an answer to the question of what would have happened had the refugees not left the country.

The short-term consequences were already apparent at the time. The departure of 200,000 people who left the country in a period of only a few months clearly had an influence on the make-up of the population. On February 1, 1957 the population of Hungary numbered only 9,788,000, 1.7 percent less than the figure (9,954,000) one would have arrived at according to natural rates of population growth. Since two-thirds of the refugees were men, the surplus of women in the remaining population returned to the post-war, 1949 levels. Distribution of the population according to age also shifted, since most of the refugees had been young (86 percent of them had been of working age, and 45 percent of those of working age had been between fifteen and twenty-nine). Given this, not surprisingly the distribution of the population according to marital status also shifted. The number of unmarried men and women dropped as a percentage of the total population.

Concerning long term consequences, scholars using the method of projection based on past trends have arrived at five different possible (but unrealized) scenarios, produced by various combinations of changes in fertility and mortality and in the impact of emigration that followed the revolution. Taking the population of the country in 1955 as the starting point, they contend that as of the 1980s Hungary would have born witness to an inevitable decline in population even had the refugees (and their descendants) remained. In other words they conclude that the 1956 emigration had little effect on the fundamental tendencies of later decades (two of the most hotly debated questions of public discourse today, population decline and demographic aging of society).

The Columbia University Research Project on Hungary

Scholars using qualitative methods, or more precisely institutes that studied totalitarian regimes (and which themselves were not free of political predispositions), were also intensely interested in the fates of the 200,000 refugees, who in the immediate aftermath of the revolution were living for the most part in refugee camps.

The intense propaganda against the communist states was based on incomplete information, primarily because after 1948 the states of Eastern Europe had been almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. Only politically reliable people were allowed to travel internationally. The Western press and even intelligence networks were often compelled to base their assessments on unreliable information, and they knew little about everyday life in the communist dictatorships. Within the framework of the Columbia University Research Project on Hungary, perhaps the best organized research program on the subject, 365 interviews were done in European and American refugee camps. Most of the interviews were recorded over the course of two or three days, and the typewritten texts were on average between fifty and seventy pages. Henry L. Roberts and Paul E. Zinner, two noted Kremlinologists, worked together with social scientists, including philosopher Siegfried Kracauer (associated with the Frankfurt School) and sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. By offering refugees a chance to speak of the events of the revolution, the incidents of everyday life, living conditions in general, conditions in the workplace, social changes, and the persistence of religious and traditional beliefs and customs, they sought to give a more nuanced picture of the influence of a totalitarian regime on the individual. They hoped to uncover the secret mechanisms of the Stalinist system, and thereby gain some insight into the question of how to bring about its collapse.

In his summary prepared for the Ford Foundation in 1962 (which consisted of several hundred interviews, publications, etc.), Roberts mentioned the organizational difficulties the project encountered and also emphasized that there was no appropriate scholarly methodology on which to base a comprehensive assessment of the vast sea of texts. The information that had been obtained through the surveys done in the refugee camps and later did not constitute a point of departure for any long term study. Furthermore, the materials of the extensive study, which was under the direction of leading American empirical sociologists at the time, had not been brought together in such a manner so as to further a deeper understanding of the Eastern European regimes or the lives of the people living under them.11 The deep structured interviews, which in their entirety stretched to several thousand pages, could hardly have been considered representative, neither from the perspective of Hungarian society nor from the perspective of the refugees themselves as a group. Thus with the exception of a few case studies, the lengthy corpus was left essentially untouched, and until 1990 simply gathered dust in the manuscripts archive of Columbia University.

The Average Emigrant from the Official Perspective

The state sought to besmirch the emigrants, presenting them in the official propaganda as traitors or at the very least gravely misguided people. The political refugees were dissidents, who had betrayed socialism, thrown the authorities off guard, and fled to join the capitalists. In 1956–57 many decrees were passed regarding the prohibited border crossing, and those who had left before December 1 were promised amnesty. This date was later changed to January 31, but people were allowed to return up until March 31, 1957.12 In principle the “misguided” were given the chance to return without fear of reprisal, but as several cases make clear, the state unsparingly took vengeance on insurrectionists who had fled. For a time the dissidents were regarded as enemies of the state, indeed to such an extent that the Ministry of Interior created a separate subdivision devoted to tracking their activities. The “state propaganda machine” assiduously gathered information on Hungarians living abroad and Hungarian organizations outside of Hungary. Later the refugees, who had been stripped of their Hungarian citizenship, were considered potential agents of attempts on the part of the West to incite unrest, but by the latter half of the 1960s emigrants who returned to visit Hungary and in some cases spent longer periods of time in the country were no longer seen first and foremost as political threats, but rather as tourists who brought in revenue and even potential economic partners. In the 1960s the number of people to travel from and into Hungary rose significantly, and this growth continued almost without any break until the end of the socialist era.13 Most of those traveling into Hungary came from other socialist countries, but there was an increasing demand for tourists from the West as well, who were compelled to change money and thereby helped boost the country’s always dwindling reserves of hard currency. From this perspective, tourists from the other socialist countries were considerably less useful, and the tourist industry in Hungary was never nearly as enthusiastic about them.14

Many of the visitors to the country from the West were not simply pleasure-seeking tourists, but rather were linked to Hungary by family ties or sentimental connections. Leaders of the tourist industry and of course leaders of the party as well were very well aware that the tourists from the West with Hungarian origins constituted a separate group: “a significant share of the tourists have come with the intention of visiting family. […] It is typical of those who have come to visit family that they spend relatively long periods of time [in the country] and very few of them need lodging in hotels. This lessens the profit that is to be gained from them. […] They spend 74–85 percent of their days in private apartments or other quarters not monitored statistically. This share of the tourist traffic offers significantly less revenue for the national economy. This suggests that we should strive to promote more profitable proportions.”15 The regime and the administrative apparatus treated the emigrant Hungarians with some suspicions, since their knowledge of language and their personal relationships enabled them to find their bearings within the system easily. They almost never had need of the luxury services intended for tourists from the West. State officials felt that as tourists these people could cause harm to the national economy by changing money illegally and also by bringing in commodities and prohibited intellectual products from the West. In the end, however, they accepted this risk, and emigrants who were not seen as engaged in hostile or subversive political activity were allowed to travel into and from their one-time homeland freely, with the exception perhaps of some minimal harassment or inconvenience. Emigrants who had obtained citizenship abroad and who were in possession of an entry visa did not have any grave cause for fear or concern.

The Image of Hungary in the Accounts of the Emigrants Who Returned to Visit the Country

In my view, because it involves many and varied processes of acculturation, emigration itself cannot be interpreted as a whole within a single, unified analytical framework. One of the reasons for this is simply the diversity of social strata from which emigrants themselves come. Another is the cultural differences in the countries in which emigrants settle (such as Austria or the United States). And naturally in the course of their journeys emigrants themselves adopted various strategies, oriented sometimes around distinctive individual goals and (or) sometimes around the maintenance of group identities.

It therefore seemed simpler for scholars to focus on questions such as the numbers of people who left or the countries in which they settled, as well as the actions they took abroad and institutions they created (such as political parties, associations, cultural organizations, and publications), and the symbolic significance of these institutions. While numerous studies have been published on the waves of Hungarian emigrants and refugees, with some exceptions (for instance the work of Julianna Puskás, Zoltán Fejős, Tamás Kanyó and Nóra Kovács) they have been primarily statistical in nature.16

Scholarship on emigrants is fertile ground for historical, anthropological, and sociological analyses, since simply by leaving their countries of origin emigrants become “others.” They become “others” from the perspective of the communities they leave behind and remain others from the perspective of the communities in which they settle. At first they often feel like strangers in their new homelands, and later they may come to feel like strangers in their countries of origin. This duality may last a lifetime.

Emigrants become inhabitants and participants in two political systems, two countries, two cultures, and (at least) two languages. At some moments the emigrant’s liminal status is better characterized by Georg Simmel’s bridge metaphor, as someone who links two divergent worlds, while at others the metaphor of a door as something that isolates and does not diminish difference may be more fitting. Emigrants play a role in cultural transfer, since they have dual (or even more complex) identities. The refugees who settled in Austria in 1956 did not sever their ties to Hungary. As of the mid-1960s they began to return to Hungary, and in circles of family members and friends they became informal intermediaries, bringing with them consumer goods and items of cultural interest.

In my research I have studied the identities of several members of a specific group of 1956 refugees who were teenagers at the time they fled and settled in Austria. I used the interviews conducted with them in order to examine identity as a social construct that changes over the course of time and is bound to several different groups (such as refugee identity, local identity, and Hungarian and Austrian national identity).

In the secondary literature on migration one reads of first, second, and third generation immigrants on the basis of place of birth and national origins. In my view it is a bit problematic to classify first generation youths who came of age and entered the work force in a foreign country in this terminology on the basis of place of birth. They were, however, mature enough to leave the country by themselves or with groups of peers (and often without their parents’ knowledge) knowing that they would have little chance of returning. For this reason I regard the teenagers who fled Hungary in 1956–57 as members of a “first-and-a-half” generation. They left the country at so young an age that their integration into another culture was much less jarring for them than it was for older first generation immigrants.

In the course of the work I attempted to combine two different approaches, the methodology of the biographical narrative interview on the one hand and that of the problem-centered interview, used in social history on the other, since the central question of my research was how the refugees who had fled to Austria in 1956 as secondary school students related to Hungary, their homeland, and the socialist system. I endeavored to further an understanding of how, because of their decisions to emigrate, their lives developed differently from the lives of their peers who had remained in Hungary, and how their everyday lives differed from the everyday lives of people in Hungary. One of my presuppositions was that in their life-courses they would emphasize other elements of identity than those considered important by their former classmates who had not left the country. I was curious to see whether their accounts strengthened the Austrian national identity, which had successfully incorporated the memory of the assistance offered to 1956 refugees into the mythos of the modern Austrian state. I was also interested in the question of how people who shared a similar background and lived in close proximity, but on either side of the Iron Curtain, related to one another. Was this proximity enough to allow for significant relationships that crossed the political divide, or were there no such interconnections? Did the refugees who settled in Austria and their family members who had been left behind seek opportunities to bring the family together, or did they simply attempt to make their own way in their separate communities? Did the Hungarians who had laid new roots help (or perhaps hinder) friends or acquaintances back in Hungary who also hoped to emigrate, or did the question simply not come up? One of my principal goals was to raise new questions regarding an area (Vienna) that was relatively new in the secondary literature on the 1956 refugees, taking advantage of the life story interviews as fertile primary sources on a group of emigrants whose common experience, the foundation of their collective identity, was their years spent in secondary school.

I met with emigrants who had left the country either alone or with their families as secondary school students and who had completed their secondary school studies in the Hungarian language schools that had been created for refugee children. It was difficult to compile precise statistics on the refugees because often they were constantly moving, so—depending first and foremost on the date of the interview—there is more data available regarding distribution based on age. According to a report by Willibald Liehr, the head of the division of the Ministry of Interior entrusted with addressing the issue of the Hungarian refugees, at the beginning of May 1957 there were 3,665 Hungarian refugees between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in Austria, many of whom clearly did not remain in Austria or did not continue (or even begin) secondary school studies. Between 1957 and 1963 almost 1,000 pupils studied at the Hungarian language secondary schools, and 815 of them completed the maturation exam at the time.17 I conducted interviews with twenty-five of these people in 2005. I sought not to assemble a history of the events of their flight or their assimilation into Austrian culture, but rather to glean some understanding of how they look back on their lives and how they recall their experiences. For the most part I raised general questions in order to exert as little influence as possible on their accounts. I included a short questionnaire on biographical data following the interviews.

Travels in the West

Most of the interviewees emphasized that when the isolation they had faced first as citizens of a communist country and then in the refugee domiciles and schools in Austria had come to an end they longed to travel as soon as possible. The Austrian state and international relief organizations provided them with lodging, board, clothing, spending money, and schooling, but hardly any opportunity to travel outside the camps. After having completed their maturation exams, the young men wanted not simply to take excursions and loaf and idle, but actually to journey “around the world.” In their accounts of their lives, the interviewees remember these trips as the beginnings of independent adulthood. They all were able to study at universities, either with state scholarships or other kinds of funding, but most of them soon lost their scholarships because of their inadequate knowledge of German, the difficulties they faced in their studies, or the lack of family support. They did not disperse immediately during their years at university. Many of them remained in the same lodgings in Vienna or Innsbruck. For most of the interviewees the memories of the trips they organized and took together abroad were as important elements of their shared identities as the months and years they had spent in the secondary schools for refugees.

At first they set off to discover Europe with only modest aims and very little money. For the most part they recounted positive experiences, and they were always able to count on the assistance of people and even the authorities in the West. This “romance of the adventurous Hungarian” lasted until the early 1960s. According to their recollections, Hungarian refugees were held in high regard all over Europe. A Dutch milkman first had mistaken them for Germans and refused to sell them milk, but later, having learned that they were Hungarians, immediately gave them milk for free. They had similar experiences in Italy. They were given free wine in a restaurant and in exchange were asked to sing Hungarian folk songs in order to entice more customers into the establishment. They emphasized these memories, which throw into question the claims regarding the pervasiveness of anti-immigrant sentiment.

With the passing of years and gradual social integration, the maintenance of the status of “refugee” had less and less allure, both for the Hungarians themselves and for the communities into which they had settled. People no longer felt obliged to offer any particular support, and the emigrants endeavored to shed the admittedly convenient, but nonetheless second-class standing by obtaining citizenship. When seasonal labor was needed in Sweden and Germany the Hungarian emigrants were seen less as refugees and more as hard-working students.

The people I interviewed first traveled to satisfy their longings for adventure, but later they had to begin to consider how to earn a living. The interviewees presented themselves as hardened freedom fighters who, following the completion of their secondary studies, sought neither to rage nor to caper, but rather strove to win the goodwill of the West Europeans who had welcomed them. The trips by motorcycle and restrained forms of merry-making, where Hungarian gallantry could be put on display without scandal, were ideal contexts in which to strengthen the Western image of the Hungarian revolutionaries. They were still poor, but with meager savings they managed nonetheless to travel extensively. In fact this mentality was common among most of the Eastern European tourists throughout the era, primarily because of their limited access to hard currency. The people I interviewed, however, were youths who had grown hardy in Austria, had at least a moderate knowledge of German, were enterprising in spirit, and were increasingly self-confident, and who moreover also had the courage of refugees who had fled from behind the Iron Curtain. The interviewees continued to expand their geographical horizons throughout their university years, and as they entered the workforce and rapidly began to start their own families they also began to have new goals. The birth of children prompted many to cultivate and nurture ties with relatives in Hungary. In the mid-1960s the political atmosphere made visits to Hungary much easier for the emigrants, but they were also prompted to cast their glances eastward by their familiarity with life in the West, the need to earn income, and family circumstances. Over the course of the years they satisfied their cravings for independence, which found manifestation primarily in travel, and they earned enough money doing seasonal (summer) labor that they were able to complete their university studies and begin to live on their own. Travel became natural to them. They either traveled on official business or simply vacationed over the summers. Their first-hand knowledge of Western lifestyle and culture, and the extent to which they had become part of this culture, became evident to them in the course of their travels eastward.

Travels in the East – Personal Accounts

For the refugees, Hungary lost its significance as a reference point as they integrated into Austrian society. They received news, primarily in their correspondence with family members but also with the increasing use of the telephone, of the gradual growth of the standard of living in Hungary and the more moderate exercise of power by the regime, but the individuals I interviewed were only able to begin to gather first-hand experience of conditions in Hungary as of the mid-1960s.

When they recounted their trips to Hungary, the interviewees spoke with me more readily of their political views than of the details of their travels. They may well have believed that I was more interested to know what they thought of the political situation in Hungary today and the contemporary political and social phenomena and trends that in their eyes have been regrettable. They had hoped that the change of regimes in 1989–1990 would usher in a moral revival, the spread of democratic thinking, and a national renewal. Many of them strove to expand prospering enterprises they had launched in Austria into Hungary, and others gave charitable donations to members of the Hungarian minorities living in the surrounding states (Slovakia, the Ukraine, Romania, and Yugoslavia/Serbia) or labored to redeem certificates they had been given by the Hungarian government as a form of compensation for the losses they had endured at the hands of the communist regime.

According to the interviewees, they met not with national solidarity, but rather wrangling, fuss, and cumbersome burocracy. In their view this was all the consequence of the demoralizing effects of decades of socialism. They offered little assessment of historical processes and phenomena that had begun before World War II, or rather mentioned only their positive aspects. They spoke of the interwar period or the turn of the century in Hungary as normal eras that stood in stark contrast to the first decade of the post-war period, during which most of the families found themselves suddenly members of lower social classes facing an uncertain future.

Two motifs dominated in their narratives of their travels in Hungary. The first, they spoke of how they maintained their relationships with family members back home. Most of them met with family members in Hungary personally after having started their own families, and they then began to return regularly to Hungary. Second, they spoke of their fear of the official authorities and the frequent humiliations they had endured, indignities that had made them anxious and intensified their sense that they had become strangers in their homeland.

Many of them maintained professional relationships with people in Hungary. The one-time emigrant students became Hungarian or in some cases Eastern European rapporteurs for their workplaces, entrusted with initiating or concluding transactions and organizing partner relationships and joint projects. Many of them rented apartments in Budapest or cities in the countryside, and as their circles of friends and acquaintances grew they also built official and informal business ties. The number of trips any one person took to Hungary varied, depending largely on his or her individual career and family life. Some only went once a year, or only for the more important holidays, while others spent their entire summer vacations in Hungary with their children. When possible, they took advantage of business trips to visit relatives as well. In some cases, for security reasons or simply given a lack of time, an Austrian spouse would spend more time behind the Iron Curtain than his or her Hungarian emigrant spouse.

Family life for the emigrants became more complex with the birth of grandchildren or as they began to face the breakup of their first marriages (which was common). Most of the children of mixed couples (in other words one parent was Hungarian) did not learn Hungarian fluently, and later spoke (and speak) German with their spouses and children. Everyday life in Vienna made it difficult and time-consuming to maintain family ties in Austria, not to mention with relatives in Hungary. In part because of this, over the course of the past ten or fifteen years, visits to Hungary became less frequent. Some of the emigrants return to Hungary for months at a time, but only to relax, not in order to visit relatives. Many of them have purchased or rented lodgings not in their places of birth, but rather prefer to spend their time in a rural, village setting.

Having traveled a great deal in the socialist countries for business, Károly, who was capable of speaking and writing in Hungarian, German, Italian, and English, maintained close ties to Hungary and the other states of Eastern Europe. When I asked him to speak about his travels in the East I was given a very thoughtful response:

The fact that I am a refugee played a strong role in my constant awareness of when I was behight, no matter where might have been, I knew very well whether I was behind the Iron Curtain or not. I was very aware of that. I was a disciplined worker, so I never let my political views enter into conversations or debates there…

In spite of having acquired Austrian (or western) citizenship and born witness to the consolidation of the Eastern European systems, once they had stepped across the border back into Hungary the refugees no longer felt themselves safe. They felt as if they were always traveling incognito in the forbidden zone. People who had been born in the West might well have found Eastern Europe strange or bizarre, but they were in all likelihood less disquieted by the almost constant presence of the police and the authorities. It is worth noting that Károly characterized himself as “a disciplined worker.” The word “worker” (dolgozó) indicates strong self-awareness in comparison with the word “employee” (alkalmazott), but it fell out of use in contemporary Hungarian not because of the feebleness of the work ethic or trade unions, but rather because it has become one of the hackneyed terms of the official rhetoric of the socialist era. The use of an expression that could be regarded as somewhat antiquated, however, should not come as a surprise, since, his many return trips to Hungary notwithstanding, Károly nonetheless remains someone who entered his teenage years in the 1950s. His use of the term disciplined, for instance, referred not so much to conscientious attention to deadlines or instructions (though he may have meant this as well), but rather to his deliberate avoidance of topics of conversation related to politics. As he noted, Károly could not risk endangering his travels (and more importantly, his job) by politicizing. He had had difficulty finding employment in the first place (he had both found a job and married later than his peers), and he did not want to risk the stable life he had made for himself.

Károly was always able to avoid situations that in his view were politically sensitive or unpleasant. His accounts of his travels in the socialist countries focused primarily on the various manifestations of economic and political backwardness in Eastern Europe, not to mention differences in mentality. In his mind the socialist countries meant drabness, neglect, constant police presence, limited consumer choice, and the eye-catching Hungarian tourist in Vienna, who “could be recognized from 100 meters away on Mariahilfer Straße, even downwind.”

At the end of the interview conducted with Lajos his wife Ágnes joined us, and the two of them continuously interrupted each other as they recounted their story. Lajos returned to Hungary for the first time relatively late. He began to travel back to his homeland regularly at the beginning of the 1970s. He enjoyed sports and the company of members of a younger generation at Lake Balaton, and also spent time at the home of the parents of one of his friends in the city of Sopron, near the border with Austria. Here he had met Ágnes and the two decided soon to marry. His trips to Hungary, which until then had been without unpleasant incident, suddenly changed because he and his bride were confronted with the arbitrariness of the Hungarian state and the local authorities. The chronology of events was at times a bit jumbled because of the fervor with which they recounted them. First they told of the ordeals they had faced when organizing the wedding and then they related some anecdotes of earlier times.

All the preparations for the wedding had been completed when the authorities made it known that because of errors having to do with some formality they were not going to allow the marriage, more specifically because the names on the various documents were not always identical. The civil wedding was held in Austria instead following a forced postponement of six months. Their church ceremony was held in Sopron, without any official announcement and with a bit of conspiratorial behavior on the part of the guests. After each mass a few more family members would join the congregation and remain in the church until finally at noon the priest joined the bride and groom in wedlock in a brief five-minute period between two services. A few months later the couple took some token revenge for the bother they had faced. After Ágnes had been given Austrian citizenship, they went into the Hungarian embassy and gleefully replied to the administrator’s question regarding the date of the wedding that they had been married on October 23: “I will never forget how the woman who was writing the information down suddenly raised her head. October 23? Yes, I said.” For them this was a symbolic blow and a form of resistance against the power of the communist state.

This attempt on Lajos’ part to present himself as someone who resisted the regime in situations such as those described above can arouse our suspicion: perhaps he did fear encounters with the authorities as much as his friends had, or at least his recollections painted a slightly rosier picture of the events. Independently of the real course of the dialogues it became apparent that very important elements of the identities of the refugee Hungarians in comparison with Hungarians who had not fled were irony, talking back and symbolic resistance against the regime. Their knowledge that they did not face any real threat in some cases prompted them to behave more boldly with official representatives of the communist state, proving their defiance both to themselves and to their acquaintances. Lajos had clearly compiled a sort of small repertoire of similar stories because it was important to him that others (including me) see him as daring and not easily ruffled.

When the interview with her husband had come to an end, Ágnes recounted her life story. She had left Hungary in 1972 with Lajos, having neither any knowledge of German nor any network of friends or family on whom to rely. It took her considerably longer to begin to fit into Austrian society than it had taken the youths who had left in 1956. She had some misgivings about leaving Hungary, because after having endured numerous tribulations she had completed a degree in Hungarian language and literature, and she knew that it would be of little use to her in Austria. At the same time she had to fit in, because she had burnt all her bridges behind her, as her first visit back to Hungary made evident. Ágnes was a so-called “marriage migrant,” someone who “at first is active, when she falls in love with a strange man, but who at the promptings of love becomes passive when she gives up the life she has known up to that point and almost without thinking follows the man she has chosen into the unknown.”18 Ágnes took a considerable risk when she left behind the career she had begun and abandoned a future that seemed certain, entrusting herself entirely to Lajos without even having had a civil marriage, in other words without any legal reassurance or recourse whatsoever.

I could no longer have gone home. Hungary looked on me as an enemy. I had to request a visa every time. I had to register myself there every time. At the beginning of the 1970s, if I went to the police station to register myself as an Austrian citizen, they looked on me as an enemy. And when I spoke Hungarian, then as a traitor. This was the mentality. For decades. So I knew that I had to lay new roots here [in Austria].

Every one-time emigrant had to confront this problem in the course of travels back to Hungary. They were “others” not simply because they had chosen to live elsewhere, in another land, but also because they were regarded and branded as others. None of the interviewees cherished any fond memories of the obligation to register or of any of the other administrative burdens with which they were encumbered, but most of them did not mention having been considered enemies or traitors. Ágnes may have felt this way because since her childhood she had always lived in a milieu that had been hostile to her and her family. They had always felt threatened by looming uncertainty. And precisely when she had finally had an opportunity to begin to lead a more tranquil life, she had left behind the achievements she had attained and emigrated. She had spent the first few years in a new uncertainty though this time of her own doing. When she had returned to visit Hungary, she had not had the self-assurance that the 1956 refugees had had. This may be why she was more sensitive to even the possibility of offence, and it may also explain why her husband felt he should always exemplify civil courage, both through his acts and when recollecting the events of his life. When I asked her to compare and contrast the two nationalities, Ágnes estimated the proportion of Hungarians and Austrians in her circle of friends at around 30 percent compared to 70 percent, and she characterized the relationships as qualitatively entirely different.

After so many years, for I have been in Austria for thirty-eight years now, I think that because of this our lives, our problems, our concerns are so different… we have grown apart. We meet, we go out, if we are together we laugh, they come to visit us or we go somewhere there from time to time, but their problems and our problems are not the same. Primarily at first our role when we returned home was to give financial support to those who were still there. From relatives to our own parents. Naturally parents. We still support my father today for instance. It’s awkward for him to accept our support, poor man, but it’s natural for us to support him, because he lives off his pension. But we always had the role of being those who were well off…

Those who made it to the West were considered the lucky ones who—assuming they had a drop of compassion in their hearts—would bring their loved ones something “western,” something that could not be purchased in Hungary at all, or only at a very high price. The emigrants had to deal with their problems on their own, for they were seen by their loved ones in Hungary as the “western relatives” who shared their plenty with the less fortunate. At the same time with every passing year they grew a bit more distant from their one-time friends, and their meetings consisted increasingly of enjoyable but superficial conversations.

Relationships with old friends were not the only things to change. Though they lived only forty-five minutes from Sopron, Lajos and his wife began to realize that they were slowly growing emotionally distant form Hungary. During the Kádár era the emigrants understandably thought that had there not been a Soviet regime in power in Hungary, then things would have been as good as and possibly better than they were in Austria. The change of regimes was a great disappointment for them, much as it was for many people in Hungary. They equated the new political system with amorality and the loss of values from an earlier time, and everything that had nurtured in them an attachment to their identities as Hungarians, even as they lived their lives in Austria, seemed to waver.

I had always had an idealistic conception of Hungary, how helpful and kind-hearted and welcoming, how… That they would never dupe me. And regrettably that affair with the hotel in Hévíz, the apartment in Hévíz made me realize that after 1989 nice and slowly Hungary was changing into a country in which we were no longer at home. That we no longer understand the rules, the mentality. Regrettably. [A long silence followed.]

In spite of the fact that they lived only thirty minutes from the border, however up-to-date they were on political affairs or cultural and sports events, however many friends they still had in Hungary, they themselves no longer felt at home in their homeland. Quite possibly the dictatorship concealed many human frailties, and when the political transformation had ended sentiments of attachment and unity faded and a society began to take form that to the emigrants seemed amoral (for Ágnes in a manner that seemed incomprehensible). It is worth asking whether these attitudes and the sense of foreignness and exclusion depended in part on the age of the interviewee. Ágnes and Lajos were always aware of Hungary. Their circle of friends included many Hungarian diplomats and politicians, and they emphasized this in the interviews. Their relationship with the country was the closest in the first half of the 1990s. Since then, the people have changed and their ties to the country have become looser. Today they prefer to gather with Austrian-Hungarian and Austrian friends and acquaintances.

Aladár saw the differences between Austria and Hungary—regardless of era—embodied most vividly in the spectacle of carefully manicured streets on the one hand and neglected cityscapes on the other. While in the West one sees flowers and attentively maintained houses, in the East one is confronted, even to the present day, with rows of unpainted tenements with crumbling exteriors. Aladár mentioned these differences, arguably superficial and noticeable to anyone at first glance, because he took little interest in the political and social issues.

For me that didn’t play much of a role at the time, because I didn’t visit Hungary to visit Hungary, but rather to visit family. And—how should I say it? —the whole atmosphere for me… it had a kind of, well, homey quality. People had not been accustomed to anything else since my childhood, and this didn’t bother me. This only, if I really deliberately compare now, Austria, so we crossed the border into Austria and went through—I don’t know—several villages, if one deliberately compares, then you see the differences. But for me this wasn’t why I went, and I didn’t compare, I just got together with siblings, and everything was fine…

For Aladár only his Hungarian family was important. Hungary was not. He was aware of the differences, but he didn’t pay them much mind. And if he did, then he was surprised, but he soon set them aside. The lack of consumer goods in the East may have caused some inconvenience, but it didn’t trouble him much, in part because as a child he had grown accustomed to privations and in comparison with the 1950s the selection of goods had improved noticeably and in part because he had come to Hungary as a tourist. Traveling as a tourist to some extent means forgetting about workaday life and venturing into another environment. Aladár could have seen his travels as excursions into an “underdeveloped region.” For a tourist, the inconveniences (such as the lack of consumer goods or arbitrary local authorities) are temporary, and the warm welcome of relatives and loved ones more than compensates for such tribulations. Or rather more than compensated, because as Aladár grew older and new generations were born he gradually grew distant. After the change of regimes, when he and his relatives could have traveled more frequently—even daily—to see one another they actually made such trips less and less often. While earlier the dreary world of Hungary had made the family members in Mosonmagyaróvár seem so much less fortunate than their relatives in Vienna, in spite of the gradual convergence of the political and social systems the more distant family ties began to lose their significance. In the case of Aladár and his family the explanation for this lies not in the tensions between political systems, international constellations, or the permeability of borders, but rather in the changes that take place as people age. Aladár is simply uninterested in the events in Hungary.

I can hardly read in Hungarian. That’s the truth. Of course I can read, so I don’t have any problem. But, well, what do I actually read? One begins with the ”Presse”, the newspapers, then… I only read German newspapers. It’s not often that I pick up a Hungarian newspaper. And about Hungary, not at all. My younger brother was here, he brought—how should I know—some interesting article that he thought might interest me… And often he’s right. But sometimes no. Something that is important to him in Hungary, for me, here, is maybe not, not so important.

One has the impression that for Aladár Hungary was important as long as it was important for him to spend time with his siblings and their families. Ever since his relationships with them began to become less close (which was hard for them to admit to themselves), Aladár has concerned himself less with events in Hungary, and accordingly he avoids emigrant circles that strive to maintain their Hungarian identities. He makes neither accusations nor requests. He simply doesn’t concern himself with Hungary, which he essentially seems to consider a closed chapter in his life.

Summary

Members of the Hungarian minorities in the surrounding states and Hungarian emigrants who had obtained citizenship abroad played a significant role in the tourist industry in Hungary throughout the Kádár era. The organs of power strove to keep visitors to the country under close control, but with the exception of increased surveillance or attempts to enlist them as agents, they were not able to do much to influence their patterns of consumption during their stays in Hungary. As of the mid-1960s politically inactive or indifferent Hungarian emigrants living in the West were able to return to Hungary regularly, and their family members still living in Hungary were able to travel abroad, first only individually, but later as families. The majority of the people I interviewed spoke of a smothered longing for freedom that they were best able to satisfy through their travels in the West. They characterized their first excursions in Europe as trips made with only modest meals, but nonetheless enjoyable adventures imbued with revolutionary (Hungarian) romance. The stories of these trips became, alongside the shared experiences of the refugee schools, the bases of long-lasting friendships (similar for instance to the soldiers’ stories that express unity and solidarity). Following the excursions of their youth, their travels to Germany or Sweden during university years formed equally important elements of their identities, and they began to acquire the abilities necessary to gain employment, earn their own livings, and forge their own lives.

In contrast, their travels back to Hungary seemed more like travels in time, including personal meetings with family members who had been left behind, their childhood surroundings, and, in a word, their past. The trips eastward represented entirely different experiences. For some time the emigrants remained wary, and they were only willing to travel to Hungary for a few days and only within an organized framework, in other words they were only willing to cross the border to the other side of the Iron Curtain as part of trips overseen in some measure by Austria. Later this fear gave way to vexation and anger. As regular visitors to Hungary (many of them entered into business relationships with Hungarian companies and institutions), they found nothing exciting or unusual in the country (in contrast, for instance, with the Soviet Union), but they found the increased surveillance and arbitrary bureaucracy difficult to bear. They noticed that as outsiders they saw (and see) the problems Hungary faced much more clearly than those who had remained in Hungary and had been compelled to adapt to and on some level accept the system. It also became apparent that their relationships to some extent had stagnated. Even after the change of regimes in 1990 no one sought to return to Hungary of his or her own accord, but there were also hardly any examples of anyone leaving Hungary to join a relative in Vienna. By the 1990s, what once had been “Family in Hungary” visits were becoming simply “Travel in Hungary” excursions, which often involved trips to the world famous thermal and medicinal baths or the purchase of holiday homes in the countryside or apartments in one of the cities, but which were always ventures to a country close by from which one could easily return home to Austria.

The change of regimes came too late for most of the emigrants to consider repatriation. In the three decades since their departure, the 1956 refugees had made their homes in their new homelands. Their networks of friends and relatives had completely changed, and it was not worth giving up their lives in the West. Those who had the means purchased land in Hungary and spent some time there or attempted to maintain their ties to the country of their birth through their descendants. We have no precise figures regarding those who chose to return, but qualitative studies suggest that the successful integration of the emigrants into the West led eventually to a slackening of their ties to Hungary.

In some cases the identities of the emigrants as Hungarian nationals was bound to an institution (such as a newspaper, a club, or a church), while in others it was more a matter of ties to the group of secondary school classmates. They considered themselves different from Hungarians living in Hungary. According to their accounts, when they visited Hungary they noticed differences more than similarities. They experience their identities as one-time refugees first and foremost from a historical perspective: in the actual context of the interviews their identities were much more bound to the Austrian national identity. They regarded their biographies almost as stories of development: one-time poor refugees, they had become Austrian citizens, not “different” in comparison with their milieu. The differences in culture and development between the West and East were recurring symbolic motifs in their narratives of their lives. Although in principle one might think them predestined to play a role as agents of transfer, they did not accept this role in the interviews and emphasized instead their ties to Austria. Not one of the interviewees characterized himself or herself as Austrian, but they frequently emphasized that in the moment of history in which they had lived much of their lives they had only been able to attain a relatively high standard of living in Austria (in other words somewhere elsewhere than Hungary). This was evident, for instance, in their perception of Budapest as a poor, run down city rife with corruption in comparison with Vienna. Their accounts were strongly influenced by the media. They were aware of the differences in language use in Hungary and Austria, and in their view public discourse in Hungary had become coarse. In the historical and anthropological secondary literature the second generation in general is seen as having a dual identity.19 My perception in the course of the interviews was that while the emigrants themselves would have liked their children to have maintained some sense of their identities as Hungarians, most of the members of the second generation consider themselves Austrian. Even in the case of the Austrian Hungarians who cultivated close ties to Hungary and Hungarian culture, their use of Hungarian was palpably different from the Hungarian spoken in Hungary. The Austrian Hungarians, most of whom lived in Vienna, produce few cultural products independently, and thus are left with the cultivation of the past and the importation of Hungarian culture, primarily from Hungary, but also from some of the Hungarian minority communities in the Carpathian Basin. The endeavors to this effect notwithstanding, they have no genuinely Hungarian vision of the future. The network of relationships between members of the first generation does not include the second or third generations, and the process of assimilation is accelerating with the passing of the first generation. The cultivation of Hungarian aspects of their identities becomes more prominent when they reach the age of retirement and begin a less active period of life. Two of the fundamental ways in which this takes form are attendance at Hungarian cultural events and attempts to nurture their grandchildren’s awareness of their Hungarian roots and compel them to use Hungarian in everyday life.

The wave of emigration from Hungary in 1956–1957 had distinctive characteristics. From the outset the United Nations and the states of the West regarded the emigrants as political refugees, not so much because of their motives for leaving the country as because of the larger historical context. They provided considerable financial assistance and did a great deal to help the emigrants settle and integrate quickly. If this was indeed their intention, my research suggests that with the passing of some fifty years it has been achieved.

Biographical Details Regarding the Interviewees Mentioned in the Essay

Lajos (1938) and Ágnes (1945)

Lajos is an architect. He crossed the Austrian border with his classmates on November 14, 1956. He completed his maturation exam in the summer of 1957 in Innsbruck and in 1964 completed a degree in architecture at the University of Vienna. In 1966 he found employment in a planning office and in 1975 he opened his own business. His wife, [Ágnes], was a teacher. She left Hungary illegally in the early 1970s after their wedding. In the 1980s and 1990s she was an active member of the Szent István Egylet (Saint Stephen Society) in Vienna. She was an editor for the Bécsi Napló [Viennese Journal] and did interviews with emigrant Hungarians entitled Közöttünk élnek [They live among us]. The interview was conducted in Baden in 2005.

Károly (1940)

Businessman. He crossed the border into Austria in December 1956. He completed his maturation exam at the Iselsberg secondary school in 1959 and then pursued training in radio engineering and electronics. In 1961 he took part in a peace march in commemoration of the 1956 Revolution. He was an active participant in the scout movement and the Central Alliance of Austrian Hungarian Societies and Associations. The interview was conducted in Vienna in 2005.

Aladár (1939)

Teacher. The child of a poor family of four children from Mosonmagyaróvár. Because of the family’s well-known religiosity, he thought he had little chance of ever pursuing university studies under a communist regime and in November 1956 left the country. He completed his maturation exam in Iselsberg. He completed a degree at the University of Vienna in German language and literature. He worked as a secondary school teacher and boarding school teacher, and also held preparatory courses for prospective university students who spoke German as a foreign language. As of 1966 he has traveled regularly to Hungary, first alone and then with his family. He has four children, and they have a moderate knowledge of Hungarian. He is bound to Hungary first and foremost by family ties. The interview was conducted in Vienna in 2005.

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Translated by Thomas Cooper.