Smokescreens and Smear Campaigns: The Dutch Communist Party in Times of Crisis

Thomas Buijnink

Doctoral School of Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):80-106 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.80

This article seeks to establish how different crises in the Eastern Bloc affected the political standpoints of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, Communistische Partij Nederland (CPN), through an analysis of publications in affiliated party magazines between 1953 and 1981. This analysis is conducted within a framework consisting of party change theories and the literature about Eurocommunism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The analysis indicates that the CPN went from supporting military interventions in Germany, Poznan, and Hungary to condemning them in Czechoslovakia, initially while maintaining ideological distance from political opponents in the Netherlands. This changed in 1981, when the CPN seemingly without restraint joined the mainstream political parties in condemning the introduction of martial law in Poland and the Socialistische Partij (SP), the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, took over the CPN’s position as a political outsider. This indicated a shift in the party’s stance from a niche to a mainstream positioning against Moscow.

Keywords: Communist Parties, Eastern Bloc, Eurocommunism, Netherlands

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union largely lost its previous exemplary function for communist parties outside of the Eastern Bloc.1 Communist parties in western and southern Europe underwent political, ideological, and organizational changes which have been characterized as a transformation into Eurocommunism. Eurocommunism could be described as a modernization attempt by such parties to appeal to a broader electorate. A new course fit for such purposes practically meant a step away from Moscow with a renewed focus on national circumstances. Armed interventions by the Soviet Union against protests and social movements in its satellite states, such as during the East German Uprising or the Hungarian Revolution, were met with heavy criticism in Western Europe. Scholars have attributed different levels of significance to the effects such events had on the development of communist parties in Europe. The secondary literature puts considerable emphasis on the communist parties in France and Italy,2 both of which were countries in which the communists at one point came close to parliamentary majorities. It is thus important to note that Eurocommunism is a broad umbrella term which hardly does justice to the differences among the various communist parties of Europe.

What makes the Dutch case interesting in comparison to France and Italy is that within the Dutch political landscape the CPN had always remained a small but constant factor. After World War II, the CPN performed relatively well and acquired ten seats in the national parliament.3 This success was due to the role of the Soviet Union in the war and to the CPN’s resistance to the German occupying forces. In the postwar years, the CPN even became the biggest party during the municipal elections in Amsterdam. During this period, the CPN was known as anti-German, anti-American, and also as a vocal supporter of Moscow. Since the mid-1960s, the CPN became more detached from Moscow due to the Sino-Soviet split until its ties with Moscow were renewed in the 1970s. During the Cold War, the CPN became less and less popular. In 1989, the CPN merged with other parties into GroenLinks, the Green Left.4

The secondary literature on Eurocommunism and party change theories could shed interesting light on the developments within and evolution of the CPN. The whole premise of Eurocommunism falls in line with party change theories. These theories indicate that the political standpoints of mainstream political parties are rationally altered to suit changing external circumstances. The literature on Eurocommunism proposes a narrative in line with this assumption, as communist parties all over Europe changed their political standpoints as a reaction to changing national political circumstances. However, this would require that communist parties be defined as mainstream parties. If not, party change theories would lack explanatory power for the emergence of Eurocommunism, since, if communist parties were to be defined as niche parties, they would theoretically remain unaffected by changing external circumstances and stick to their predetermined policy positions. By addressing the specific policy changes of the CPN towards the crises in the Eastern bloc, this article only addresses a fraction of an array of factors which could indicate a shift to Eurocommunism. Singling out crises in the Eastern Bloc as an explicitly party external factor offers the benefit that party change theories can indicate if a shift to Eurocommunism correlates with a shift from a niche to a mainstream political course. This leads to the fundamental question I address in the discussion below: How did the CPN react to political crises within the Eastern Bloc, and did its political standpoints develop as a response to these events?

Table 2. An overview of the election results of the CPN in general elections in relation to the crises in the Eastern Bloc

Source: PDC. “CPN en de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen tussen 1946 en 1986.” Reference work Dutch Parliament. Accessed 25 June 2021, https://www.parlement.com/id/vhsdgb8b3t09/cpn_en_de_tweede_kamerverkiezingen.

Literature Review

In a substantial article about the Hungarian Revolution and anti-communism in the Netherlands, Duco Hellema addresses the Hungarian Revolution and the Dutch response from an international relations perspective. In general, the political attitudes of Western European states towards the Hungarian Revolution could be described as rather passive. Hellema attributes the overall lack of action to a sense of cautiousness due to the constant threat of nuclear war. A second factor is that in November 1956, France and Britain were preoccupied with the Suez Crisis. The Dutch attitude became something of an exception.5 Hellema states that the Dutch public reacted “vehemently,” as in comparison to other European states, the Dutch had a more outspokenly anti-communist reputation. According to Hellema, this came from a sense of conservatism which had its roots in a widely shared sense of discontent with the rapid modernization and societal changes after World War II. A factor which led the Dutch government to practice a cautious foreign policy was the loss of its former colonies. As a result of this, the Dutch government was forced to redefine its position on the international playing field and had no firm or predetermined Ostpolitik. In the postwar period, the Netherlands was governed by a Roman-Red coalition (a coalition of the Dutch labor party De Partij van de Arbeid, or PvdA and the Catholic People’s Party, or KVP), the foreign policy of which was characterized by an anti-communist attitude and could be summarized as cautious. The developments in the Eastern Bloc were therefore not followed with great interest but rather with suspicion. As soon as the situation in Hungary escalated, the Netherlands had no specific criteria or Ostpolitik to fall back on. Eventually, the Hungarian revolution was considered a window of opportunity to reduce the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The attitude of the Dutch government thus became impatient in comparison to the other Western European states. At the same time, the Dutch government acknowledged that it could only wait and see. The military intervention which brought the Hungarian revolution to an end was sharply condemned by the Dutch press and prompted large demonstrations. One of the main targets of indignation was the CPN.6 Ultimately, no major sanctions were imposed on the Soviet Union. Hellema concludes that the Dutch people reacted fiercely to the events in Hungary and that this was somewhat reflected in the choices made by the Dutch government.7

The assumption that Dutch anti-communism has its roots in conservatism could be challenged. According to Revel, the staunchest anti-communists in Europe have always been the social democrats.8 The anti-communist sentiments in the Netherlands and in other northwestern European states could therefore be explained by the strong presence of social democratic parties. This is important for the framing of the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and 1980s: “The fundamental controversy about Eurocommunism in Europe is thus not a debate between the Right and the Left but between two Lefts. The question is which trend of European socialism, the Leninist or the social-democratic, will prevail.”9

In West European Communism after Stalinism. Comparative Approaches, Maud Bracke and Thomas Ekman Jorgensen offer an overview of the different ways in which Eurocommunism has been addressed by various scholars.10 In the late 1970s, many articles and books were published about the political and ideological changes which Western European communist parties underwent in the 1970s and the 1980s. Consequently, much of the literature on this topic suffered from the political burden of being directly linked to the Cold War. According to Bracke and Ekman Jorgensen, this context made it difficult for many scholars to approach the topic from a neutral perspective. Contemporary studies in Eurocommunism thus could benefit from a different and more neutral approach.11 A second observation they make is that Eurocommunism has mainly been studied in countries where communist parties were more influential. Thus, within the literature on Eurocommunism, there is a strong focus on southern Europe.12

According to the same authors, one of the main motivations behind the transition to Eurocommunism was an increasingly critical attitude towards the lack of internal democracy in communist parties. At the same time, many party members realized that communist parties would not be able to obtain a leading role in modern protest movements which emerged outside of the working class, such as student protest movements and women’s rights movements. The sense of insecurity within communist parties peaked in the 1960s because of the Sino Soviet split and because the New Left was increasingly winning political terrain. It must be noted, however, that the development of Eurocommunism cannot be entirely generalized due to large differences between communist parties.13 In the 1960s, when it became increasingly urgent for communist parties to adapt to changing social circumstances, some of these parties were already far removed from their origins. Unique party cultures, histories, and circumstances gave each of them a unique societal dimension. In Italy and France, the communist parties in particular emerged as influential political actors after World War II, a position which they initially managed to maintain in the 1950s. By comparison, the communist parties in the Scandinavian states were small and marginal.14

Scholars have attributed different levels of significance to the effects of the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring on the development of Eurocommunism. The Hungarian Revolution is considered a turning point by some authors, but other scholars argue that the ideological crisis for communist parties began no earlier than the 1970s. Gombin argues that the 1950s were formative for the French Communist Party and the emergence of the New Left.15 This was partly due to the Hungarian Uprising but also to the Algerian War: “Marxism lost its doctrinal primacy among an entire generation of young intellectuals and workers concerned with politics.”16 Jane Jenson draws a similar conclusion and considers 1956 a pivotal year for the communist party in France and “a high point between rise and decline.”17 Nevertheless, other authors claim the opposite. Roy Macridis18 and Hadley Cantril19 conclude that consternation within the French Communist Party was not particularly relevant for most of its members but mainly for its intelligentsia and leadership.

According to A. J. Liehm, the intended reforms proposed during the Prague Spring reflected and to a certain degree represented the ideal of Eurocommunism. Liehm concludes that the military interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, together with the general rejection of fundamental freedoms in Eastern Europe, were major reasons for the schism between eastern and western communist parties.20

Theoretical Framework

The circumstances under which political parties change their views are addressed widely within the field of political science. Several major studies have been bundled by Andreas Fagerholm in his 2015 article, Why Do Political Parties Change their Policy Positions? A Review.21 Among the studies on policy position change, two traditions can be distinguished. The first tradition was initiated by Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda.22 Their general assumption is that political parties are conservative organizations which are averse to any form of change. If a political party changes policy positions, this is most likely because of internal party factors, such as leadership change. Alternatively, change could occur because of factors outside the party, such as disappointing electoral results or a shift in public opinion.23 The second tradition, heavily influenced by the work of Ian Budge,24 assumes that political parties rationally change their standpoints based on the political and societal circumstances they encounter while they engage in active political competition with one another. Budge identifies several factors which could indicate how likely it is for political parties to change their political standpoints.25 These include external factors, such as change of public opinion, undesirable electoral performance, creating distance between ideological rivals, and position within government or opposition. Also, internal factors are addressed, such as change of party leadership and internal party structures.

It is important to note that niche and mainstream parties have different tendencies when it comes to how they react to these factors. Adams et al. address changes in political standpoints in the context of Western European niche parties. This research concludes that while mainstream political parties’ policy shifts correspond to shifts in public opinion, niche parties do not display similar tendencies to adjust their policy preferences. A potential explanation for this phenomenon is that niche parties might have established their policy positions beforehand in such a way that they are already aligned with their rank and file.26 While there is consensus that there are relevant differences between niche and mainstream political parties, the literature is more ambiguous about how niche political parties should be identified. This leads to an important question in this theoretical framework, namely if in a Dutch context the CPN should be defined as niche or mainstream. Fagerholm emphasizes that an important distinction between niche and mainstream political parties is the degree to which they seriously compete during elections. However, a second definition is also widely used; Adams et al. argue that a party should be qualified as niche based on its ideology. If a party adheres to a niche ideology, such as communism or a far-right ideology, it should be qualified as a niche party. In the case of the CPN, both definitions of a niche party are applicable to a certain degree. One of the key features of the CPN is that it initially related itself to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in an outspoken manner, which is something no other political party in the Netherlands did. In an ideological sense, as hardline communists, it should be defined as a niche party. However, when it comes to electoral performance, a different categorization might be appropriate. Even though the CPN had never become a serious candidate for government, they were consistently represented in the Dutch parliament. In the postwar years, the CPN was represented in the opposition with ten seats. Its popularity slowly declined until it was disbanded, while over the years maintaining between two and eight seats. As such, the CPN had something to lose during the national elections and therefore had to compete seriously. In this sense, the CPN might have been sensitive enough to external circumstances to adapt its political standpoints under the influence of factors indicated by Fagerholm, even though, in an ideological sense, the party could still be considered niche.

Research Methodology and Case Selection

This article seeks to establish how such crises in the Eastern Bloc affected left wing party politics in the Netherlands and specifically the political standpoints of the CPN. This will be done through a discourse analysis of articles related to this topic from party affiliated newspapers and magazines. These publications mainly originate from the CPN newspaper De Waarheid, but they are contextualized with publications from Socialisme en Democratie and Paraat from the PvdA) as well as articles from de Tribune from the Socialist Party Socialistische Partij (SP). The analysis of such documents offers multiple benefits in comparison to other options. The first benefit is that during the twentieth century, these party magazines and newspapers were published on a regular basis and formed an important means of communication. Most party magazines were issued at least monthly, and some party-affiliated newspapers were even published on a daily basis, allowing the parties to reach out to their electorates regularly. This regularity enabled political parties to address the issues of the day quickly and react to developments as soon as they occurred. As these publications were an important way to communicate with the masses, any changes in a party’s political and ideological stance to appease public sentiment are also likely to have been addressed here.

I have not collected or analyzed the data in accordance with a strict code book. The reason for this is that the data has been selected from fundamentally different sources covering a span of almost forty years with large time intervals. The analysis of data focusses on five reoccurring elements during each moment of crisis. These elements partly fall in line with some of the relevant factors listed by Fagerholm.

1. Close attention is paid to how the uprisings against the socialist regimes were addressed.

2. Attention is also devoted to the attitudes expressed towards the initial reaction by the national government. The analysis considers which desires were expressed by the Dutch political parties towards the national authorities of the state in which the crises took place.

3. Indications of support for or criticism of military interference are also considered. Each of the political crises was brought to an end by military interference, always backed up by or under pressure from Moscow.

4. Attention is paid to whether political parties expressed a preference for a hardline or a more liberal approach to state socialism.

5. The dynamics between Dutch political parties are also taken into consideration, as is the question of whether they supported or reprimanded each other for their responses to the crises.

The East German Uprising of 1953

During the East German uprising in 1953, demonstrations against work quotas developed into mass protests against the East German government. After the Soviet forces stationed in East Germany intervened, it took until June 24 before the situation was fully deescalated.27

The protests in East Germany, consistently described in De waarheid as provocations, were addressed for the first time on Wednesday, June 17, 1953.28 The claim was made that the social unrest in East Berlin had been organized by the West German government under Adenauer in cooperation with the United States. According to De Waarheid, the “provocateurs” were inhabitants of West Berlin to whom the East German authorities responded in a measured and appropriate manner.29

De Waarheid considered the protests an attempt to divert attention away from the conciliatory measures proposed by the East German government. The local correspondent claimed that the following alleged circumstances had been essential factors in the outbreak of open conflict or clear signs of provocation from the West: the visit of Jakob Kaiser (minister of all-German affairs) to Berlin; the spread of propaganda from West to East Berlin; wounded insurgents having been taken to West Berlin; and the fact that the provocations had taken place near the Western border. The actual inhabitants of East Berlin were reported to have defended their city against the provocateurs.30 According to De Waarheid,the unrest among workers due to higher labor norms was immediately exploited by Western sabotage agencies, even though the East German government had acted quickly and adequately by altering their plans.

On June 18, it was stated by De Waarheid that American officers had been involved to such an extent that that they had walked through East Berlin in uniform and distributing orders. This was explicitly associated with Germany’s Nazi past. People were reported to have sung the Horst Wessel song and chanted, “We want Hitler back!”31

The events in Berlin were also addressed by Marcus Bakker, a board member of the CPN. He stated that the Soviet Union had made many proposals which would further a peaceful solution to global issues. A peaceful foreign policy and potential German reunification, Bakker continued, were against the interests of the United States. The recent economic and political successes of East Germany had rendered the West German smear campaign irrelevant. This smear campaign, according to Bakker, had been conducted by the United States and West Germany to provoke conflict. This plan has failed because the DDR government had recognized and addressed its previous mistakes, and the provocateurs had shown their fascist nature.32

In Socialisme en Democratie, distributed by the PvdA, J. in ‘t Veld considered the turmoil in the Eastern bloc as an indicator of success for the West’s cautious foreign policy.33 In the following edition, J. Barents addressed the geopolitical implications of the East German Uprising.34 The death of Stalin and the “workers revolt in Eastern Berlin” were interpreted as factors which could indicate an approaching change of the status quo: “One of the clichés destroyed by the East German uprising was the assumption that nations living under police and state terror could never rise up against their oppressors.”35 Barents considered the East German Uprising confirmation of Adenauer’s insistence on free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

1956 Poznan Protests

The Poznan uprising was the first full uprising which occurred after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. A peaceful strike in Poznan grew into a two-day fight between insurgents and the Polish army. Later that year, some of the demands which had been made by the insurgents were met. The uprising caught a lot of international attention, as a large number of representatives of the foreign press had been attending an international fair in Poznan.36

In its reports on the Poznan Uprising, De Waarheid contended that imperial agents and reactionaries had attempted to exploit Poland’s economic difficulties.37 Implying that the disturbances were prepared provocations by foreign actors, De Waarheid characterized the demonstrations as unjust, as the Polish government had already addressed the grievances voiced by the protestors.

The next day, it was alleged in De Waarheid that it was foreign provocateurs who had motivated the workers to go on a strike. “The situation escalated when provocateurs and underground groups started to shoot near the security police building.”38 The correspondent reported that order had been quickly restored after the army had opened fire on the provocateurs. Reportedly, the real workers had not been harmed, as they had nothing to do with the outbreak of violence.

In the article Workers and terrorists, the uprising in Poznan was linked to the protests in Berlin: “We have to say that it is easier to get a general overview of the events in the Polish city of Poznan than was the case in 1953 with the riots in Berlin (…) This is because the number of proponents of the Cold War has reduced since then.”39 The fact that there were economic and administrative issues in Poland was acknowledged, but the contention was also made that the government had devoted considerable effort to solving these issues. Looting and arson were considered indications that the disturbances had been instigated or carried out by professional foreign provocateurs. The Polish government was reported to have met the provocations with a continuation of “international and domestic détente.”40 In the next edition of De Waarheid, the American offer to supply Poznan with food was condemned as “malicious propaganda.”41 The disturbances in Poznan allegedly could be traced back to the United States, which had “a hundred million dollars on their budget for sabotaging socialist countries.”42

In the July 4 issue of De Waarheid, the contention was made that most of the workers had left the protests as soon as the provocateurs had become violent.43 CPN member F. Baruch argued that the American involvement in Poznan had been hinted at by Dulles himself, as he had implicitly mentioned the Poznan uprising before it had taken place, and the whole provocation had been part of an effort to create a smokescreen to hide the USA’s failing foreign policy.44

In the PvdA magazine Paraat,the Poznan uprising was explicitly addressed by Alfred Mozer.45 Mozer interpreted the protests in Poznan as an event of great importance because they had led to significant internal changes in Poland and pushed back the Russian sphere of influence. However, he stated that the situation might be more complicated than it initially seemed.46 According to Mozer, the death of Stalin implied that the conditions for the Stalinist model had ceased to exist, and this has led to an attempt by Moscow to ease relations with its satellite states by allowing them to liberalize to a certain extent. However, this attempt would always fail, Mozer suggested, since “hunger comes while eating.”47

In PvdA’s Socialisme en Democratie, Dedeijer expressed his faith in Władysław Gomułka’s ability to solve the issues at hand: “Not only in his political postulates, but also in his behavior as a man, in his intellectual integrity and his rationality.”48 De Kadt stated that the pretenses of communism had been utterly destroyed, and the ideology had been reduced to what it truly was: “An enforced system that by an immense waste of human lives, human happiness, and human dignity reaches only meagre results.”49 Goedhart took a critical approach to the concessions made by Moscow in 1956, as the easing of strict policies in Poland and Hungary could not be considered a logical outcome of the communist system and therefore could not be used as an argument in defense of communism.50

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

On October 23, 1956, students gathered in Budapest to demonstrate against one-party rule and demand more political, economic, and democratic rights. The protests soon escalated, and fights broke out countrywide between the insurgents and the army. The revolutionaries believed they had succeeded, as the Soviet troops retreated from Budapest, to which the government responded by requesting military support from the Soviet Union and the reinstalment of Imre Nagy as the prime minister. Nagy’s decision to resign from the Warsaw Pact did not have the desired effect. In early November, Khrushchev crushed the revolution by sending the Red Army to Hungary. The international response which Nagy had hoped for did not come. After the revolutionaries were defeated, the government fell into the hands of the reorganized and purged Hungarian communist party.51

On October 24, 1956, the disturbances in Budapest were mentioned in De Waarheid. It was reported that counterrevolutionary gangs had conducted bloody attacks on soldiers and civilians. This allegedly had led the Hungarian government to announce martial law and to ask the Soviet troops to help restore peace.52 In a second article, Imre Nagy was paraphrased: “hostile elements joined the peaceful demonstration of Hungarian young people. They misguided the working people and acted against the popular-democracy and power.”53

The next day, De Waarheid addressedthe situation in Hungary, recognizing that the demonstrations had been provoked by the irresponsible behavior of leading politicians. Therefore, they expected the new Hungarian government to introduce far-reaching reforms once peace had been restored.54 Marcus Bakker blamed the Dutch media for not expressing solidarity with the Egyptians during the Suez Crisis, as they done with the Poles and Hungarians: “We are also deeply affected by the events in Hungary: while a people rose for a changed and improved construction of socialism, irresponsible elements made use of the situation to turn the desire for progress into a contra-revolution.”55 The Hungarian attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact was criticized the next day, as the only opponents of this pact would be “Adenauer and his Hitler-generals.”56 This assumption was illustrated by the example that fascists were reported to have sung “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”57

On October 30, the CPN offered a statement about the situation in Hungary and the alleged anti-communist campaign in the Netherlands: “The party administration makes a call for all peace-loving Dutch citizens to recognize the true and dangerous character of the events and to take a stand against the campaign of incitement.”58 The CPN also claimed that even though there was no clear overview of the situation in Hungary, all available data pointed towards a putsch. It linked “this counterrevolutionary adventure” and the interests of “American pro–Cold War politicians.” The Dutch reaction to side immediately with this “counterrevolutionary coup d’état” showed the hypocrisy of other political parties: “The lament for the faith of the Hungarian people sounds especially false from the mouths of those who prepare an atomic war against the peoples of Eastern Europe and assist the rearmament of the SS in West Germany.”59 The worries about Hungary were interpreted by the CPN as “having the goal of diverting attention away from the deteriorating economic circumstances in the Netherlands and creating a false sense of unity.”60

On November 2, it was reported that there had been Western intervention in the events in Hungary, as planes from the Red Cross had dropped weapons and supporters of the previous Horthy regime had crossed Hungary’s Western border.61 A similar interpretation could be found the next day: “Under the cover of smokescreens of talking about a ‘heroic uprising’ and ‘Soviet Troops,’ Western circles do everything in their power to restore the old reactionary regime in Hungary.”62

On November 5, it was announced in De Waarheid that the new Hungarian government, under the leadership of János Kádár, along with the socialist forces of Hungary and the Soviet Union, had succeeded in their task.63 Any attempts to discuss the situation in the forums of the United Nations were deemed unlawful, as the uprising had been a strictly domestic affair. Assaults on the properties of the CPN in the Netherlands were also addressed: “It had nothing to do with an indignant crowd, but everything with organized destruction commandos.”64 On November 6, the alleged underlying motivations of the anti-communist riots in the Netherlands were addressed in more detail: “They attempt to conceal the dangerous situation, which is the result of the British-French aggression against Egypt, behind the curtain of Hungary hysteria.”65 The PvdA was especially blamed for this, with their “unreasonable disruptions about Hungary.”66

The tenth edition of PvdA’s Paraat from 1956 was dedicated entirely to the events in Hungary and Poznan, obviously siding with the revolutionaries: “For the first time in history an oppressed people, by its own force, has triumphed over a modern dictatorship while the same people has been handcuffed again by brute military force.”67 The author asks how the situation will develop and whether Moscow would “[u]nashamedly, brutally, and cynically lower the Iron Curtain over Hungary again (…) Moscow does not believe in tears, blood, and freedom. A people is being suffocated under the chokehold of Communism.”68 In another article, the authors of Paraat stated that the CPN had always been a “slavish imitation of the foreign communist parties that remain a slavish imitation of the Russian communist party.”69 The PvdA explicitly presented itself as an anti-communist party: “Now the terrible events in Hungary have united the PvdA, together with all other democratic parties, to take a stand against communism; to us this is a confirmation of our principal standpoint that we have drawn a line, which we have always followed as long as we have been democratic socialists.”70

The Prague Spring 1968

In 1968, Alexander Dubček introduced far-reaching reforms which opened the way for a ten-year transition plan. His intention was to re-popularize socialism by removing its most oppressive features. In practice, this led to the socialist government and the Soviet Union being openly criticized. The Soviet Union perceived the Prague Spring reforms as a threat to the unity of its bloc. On August 20, WTO forces occupied Czechoslovakia. Immediately, all reforms were undone, and Czechoslovakia entered a period of “normalization.” Within one year, the government re-established full censorship.71

In April, De Waarheid addressed the reforms of the Prague Spring. Its attitude towards these developments was positive under the precondition that the reforms would help build a stronger socialist state and the new foreign policy would remain in line with the foreign policies of other WTO members.72 On August 21, it was reported that WTO troops had unannouncedly entered Czechoslovakia and occupied the most important political centers. De Waarheid mentioned that the Soviet press bureau reported that these troops had come to Czechoslovakia’s aid only after the Czechoslovak government had requested armed support.73 Directly next to this article, a commentary by the CPN was placed in which the CPN distanced itself from the armed intervention: “Over the course of recent months, the Communist Party of the Netherlands has repetitively and with great emphasis expressed its stance against any sort of intervention, military or anything else, in the affairs of Czechoslovakia.”74 The CPN was convinced that this intervention would have “harmful consequences to the necessary battle against American capitalism and West-German revanchism.”75 The CPN also stated, however, that the Western press had done everything in its power to escalate the conflict. In a later article, the CPN announced that, “[i]t is up to the Czechoslovak people and the Czechoslovak communists to decide how the affairs of their country should be dealt with in the continuing construction of socialism. Interference, in whatever form, can only do damage and lead to great harm.”76

A week later, the front page of De Waarheid was covered by a manifesto of the CPN in which it strongly condemned the use of military force in Czechoslovakia: “The administration of the CPN declares with great emphasis that such conduct is unacceptable, that it has nothing to do with communist principles, and that it violates all decisions and declarations of the international communist movement.”77 The CPN stated that the crisis in Czechoslovakia had been caused by the former government under Antonín Josef Novotny, which Moscow had always supported. The Soviet Union thus had failed to deliver any justification for its interference. This made it the “most shameful breach of the principles of Leninism yet committed.”78 They stated that this interference took place with the silent approval of American imperialists, who seized the opportunity to nurture and inflame anti-communist sentiments. The CPN called for the Dutch working class not to be misled by the pro-Czechoslovak front of Dutch political parties. They felt that the other parties had used the situation in Czechoslovakia to cover up their support for the American war in Vietnam and German revisionism. However, the CPN also continued to present itself as a critic of the Soviet Union: “For years, the Communist Party of the Netherlands has been criticizing the leadership in the Soviet Union, much to the dismay of all anti-communists and the ‘official circles’ in our country.”79 The CPN then announced that they had cut off all ties with the leadership of the Soviet Union and its supporters: “The CPN insists that the current leadership in the Soviet Union cannot and should not in any way be identified with the Soviet Union or with the ideas of communism.”80 The CPN expressed the conviction that it was “the only party in the Netherlands with the moral right to stand up to the violation of communist principles being committed by the current Soviet leadership.”81

The Prague Spring was addressed in two articles in Socialisme en Democratie. Cees Laban spoke of the Czechoslovak people and politicians with great sympathy, concluding that

it is clear that one is looking for a form of communism that is in line with humanism and the principle of freedom, which is rooted in the people, and which also has an economic effect that will give the population greater prosperity (…) Therefore, the moral duty rests on us to provide support for this people cautiously and by using all appropriate, however limited, resources at our disposal.82

In another article, another PVDA politician strongly condemned the Soviet intervention but simultaneously argued in support of continuation of the détente policy: “It is the only policy that can lead to real cooperation between East and West.”83

Martial Law in Poland 1981

In the early 1980s, the Polish governing party (PZPR) was in crisis and rapidly losing influence. The opposition was gaining strength in the form of the Solidarność trade union and political movement under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. The PZPR perceived Solidarity as the cause of the economic recession and accused its supporters of leading Poland into a civil war. The prime minister, Wojciech Jaruzelski, believed that the only way to maintain control and avoid Soviet intervention was to introduce martial law, marking a period of severe repression of the opposition and other far-reaching restrictions. Despite the severe measures, martial law did not achieve all the goals set by the PZPR, as Solidarity managed to remain active underground.84

On December 13, De waarheid stated on their front page that the Polish army had seized power and had announced a state of martial law.85 On the same page, the CPN condemned the coup d’état by the Polish army: “This seizure of power underlines the bankruptcy of the Polish United Workers Party and the urge to innovate as was expressed by the population and the trade union movement in Poland.”86 The CPN was convinced that this provided proof of “the failure of a one-party system, and that broad coalitions, separation of powers, and a deepening of democracy are necessary prerequisites for socialism.”87

In the December 15 issue of De waarheid,it was announced that the Amsterdam departments of the CPN and PvdA, together with three other progressive parties, had published a response to the coup d’état by the Polish army.88 Only a democracy, it was stated, could lay the foundations for political solutions.

On the next day, it was mentioned that a petition had been sent to the Polish ambassy in The Hague signed by the CPN, the PvdA, and, remarkably enough, three conservative political parties. Marcus Bakker, by then the leader of the CPN faction in the Dutch Parliament, was quoted: “In Poland, the point is that there was an opportunity to create real democratic socialism; but instead of seizing this opportunity, they intervened by military means. That is contrary to what we consider socialism.”89

In Paraat, political relations between the PvdA and CPN were explored. The discussants addressed the CPN’s political standpoints towards Eastern Europe and specifically their standpoint regarding the introduction of martial law in Poland. It was stated that the CPN had lost many members to the PvdA because its attitude towards Moscow had not been rectilinear. According to one of the discussants, the CPN had sometimes been critical of Moscow in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, the CPN had reorientated itself towards Moscow, and this had been something, the discussants contended, that the CPN’s electorate had not found encouraging. The discussants did not believe that the CPN being critical of Moscow was necessarily very substantial: “I miss a story from the side of CPN about the current situation in Eastern Europe, what the balance of power there is. A cohesive story, and not a sum of incidents.”90

In Poland: an “internal affair” for democratic socialism, Paul Kalma and M. Krop suggested that the PvdA had reacted reasonably to the introduction of martial law. Immediately, a statement of protest was written, and two demonstrations were organized. “However, this position does not undo the lukewarmness and half-heartedness that have characterized the reactions in the party to the events in Poland for the last year and a half.”91 One of the reasons for a lack of support, the authors supposed, was that the PvdA still had an old-fashioned concept of détente politics. It was therefore suggested that practical support of liberation movements in the Eastern Bloc should be taken more seriously: “Such support undoubtedly increases the tension between East and West, but that is the price which must be paid.”92 They argued that it would be key for successful détente politics to differentiate between the relaxation of relations between East and West while simultaneously acknowledging the changes to the European status quo. This way, a political course could be followed by the PvdA which would fall more in line with that of the United States.

De Tribune,the magazine of the SP, dedicated a large article to the introduction of martial law in Poland. In their view, Solidarity had become the mouthpiece of economic dissatisfaction. However, the Polish government had met most of the economic demands which could justifiably be made by a trade union. They did not consider Solidarity to be in the position to make any demands other than economic ones.93 According to De Tribune, the establishment of Solidarity as the third power beside the Church and state would inevitably lead to political confrontations. After martial law went into force, the army became the fourth power: “A drama is unfolding in Poland, let’s face it. A drama that for all progressive people will be experienced as a setback. But that is not yet a reason to cry with the CDA [Christian Democratic Appeal] and VVD [People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy] wolves” 94 (as the CPN allegedly had done). De Tribune concluded that none of these four powers in Poland had the mandate or the popular power to solve Poland’s economic issues. It therefore recommend that “Poland can only be drawn out of the economic swamp by an utmost concerted effort of these four powers, supported by the population.”95 In the article Washington, it was reasoned that while the situation in Poland dominated the news, many North American misdeeds had not been properly addressed.96 A similar way of reasoning can be found in a later article: “Poland is met with hue and cry, while Minister Haig97 praises Turkey, (…) They are using the Polish crisis to start a new anti-communist smear campaign and as a reason to sweep the disarmament talks off the table.”98

Analysis

An analysis of the discourse used by each of the political parties reveals that during each of the crises, all parties took clear and unambiguous positions. The PvdA systematically condemned all Soviet interventions in the Eastern Bloc. Among the many parties, the standpoints of the CPN changed the most significantly, as they went from fully supporting military interventions to completely condemning them. However, there were some steps in between. Regarding the East German Uprising, the CPN did not take the political and economic discontent of East Germans (except for the workers of the Stalin-Allee) strongly into consideration. Most of the uprising was framed as the work of fascists and foreign agents, which the East Berlin workers allegedly had nothing to do with. During the protests in Poznan and Budapest, the CPN already acknowledged to a larger extent the possibility that political and economic discontent existed among workers and citizens. However, the CPN still insisted that the Polish and the new Hungarian government had already solved or would soon solve the issues that had given rise to expressions of discontent. Initially, the CPN put trust in Nagy’s government to get hold of the situation in Hungary. However, as soon as Hungary left the Warsaw Pact, Nagy’s revolutionary government could no longer count on the CPN’s sympathy. The suppression of the Prague Spring was the first military intervention which was fully condemned by the CPN. The CPN supported the liberal policies of the Prague Spring, under the precondition that they would help further the construction of a better socialism. The CPN sympathized with the government of Czechoslovakia and stated that only the Czechoslovaks could solve the problems at hand, without any meddling by the WTO or Western powers. The CPN did not believe Moscow’s claim that Prague had asked the Soviet Union to remove fascist elements from the Czechoslovakian elite circles, so the CPN considered the intervention illegitimate. This led it to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia sharply and to cut ties with Moscow. However, the CPN still insisted that the situation had escalated due to Western Powers, which had put up another smokescreen to cover up German rearmament and the Vietnam War. During each of the four crises, the CPN repeatedly argued that the events in Eastern Europe were being used as smokescreens to hide American misdeeds and as part of smear campaigns to discredit communism. The introduction of martial law in Poland was therefore the second intervention which was fully condemned by the CPN but the first during which the CPN did not accuse any Western Powers of being involved. It is also important that, in contrast to its response to the events of the Prague Spring, during the introduction of martial law in Poland, the CPN contended that a democratic system was a prerequisite for socialism, not a one-party state. The SP interpreted the introduction of martial law as the result of the Poland’s poor economic circumstances and Solidarity, as a trade union, having intervened too much in politics instead of focusing on labor policies. It observed that none of the actors involved (the army, the Church, the state, and Solidarity) had either the popular support or political mandate to solve Poland’s (economic) issues. Therefore, the SP proposed that all actors cooperate. Despite this seemingly neutral position, it was still suggested in Paraat that the situation in Poland was being used by the Western Powers to start an anti-communist smear campaign to sweep disbarment talks off the table.

When the dynamics between the political parties in the Netherlands are considered, a few significant observations can be made. During the East German Uprising, the Poznan Protests, and the Hungarian Revolution, the dynamics remained largely consistent. The PvdA condemned military intervention and supported a more liberal and democratic political course. The CPN blamed the Western powers for allegedly organizing the crises and vocally supported the Soviet Union. On a national level, the CPN blamed the other political parties for utilizing the crises in the Eastern Bloc for their own gain, either to start anti-communist smear campaigns to divide the Dutch working class or to create smokescreens to hide the failing policies of the Dutch government. Simultaneously, the PvdA emphasized its anti-communist stance and called out the CPN for being a slavish imitation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This dynamic changed with the end of the Prague Spring in 1968. This time, even the CPN distanced itself from Soviet intervention, though it was not yet willing to take a collective stance towards Moscow with other political parties. The CPN stressed that it was the only political party in the Netherlands with the moral authority to condemn the WTO intervention. The other Dutch political parties were considered hypocrites for meddling in these affairs, as they did not even support the Dutch working class. Therefore, the CPN was unwilling to cooperate with initiatives and demonstrations organized by other political parties. The only crisis which the PvdA and CPN interpreted and acted on in the same manner was the introduction of martial law in Poland. Both parties considered this crisis symptomatic of a failing one-party state and acknowledged that the introduction of a multiparty system was much needed. The PvdA and CPN not only reached the same conclusion, they also acted in unity.

In 1981, the CPN adopted a very conventional and mainstream political standpoint towards the introduction of martial law in Poland. On this specific matter, the party acted together with the PvdA and even with conservative parties, such as the VVD and CDA. The SP explicitly placed itself outside of this cooperation. It also condemned the introduction of martial law, but the SP still did not want to work together with the other Dutch political parties. In fact, the SP framed the other parties as hypocrites and considered the international outrage little more than a smokescreen to get disarmament talks off the table. The SP publicly called out the CPN for its alleged hypocrisy on this issue. In this specific context, the SP in 1981 willingly took over the CPN’s position as a political outsider. It is therefore clearly the case that left-wing political parties in the Netherlands did strongly react to political crises within the Eastern Bloc. In particular, the CPN’s political standpoints towards these crises changed drastically over the years.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this discussion, I proposed to consider how the CPN reacted to political crises in the Eastern Bloc and whether its political standpoints developed in response to these events. An analysis of how the CPN presented itself in De Waarheid offers reason to assume that the party was motivated by the desire to appeal to a broader electorate, as it called public attention to its changed political standpoints. The CPN made considerable efforts to communicate its firm condemnation of the oppression of the Prague Spring and the introduction of martial law in Poland. It did this by placing elaborate statements in De Waarheid, which sometimes even covered full front pages, or as was mentioned in De Waarheid, by making a television appearance to express support for Solidarity.

The desire to keep ideological distance from political rivals seems to have played a role in how the left-wing parties in the Netherlands positioned themselves towards one another and the crises in the Eastern Bloc. In 1968, the CPN put in a lot of work into its efforts to underline its ideological distance from the PvdA, even though both parties condemned the Soviet Union’s response to the Prague Spring. However, as the standpoint of the CPN towards the introduction of martial law in Poland became mainstream and the CPN started to act accordingly, the SP took its place as the political outsider. The suggestion that the PvdA should adopt a more pro-active stance towards détente politics also fits the narrative of creating ideological distance. A bolder approach towards crises in the Eastern Bloc would have distanced the PvdA further from the new course of the CPN. Simultaneously, the PvdA took a critical stance towards the new course of the CPN by doubting its substantiality and integrity.

As is addressed in the literature on Eurocommunism, many factors led communist parties in Western Europe to change their political standpoints in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it remains difficult to say whether the CPN’s political standpoints changed as a reaction to the crises in the Eastern Bloc or the CPN’s reactions to these crises reflected earlier changes in political standpoints. However, within the framework of party change theories, the CPN seems to have become increasingly reactive to the reoccurring crises by changing its policies towards Moscow. It thus acted more like a mainstream party to appeal to a broader electorate, as the literature on Eurocommunism presumes.

This tendency can also be observed when the election results are coupled with the analysis of policy change in the CPN towards Moscow.99 The CPN lost four seats during the 1959 elections, which were held two years after the Poznan protests and the Hungarian uprising. During the election of 1977, the CPN lost five seats. Therefore, it is remarkable that large electoral losses during the elections of 1959 and 1977 were followed by significant changes in the CPN’s political standpoints during the subsequent crises in the Eastern Bloc, which occurred in 1968 and 1981. This indicates that the changes in political standpoints of the CPN towards the crises in the Eastern Bloc were seemingly affected by disappointing electoral results. Again, this indicates that the CPN acted in line with the presumptions in the theoretical literature on Eurocommunism in an attempt to appeal to a broader electorate.

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The First Generation of Architectural Historians in Modern China: Their Studies and Struggles

Shanshan Liu

Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):59-79 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.59

This paper examines the intellectual history of the first generation of architectural historians in China, with a focus on the activities of Liang Sicheng and his colleagues from the 1920s to the 1950s. It analyzes the various oppressive forces they encountered during this period. Initially, they challenged Western and Japanese hegemonies in Chinese architecture research. Following World War II, they faced off against Soviet Union experts to safeguard China’s architectural heritage. The paper evaluates their successes and failures in achieving academic and social goals, their impact on the preservation of Chinese heritage, and their ongoing influence in academic and societal spheres. Additionally, it explores how professional ethics were utilized to dismantle colonial narratives and perceptions in China, suggesting that professionalism can serve as a mode of intellectual opposition.

Keywords: Modern China, intellectual history, architectural historian, Liang Sicheng

The intellectual history of architectural historians in China from the 1920s to the 1950s, particularly focusing on the endeavors of Liang Sicheng and his contemporaries, reveals a dynamic interplay between scholarly pursuits and sociopolitical contexts. This period witnessed the multifaceted engagement of these historians with various oppressive forces, from the challenges they issued to Western and Japanese hegemonies in Chinese architectural research to confrontations with Soviet Union experts in the immediate postwar era in their efforts to safeguard China’s architectural heritage. By examining the successes and failures of their academic and social initiatives, as well as their enduring influence on the preservation of Chinese heritage, this paper sheds light on the intricate relationship between professional ethics and intellectual opposition.

Western and Japanese Hegemonies in Chinese Traditional Architecture
Research before the 1930s

When the first generation of Chinese architectural historians started their academic research at the beginning of twentieth century, they faced two different hegemonies, Western hegemony in the international academic community and Japanese hegemony in the East Asian academic community.

Both colonial powers attempted to reconstruct the history of Chinese architecture by promoting their own favorable historical narratives in part to diminish the historical achievements and artistic status of Chinese architecture and gardens, thus serving their agendas of cultural oppression. Western hegemony, for instance, sought to discredit the evolutionary development of Chinese architecture, criticizing it as an ahistorical style and thus denying the significance of Chinese architectural culture in world architectural history. Meanwhile, Japan aimed to elevate the artistic value of Tang and Song architecture, indirectly elevating the status of Japanese architecture and positioning itself as the heir to the highest achievements in Eastern architectural art.

In the second half of nineteenth century, in the context of the political, economic, and cultural confrontation between the East and the West, Western scholars devalued Asian arts as a whole. This situation had partially changed at the beginning of the twentieth century because of the propaganda of the Japanese government. Western society had begun to appreciate Japanese art and Chinese art before the Tang and Song Dynasties (960–1279 AD).

However, Chinese architectural historians found themselves under the second culture hegemony caused by this situation. Japanese scholars had a reason for placing emphasis on the importance and value of Chinese art before the Tang and Song Dynasties. It was impossible to deny the Chinese origins of many aspects of Japanese culture, so they emphasized that Japan, instead of China, was the heir to the Chinese culture of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Thus, they sought to establish the dominance of Japanese culture in Asia. As a result, Chinese architectural historians needed to challenge the dual hegemony, in the world of scholarship, of the West and Japan when starting research on the history of Chinese architectures.

Western Hegemony before the Twentieth Century

Before the twentieth century, the international image of Chinese architecture and garden arts underwent several transitions. The Western world first learned of Chinese architecture and gardens from the writings of explorers and missionaries. Before the sixteenth century, The Travels of Marco Polo introduced the cities and architecture of China to the West. This was the first work to offer Westerners detailed impressions of Chinese architecture.

From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, Westerners were full of curiosity about Chinese architecture and gardens. In the seventeenth century, Western missionaries developed a strong interest in Eastern art and culture, and they naturally paid attention to the unique Chinese architecture and garden art. Texts and drawings depicting Chinese architecture and gardens were brought to the West. Westerners loved the naturalistic styles, and they imitated these styles in architectural design and gardening practices. Designers from the United Kingdom absorbed the aesthetic elements of Chinese gardens and created English landscape gardens characterized by structured informality, which made free layout garden design increasingly popular across Europe. Between 1757 and 1763, Swedish-Scottish architect William Chambers caused a sensation in Europe by introducing Chinese architecture into the garden during the renovation of Kew Gardens in London.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Chinamania began to cool down. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the deepening of the western invasion of China, Western opinion on Chinese culture changed from positive to negative. Western attitudes towards Chinese architectural arts also changed from admiration to derogation.

In 1793, the Macartney Embassy visited China. All the members of the embassy described Chinese architecture and gardens in their travel notes. The accompanying painter William Alexander depicted Chinese cities along the way in watercolors. Mission member John Barrow made negative comments on Chinese architecture and cities in his book Travels in China, arguing that Chinese architecture is not as grand or artistic as the architecture of European countries. He commented in his book that “their architecture is void of taste, grandeur, beauty, solidity, or convenience; that the houses are merely tents, and that there is nothing magnificent, even in the palace of the Emperor.”1

In 1896, British scholar Banister Fletcher (1866–1953) published his masterpiece of world architectural history A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.2 In this book, he included an illustration that reflects the genealogy of the world’s architectural development, which is the famous “Tree of Architecture.” Fletcher regarded ancient Greek and ancient Roman buildings as the main trunk of this “tree,” from which the Romanesque style developed. After the development of Gothic and Renaissance styles, the tree of architecture finally flourished in Europe and the United States. At the same time, Fletcher placed the styles of Chinese and Japanese, Peruvian, Mexican, Indian, and other non-European styles on the branches roughly in the same period as ancient Greece, thus implying that these styles did not evolve over time.

Before the twentieth century, the West lacked an in-depth understanding of the true characters of Chinese architecture. The Western attitude towards Chinese architecture was constantly changing as the various imaginative visions of China changed. These shifts were driven first and foremost by changes in the political and economic relationships between China and the West, but also by competition between China and Japan.

Japanese hegemony at the beginning of twentieth century

In the late nineteenth century, Western interest in Chinese art gradually began to diminish, while interest in Japanese art increased. This situation continued until the 1930s. This understanding of the differences between Chinese art and Japanese art was partially the result of intentional propaganda by Japanese political and cultural figures. Since the Meiji Restoration period, Japan had strategically propagandized Japanese culture in the West to build its international status. Under the guidance and promotion of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s(1835–1901) “Theory of Civilization,” Japan looked for elements in traditional culture to compete with the West. Japanese politicians and literati constructed the conditions that could make Japan a “civilized” country. They sought to reexamine traditional Japanese culture from a modern perspective, and they actively carried out activities in the public sphere to shape the national image.3

However, for Japan, which came from the East Asian cultural context, Chinese culture was a rather awkward rival. Japan had the advantage over China of having started the process of westernization before China and thus having a more active presence in the international discourse earlier. The Japanese government recruited and hired foreigners to carry out cultural construction in Japan. When these people returned to the West, they became the authorities on Eastern art, and they took with them the prejudice that Japanese culture was superior to Chinese culture. At the same time, Japanese critics also took advantage of their relationship with these orientalists to further propagate the alleged superiority of Japanese culture. Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who was recruited by the Japanese government to teach at Tokyo Imperial University at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of the representative figures. Fenollosa’s student Okakura Tenshin (1863–1913) went a step further, advocating the “leadership” of Japanese culture in East Asia.

In the propaganda of Japanese critics and Western critics, the rhetoric of contrast was repeatedly used. Chinese art was always used as a foil to Japanese art. Although no one could deny that the origins of numerous elements of Japanese art lay in Chinese art, this did not in any way enhance the status of Chinese art in the international discourse. Western critics often criticized the alleged stagnation of Chinese art after the Song Dynasty. They claimed that only the Chinese art from the period before the Song Dynasty merited praise, while Japan had avoided stagnation by learning from the nature and thus had become the successor of the culture of the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties. This argument mirrors the image of China being closed and conservative and Japan’s westernization and progressiveness at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it had many negative consequences from the perspective of the protection of and research on traditional Chinese architecture for Chinese scholars.

Japanese architectural historian Itō Chūta (1867–1954) argued that, “[t]he culture in the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) is not only the culmination of Chinese civilization, but also the successor of Central Asian, Indian, Greek and Roman civilizations, while Japanese culture combines native Shintoism with Tang culture, thus representing the essence of Asian culture. Therefore, the Japanese culture is sufficient to lead Asia.”4 Chinese architectural historian Lai Delin incisively pointed out the intentions of Japanese scholars at that time: “If Chinese architecture begin to decline after the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), then what were the representatives of East Asian architecture in the Ming and Qing Dynasties? (Japanese architecture).”5

The First Generation of Chinese Architectural Historians and Their Studies from the 1920s to the 1940s

The first generation of Chinese architectural historians, represented by Liang Sicheng(1901–1972), Lin Huiyin(1904–1955), Tong Jun(1900–983), and Liu Dunzhen (1897–1968), started pursuing research on and make efforts to protect traditional Chinese architecture and gardens in this unfavorable international cultural context.

Having received systematic professional education in the West, these architects had a clear understanding of the value of architectural historical narratives for national cultural identity and the international status of culture from the outset. Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and Tong Jun all graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. They received a systematic education on Western architecture. While pursuing studies in the United States, they were deeply influenced by Western history, culture, and aesthetics. But they did not agree with the Western views on traditional Chinese architecture and garden arts.

During their stay in the United States, they realized that European countries attached great importance to the study of their own architectural history and achieved fruitful results. A group of architectural historians also emerged in Japan. They made great achievements in the study of the ancient architecture of their country and extended their range of study to Chinese architecture. This situation brought a sense of urgency for Chinese scholars. They started research on Chinese architecture and gardens in part out of fear of leaving this field of research under the domination of Western and Japanese hegemony.

Liang Sicheng was the eldest son of Liang Qichao, a prominent politician and historian in modern China who was one of the leaders who advocated for the Hundred Days’ Reform. Liang Qichao deeply understood the importance of architectural history in national culture. Therefore, he had high hopes for Liang Sicheng and his daughter-in-law Lin Huiyin’s research on Chinese architectural history. During their studies in the United States, Liang Qichao sent them the recently rediscovered Chinese traditional architectural technical treatise Yingzao Fashi (Treatise on Architectural Methods or State Building Standards), first printed in 1103. He inscribed a message on the title page, urging them to conduct in-depth research: “This masterpiece from a thousand years ago can be a great treasure for our cultural heritage.”6 Therefore, during their studies in the United States, Liang and Lin had already begun to attempt to create a modern Chinese national and social identity through their research on traditional Chinese architectural history.

Lin Huiyin hailed from a distinguished background and had already established herself as a celebrated poet, novelist, and literary figure prior to her engagement to Liang Sicheng. During their studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she encountered barriers in pursuing the study of architecture due to its male-dominated nature at the time, leading her to enroll in the art department while auditing courses in architecture. In contrast, Liang Sicheng faced no such impediments in the architecture department. Despite encountering discrimination, Lin excelled academically and was appointed as a teaching assistant in the architecture department. As the sole woman in the field of modern Chinese architecture, Lin endured unfair treatment throughout her life, yet her exceptional talent ensured that her accomplishments were not overshadowed by her husband. Her exceptional literary abilities and profound insights rendered her writing accessible to the public, and her scholarly works and essays contributed to the heightened recognition of ancient Chinese architectural art among the broader public.

Northeastern University and Chinese architecture education

When the first generation of architectural historians came back China from their studies abroad, they built education in modern Chinese architecture from its foundations. In 1928, Liang and Lin returned to China after having graduated. They joined the architecture department at Northeastern University in Shenyang. The department had been founded a month earlier, and Liang and Lin became the only two teachers in the department for the first academic year. In 1930, Tong Jun also returned from the United States, and joined them as a colleague.

The three earliest teachers at Northeastern University graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. They built the architectural curriculum on the basis of the fine arts Beaux-Arts traditions in the United States. Meanwhile, they began to construct the discipline of Chinese architectural history. In the following years, they started three courses for East Asian arts studies: History of Oriental Architecture, History of Oriental Sculpture, and History of Oriental Art.

Liang Sicheng also started to survey and study traditional Chinese architecture in this period. He believed that, in order to sort out the development process of Chinese architecture, modern architectural theories and methods must be adopted. He therefore attached great importance to the investigation of architectural heritage. In one article, he made the important statement concerning methodology that, “[t]he study of traditional Chinese architecture cannot be conducted without field investigation, surveys, and mapping.”7 Moreover, he sought to confirm the descriptions and records in historical architectural documents such as Yingzao Fashi by discovering evidence.

Shenyang had once been the capital of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. There were many royal buildings in the city, which undoubtedly provided rich cases for Liang Sicheng’s study of traditional architecture. Liang’s first survey subject was the Northern Mausoleum of the Qing Dynasty, the Zhaoling Mausoleum, located in the suburbs of Shenyang. The experience he gained from this project became the foundation for his future fieldwork in architecture investigation and research.

He also began his efforts to further the preservation of traditional architectures in China in this period. According to Fei Weimei,8 the mayor of Shenyang decided to demolish the old Bell and Drum Towers on the grounds that it was a hindrance to traffic. When Liang heard this news, he approached the municipal authorities, hoping to preserve the ancient buildings and find another solution to the traffic problem. However, his proposal was rejected. This incident became one of the considerations that prompted Liang to resign from Northeastern University.

In the winter of 1930, Lin Huiyin returned to Peiping (Beijing) to recuperate due to a relapse of tuberculosis. In February 1931, Liang Sicheng handed over his work in the Architecture Department to his colleague Tong Jun. He left Northeastern University in June, returned to Peiping and joined Yingzao Xueshe (The Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture).

A mere three months after Tong Jun had taken over as dean of the department, Japanese troops invaded northeast China. Tong strove to meet his responsibilities during the war. He led the teachers and students of Northeastern University into exile in the south. He endeavored to give lectures to the remaining students until they graduated.

Yingzao Xueshe and the study of traditional Chinese architecture

Yingzao Xueshe, or the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture, was founded by Zhu Qiqian (1872–1964) in 1930. It was the first academic group in modern China for the study of traditional architecture. Liang and Lin became the leading members of the society after they had fully enrolled in 1931. Another leading member was Liu Dunzhen.

The scholars of architectural history had a clear understanding that their work could serve as a means of resistance against colonial narratives. In 1932, Lin Huiyin published an article titled “On Several Characteristics of Chinese Architecture,” in which she pointed out that

Chinese architecture is the most prominent independent system in the East, with profound origins and a simple evolutionary process. Throughout the ages, it has maintained a consistent inheritance and orderly development, without undergoing complex changes due to external influences. ... Compared to architectural styles from various Eastern and Western traditions, it represents an exceptionally unique and coherent system. ... However, the national history of this architecture is not simple, and it is not lacking in various religious, ideological, and political transformations.

This argument was a candid refutation of Fletcher’s “Tree of Architecture,” and Lin Huiyin also noted that,

[b]ecause the subsequent Chinese architecture reached a level of complexity and exquisite artistry in structure and art, its external appearance still presents a simple and unadorned atmosphere. Ordinary people often misunderstand Chinese architecture as fundamentally crude and underdeveloped, inferior and immature compared to other architectural styles. This misconception originally stemmed from the careless observations of Westerners toward Eastern culture, often leading to hasty and rash conclusions that influenced Chinese people themselves to excessively doubt or even disdain their own art. ... The contributions of outsiders to the discourse on Chinese architecture are still very few, and many areas still require urgent attention from our architects to pursue material research, correction of misconceptions, and valuable exploration, thus rectifying many misunderstandings and errors made by outsiders.9

These scholars were always patriots, and their love of their country was intertwined with their dedication to their work. Their research on Chinese architecture was aimed at glorifying their motherland and resisting the Japanese.

In June 1932, Lin Huiyin wrote to Hu Shi,10 mentioning Liang Sicheng’s departure to investigate the Baodi Guangji Temple, saying, “[w]e are waiting eagerly for his detailed survey maps and reports to be published, which will surely astonish the Japanese scholars.” In 1935, when the Japanese brutally shut down the Da Gong Bao (Impartial Daily) newspaper and launched the Asian People’s Newspaper, she was outraged and wrote to Shen Congwen11 to encourage him to condemn the Japanese.12

That year, Japan’s imperialist ambitions in China had become apparent, and the situation was increasingly tense. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin felt immense pressure to complete the survey of ancient buildings in northern China before the aggressors invaded on a large scale, fearing that once the war had broken out, the essence of these national cultural treasures would be reduced to ashes in enemy fire. Liang Sicheng said, “[o]ur days of working in northern China are numbered. Before we are stopped from doing so, we have decided to make full efforts in this area.” The Japanese claimed that there could not possibly be Tang Dynasty wooden structures in China, and Chinese people could only go to Nara to see them, but Liang and Lin always believed that there must still be Tang Dynasty wooden structures in China, and he decided to go on a difficult search. After the Lugou Bridge Incident in July 1937, Lin wrote to her nine-year-old daughter, telling her that “the Japanese are coming to occupy Peiping, and we are all willing to fight” and asking her “not to be afraid of war, not to be afraid of the Japanese.”13

From 1932 to 1937, the members of the Society led by Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen conducted a large-scale survey of traditional works of architecture. With the results of the survey, they conducted in-depth research on important issues related to the history of Chinese architecture, and they made many achievements that have had an important impact on the field. Before the Second Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, the members of the Society led by Liang and Liu had successively investigated 1,832 works of traditional architecture in 137 counties and cities, surveyed 206 groups of works of traditional architecture in detail, and completed 1,898 survey drawings.14

The first field investigation led by Liang was for the Mountain Gate of the Du Le Temple Kuanyin Pavilion in Ji Count in 1932. The research was published in the Bulletin of the Society for the Research in Chinese Architecture (vol. 3, no. 2).15 After the report was published, it attracted great attention among academic circles at home and abroad. It was the first time that Chinese scholars had studied a work of traditional Chinese architecture with modern scientific methods, and it thus become a milestone in the study of traditional Chinese architecture.

The survey by Liang’s team confirmed that the mountain gate of the Du Le Temple had been built in 984 AD under the Liao Dynasty. It was the oldest wooden structure in China known at that time. Liang analyzed the dimensions of the building structures in the Du Le Temple, and he compared the construction dimensions of the buildings with the recordings from the era of the Song Dynasty in Yingzao Fashi. The structures intuitively show the basic patterns of architecture from the Song Dynasty. Thus, on the basis of the evidence found in the Du Le temple, the written records in Yingzao Fashi had been interpreted clearly and accurately. Thus answered many questions which, until then, had puzzled scholars.

In 1937, Yingzao Xueshe accomplished another important achievement. The team led by Liang and Lin discovered and surveyed in detail the wooden structure of the Fo Guang Temple in Wutai Mountains, which had been built in 857 AD under the Tang Dynasty.

Tang Dynasty architecture represents the highest achievements of ancient Chinese wooden architecture. At the time, no one knew whether there were any remaining examples of wooden structures from the Tang Dynasty in China. Japanese scholars asserted that there were no wooden structure remains from the Tang Dynasty in China, and they claimed that wooden structures from the Tang Dynasty had only been preserved in Nara, Japan.

Liang believed that there were still Tang Dynasty structures in China. When he was sorting out the materials of the Mo Kao Grottoes in Dunhuang in the Gansu province, Liang noticed a temple in the murals painted under the Song Dynasty in cave No. 61. He realized that the edifice might still exist because of its remote location. With this hope in mind, Liang took the Fo Guang Temple as his first choice for investigation when he was planning his fourth visit to Shanxi. Their investigation found that the main building of the Fo Guang Temple was well-preserved, and its wooden structure was a typical example of the Tang Dynasty architectural style.

Precisely when Liang and Lin set out to survey the Fo Guang Temple, Japan intensified its war against China. Liang and Lin had to end their project in a hurry and return to Peiping. After that, the Yingzao Xueshe was temporarily dissolved. The members left Peiping and began to live in exile in the southern provinces. After the Yingzao Xueshe began to function again in Kunming, Yunnan province, Liang and his colleagues continued their research under extremely difficult circumstances. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, members of the Society lacked funds and research materials, and it was difficult for them to ensure their own personal safety. These difficulties notwithstanding, they kept on with their academic research. The Society carried out surveys of works of traditional architecture in southwest China another three times.

The research findings concerning the Fo Guang Temple were not systematically published on schedule because of the outbreak of war. In July 1941, Liang published an article in English in Asia Magazine titled “China’s Oldest Wooden Structure.”16 The article focuses on the investigation process of the Fo Guang Temple, which did not include the surveying data. Although the research findings were not fully revealed, Liang confirmed that the main building of Fo Guang Temple is a wooden structure from the Tang Dynasty, and this revelation came as a shock to academic circles. In 1944 and 1945, Yingzao Xueshe published the last two issues of the Bulletin of the Society for the Research in Chinese Architecture (vol. 7, no. 1 and 2) in Lizhuang, Sichuan. In these two issues, the discovery of the Fo Guang Temple discovery and related research findings were finally announced.17

At the same time, the focus of the work of the Society shifted to research on previous documents. Liang and his colleagues pursued penetrating research on Yingzao Fashi. They sorted out the development process of traditional Chinese architecture and compiled The History of Chinese Architecture, which included the findings of their investigations. The History of Chinese Architecture18was completed in 1944. At the same time, Liang began to write the English version of the book, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types,19 which was published in the United States in 1984. In the book, Liang specifically drew several illustrations to show the evolution of Chinese architecture, in part as a protest against Fletcher’s contentions concerning Chinese architecture.

The research by Chinese scholars surpassed the work of their foreign peers. Architectural historian Fu Xinian later commented on the survey report of the Du Le Temple, saying, “[t]his work not only surpassed the level of European, American and Japanese research on ancient Chinese architecture at that time, but also surpassed the depth of Japanese research on Japanese architecture at that time, it was the in-depth exploration of ancient architectural design pattern through form.”20

Before Liang Sicheng and his colleagues began to study traditional Chinese architecture, Japanese researchers made several contemptuous comments concerning the efforts of Chinese scholars. Japanese architectural historians Ito Chuta21 and Tadashi Sekino both contended that the study of Chinese architectural history could only be done by the Japanese, since Chinese scholars allegedly lacked the skill for scientific surveys and investigations (Ito Chuta, Chinese Architecture History, 1925; Tadashi Sekino, Relics of Ancient Chinese Culture, 1918).22 However, after the publication of research conducted by the Chinese architectural historians, they no longer made these kinds of comments. And in their study of Chinese architecture, they often cited publications by Chinese researchers.

The protection of traditional cities during World War II

In the later stages of World War II, Liang Sicheng and his colleagues began to use their professional literacy to help further the protection of traditional cities from the destruction of war. During the final stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Liang Sicheng and his colleagues helped the Allied and People’s Liberation Army compile catalogues of cultural relics on many occasions. Many sites in cities in China and even in Japan were spared damage as a consequence of their efforts.

In 1944, the Allies planned to strike back against Japan in a comprehensive, devastating manner. In the summer, Liang went to Chongqing to help mark culture relics on military maps. His work included not only maps of mainland China, but also maps of Japanese cities, including Kyoto and Nara.

In order to ensure that the cultural relics and historical sites were not damaged during the attack, Liang marked the locations of historical sites on the maps and compiled a catalogue of cultural relics and buildings in both Chinese and English. The complete catalogue consists of eight volumes, including nearly 400 buildings which are important cultural relic buildings, covering 15 provinces and cities in the occupied area.23 He also included a note on the “Principle of Identification of Ancient Buildings” at the beginning of each volume.

In the spring of 1949, in order to protect the cultural relics from damage during the civil war, Liang Sicheng was commissioned by the People’s Liberation Army to organize the teachers in the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University to compile a “Brief List of Important National Cultural Relic Buildings.” This was the first important document on the history of cultural relics’ protection in the People’s Republic of China. Most of the participants were members of the Yingzao Xueshe, and they used the survey data accumulated by the Society. Therefore, this document should still be regarded as the last academic achievement under the name of the Yingzao Xueshe.24

Protection of Chinese Traditional Cities after World War II (1950s)

A failed reform of architecture education

In October 1946, Zhu Qiqian, Liang Sicheng, and Tsinghua University signed an agreement to merge the Yingzao Xueshe into Tsinghua University. The materials and collections of the Society were also transferred to the Architecture Department of Tsinghua University. This marked the end of the history of Yingzao Xueshe as an independent academic research institution.25

From 1946 to 1947, Liang was invited to serve as a visiting professor at Yale University and to attend the International Symposium on Far Eastern Culture and Society hosted by Princeton University.26 After returning to China from the United States, Liang proposed reforming architectural education according to the new trends in modern architectural education in Europe and the United States. He advocated abandoning the traditional “Beaux-Arts” curriculum, which approached architecture as one of the fine arts, and using the Bauhaus method for teaching.27

In the 1920s and 1930s, architecture theories in Europe and the countries of North America changed dramatically. An approach based on a classicism aesthetics was replaced by modernist trends. The Bauhaus method was a new teaching method which adapted to this new trend and was widely accepted. It became the mainstream in architecture education. Liang believed that the Bauhaus method represented the new direction in international architectural education, and in his assessment, it was more suitable for educating the future architects for the reconstruction of postwar China. He suggested that Tsinghua University adopt the new Bauhaus education system.28

His new curriculum plan also reflected strong liberal education characteristics. It included social science courses, such as Sociology, Economics, Physical Environment and Society, Rural Sociology, Urban Sociology, Municipal Management, and courses on architectural history and art history, such as the History of European and American Architecture, the History of Chinese Architecture, the History of European and American Paintings and sculpture, and the History of Chinese Paintings sculptures.29 Together with more narrowly specialized courses in the profession, these courses offered a comprehensive curriculum which offered students a rich knowledge in the fields of society, engineering, and art. The new curriculum was intended to stimulate the modern architect’s research interests and enhance his or her sense of social responsibility.30

Liang’s education reform only lasted from 1947 to 1952. After 1952, the Soviet model of higher education gradually became dominant in China. The mainstream architectural style in the Soviet Union during this period changed from constructivism to classicism. And the Soviet architectural education program also completely returned to the traditional system resting on an approach to architecture as one of the fine arts.31

Soviet experts such as A. S. Mukhin and E. A. Ashchepkov came to China and brought with them the concepts of Soviet architectural education. Soviet experts’ opinions became decisive in the formulation of the syllabuses in departments of architecture. Many colleges and universities adopted the architectural education system of the Soviet Union. The Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University gave up the newly adopted Bauhaus teaching mode and focused on principles of classical aesthetics.

Ashchepkov came to the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University in 1952. He had developed an architecture curriculum in the Soviet Union in 1948, and he specified a new teaching plan with the reference to the “plan proposed in the summary of the Tenth Congress of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1951.”32 Drawing on the Soviet model, Tsinghua University revised the curriculum according to the template of the Moscow Institute of Architecture. The exploration of modern architectural education in Tsinghua was suspended.

Struggles to protect architectural heritage

Another one of Liang Sicheng’s contributions in the 1950s was to call for the protection of architectural heritage, particularly the old city of Beijing, also named Peiping before 1949. Since the tenth century AD, the city had served as the capital of China for five different dynasties. After having been chosen as the capital of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing faced the challenges of large-scale urban renewal to cope with the pressure of the official entry of the Central People’s Government.

In January 1949, Peiping was peacefully liberated, and most of the traditional architecture was saved from damage. What was even more valuable was Beijing’s overall layout as a traditional ancient capital. Liang repeatedly emphasized that Beijing’s special value lies first and foremost in its urban layout as a whole. For this reason, he suggested “first recognizing the excellent structure of Beijing City’s layout, and the architectural monuments in Beijing should be protected as a comprehensive system. They are the world’s best-preserved, most special, and most precious masterpieces of art.”33

After the government agencies moved into the city, the urban area of Peiping became crowded. Many palaces, temples and old buildings were in danger of being requisitioned by the government. Due to the lack of systemic regulations, the new construction work in Peiping was also in a disorderly state.

The protection of the old city of Beijing in the urban renewal plans was a foremost issue among Chinese experts and scholars. As a member of the newly established Peiping Urban Planning Committee, Liang wrote to the new mayor of the city in 1949, expressing his concerns about the disorderly development and putting forward suggestions on how to solve this problem.

In May 1949, the Peiping Municipal Government organized a meeting to discuss the plans for the new urban area in the western suburbs of Peiping. Liang Sicheng and other scholars were invited to the meeting. Liang pointed out that the administrative center of Peiping and the central government should be positioned in the new urban area in the western suburb. The old city of Beijing would thus be surrounded by the city wall, and the Forbidden City, which would be the center, would remain intact. The future development of Beijing, he felt, should be founded on this idea. The municipal government showed keen interest in the plan for the new western suburb at the meeting.

However, the situation changed when Soviet experts arrived in Peiping. In September 1949, the Soviet Union sent a group of 17 municipal experts led by P. V. Abramov to Peiping. Their goals were to guide the urban construction in Beijing, drawing on the experiences gathered during the construction or reconstruction of Soviet cities. The Peiping Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government quickly changed their opinion on the plan provided by Chinese scholars and agreed with the urban plan proposed by Soviet experts. One of the key changes made by the Soviet experts was the choice of the location of the administrative center. The new administrative center was set within the original urban area, more specifically, the new urban plan was set with the Forbidden City as the center.

At the city planning report meeting in November 1949, Liang Sicheng and other Chinese experts had an intense discussion on the report submitted by the Soviet experts. Liang Sicheng did not agree with the Soviet experts on multiple issues. The Soviet experts also expressed their opinions on the reports of Liang and sharply criticized him. Abramov claimed that his design ideas were based on the opinions of the leaders of the Communist Party of China. He criticized the European and American urban planning and heritage protection concepts reflected in Liang Sicheng’s speech. And he cited in particular the case of the reconstruction of Moscow as his supporting example to criticize Liang Sicheng’s idea of putting the new administrative center in the western suburbs in order to protect the old city of Beijing.

Liang Sicheng did not agree with the Soviet experts at the meeting. Regarding the importance and urgency of formulating an urban plan for Beijing, Liang and planning expert Chen Zhanxiang felt that it was necessary to express their understanding comprehensively in a detailed counterproposal. In February 1950, Liang and Chen completed the “Proposal on the Location of the Administrative Central District of the Central People’s Government,” which was later called the “Liang-Chen Proposal.” In this proposal, they offered a detailed urban plan for the new administrative central district in the western suburbs of the city.

To win more support, Liang and Chen printed more than 100 copies of the proposal at their own expense and distributed the copies among the officials of the Beijing Municipal Government. However, two months passed and they did not get any feedback. In April, Liang wrote to the Premier Zhou Enlai, hoping to gain an opportunity to introduce the proposal to him. He did not get any reply.

Over the course of the next few months, the Liang-Chen proposal drew criticism from different parties. The main accusation was that it was an objection to the opinions of Soviet experts. The attempt to build the new administrative center outside the old urban area of Beijing failed. In 1952, Soviet experts became the main sources of decisive guidance in all professions. Chinese experts such as Liang were marginalized.

The construction of the new administrative center in the old urban area of Beijing caused massive, chaotic upheaval. Many buildings that were part of China’s architectural heritage in Beijing were at risk. One demonstrative example was the demolition of the city wall of Beijing.

In Liang’s opinion, the city wall of Beijing was an important part of China’s cultural heritage as a whole. Liang had once provided a design to transform the old city wall into a high-rise park around the city. In his design, the main body of the city wall was preserved as a recreational area for the citizenry, and new city gates could be opened to adapt to new transportation demands. Regarding the protection of elements of China’s cultural heritage under the new construction project, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin raised a number of objections in different forms. However, they often failed in their struggle. The city wall and many traditional buildings in Beijing were demolished in the later years.

Conclusion

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the study and struggle of the first generation of architectural historians showed many respectable qualities of Chinese scholars. They started their research as part of an effort to challenge Western and Japanese hegemonies. They introduced modern architectural education in China from abroad. In the 1930s, they investigated and surveyed a large number of Chinese architectural monuments and gardens to fight against prejudices in the international academic world against Chinese culture.

After the beginning of World War II, they struggled to continue their teaching and research under Japanese occupation. While their personal safety was threatened by the war, they strove to pursue their research and professional practice. They also managed to transfer their students and to continue their teaching.

After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, they started the reform of architectural education and called for protection of important elements of China’s architectural and landscape heritage in the industrialization movement in the 1950s. The Liang-Chen Proposal, Liang’s urban planning proposal to preserve old Beijing, was turned down due to the objections made by Soviet experts. Liang protested many times against the demolition of important historical works of architecture.

Whether oppression came from the West, Japan, or the Soviet Union, the first-generation architectural historians in China always kept their independent mind and professional attitudes. They faced many setbacks in their efforts, but their research saved many historical works of architecture and important elements of cityscapes from been ruined by the war, both in China and Japan. Their surveys and investigations offered invaluable documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage that disappeared in the war and in the subsequent industrialization movements. Their ideas still play an important role in Chinese cultural heritage conservation today. They established the modern discipline of architecture in China. Their persisting struggle revealed the unyielding independence and dignity of modern Chinese intellectuals.

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Historians Resisting Tyranny: A Preliminary Evaluation

Antoon De Baets

University of Groningen

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):39-58 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.39

Since time immemorial, dictators have censored the writing of history and persecuted its practitioners. This policy of history censorship has had many effects, some of which were unintended, such as the development of strategies to counter the distortion of history. This essay therefore opens with a summary overview of the intended and unintended effects of the censorship of the science of history. Against this backdrop, the essay then focuses on one unintended effect of this censorship: resistance to the distortion of history. A tableau is given of the repertoires of available types of resistance under dictatorships and, for comparative purposes, in democracies. The essay uses these repertoires to analyze the resistance of the historians under dictatorships from four perspectives: actors (historians and others); conduct (acts and omissions), motives (ethical, moral, professional, and political), and impact (short-term and long-term). The essay is intended as a tribute, both to historians who once resisted tyrannical power and to historians who retell their stories as an inspiration for present and future battles.

Keywords: actors of resistance, conduct of resistance, censorship of history, professional solidarity, repertoires of resistance.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney1

You did not survive in order to live

your time is short you must bear witness

have courage when reason fails have courage

in the last count only that matters.

Zbigniew Herbert2

Introduction

Over the course of the ages, dictators have often censored historians, and this policy has had multiple intended and unintended effects. Some of the intended effects of censorship have undermined historical writing directly. Censorship produces a shredder effect, when it leads to the destruction of data, a distortion effect, when it falsifies or invents data, and an omission effect, when it conceals data.3 The cumulative result of these three effects is a survivorship bias at the level of sources and their analytical treatment: censorship distorts the overall record of the past.4 The intended effects of censorship may also undermine historical writing indirectly via the impact on historians and their audiences: censorship produces a corrupting effect,when historians are co-opted or seduced into collaborating with the repressive system or into tolerating its propaganda and distortions; a chilling effect, when it intimidates and deters the expression of opinions, meanwhile encouraging obedience and self-censorship in censored and third parties; an elimination effect, when it removes unwelcome critical actors from the historiographical scene, either temporarily or permanently; and a sterility effect, when the caricatural history created by censorship and propaganda discourages openness, diminishes creativity, and creates a credibility gap, provoking a crisis of public trust in historical writing which can last far beyond the abolition of the dictatorship and its censorship apparatus.

Censorship has unintended effects as well, that is, unintended by the dictators and their censors. These effects emanate from the targets of censorship and counter the intended effects. The most important direct unintended effect is the backfire effect, which emerges spontaneously when the weak credibility of official versions of history in nondemocratic regimes directs collective curiosity toward the historical taboos created by these regimes. Other direct unintended effects are less spontaneous and are rather a calculated product of individual and collective decisions to form counterstrategies to stop the assaults launched by power. They include a resistance effect, when historians oppose censorship privately or publicly, passively or actively; a solidarity effect,whenthird parties start supporting censored historians openly or covertly, materially or morally; a substitution effect, when novelists, poets, and filmmakers take the place of censored historians and become vicarious messengers of history; and a rescue effect, when censorship triggers attempts to save manuscripts, books, archives, and heritage at risk of destruction. Some direct unintended effects appear immediately after the collapse of a dictatorship, such as a restitution effect, when censored works are republished in their original versions, and a survival effect, when censored historians are rehabilitated after the abolition of censorship, leading to at least a partial restoration of the previous situation.

In the longer term, unintended indirect effects may also emerge: an integrity effect, when the distortions of history are exposed, thereby restoring intellectual honesty and protecting the integrity of history; a memory effect, when stories of resistance and courage in the face of censorship are told and retold and inspire; a therapeutic effect, when these stories suggest remedies to act; and, finally, a preventive effect, when the cumulative unintended effects of censorship help safeguard responsible notions of historical truth, reestablish public trust in history and prevent the recurrence of censorship.

In the following reflections, I examine ways in which historians have organized resistance to censorship under dictatorships all over the world since 1945, often at great risk. When battling tyranny, historians have of course been active in other roles, for instance as academics, journalists, politicians, and human rights and peace activists, but these kinds of roles are only relevant here to the extent that they have a clear link with the past. In addition, it is worth keeping in mind that resistance to censorship in the historical profession was usually the affair of a minority. This does not mean that the majority was a homogenous and willing mass. Some actively collaborated with the dictator, while others merely acquiesced to their fates. As we shall see, the historians who remained silent were the hardest to gauge.5

Readers who are looking for specific examples of acts of resistance by historians will be disappointed. I have given examples of such acts in abundance elsewhere.6 This time, my purpose is different. I reflect on the evidence on a global scale and embark on a preliminary attempt to evaluate the results of the resistance to the distortion of history, discussing in the process whether acts of resistance actually furthered the ultimate goal: saving the integrity of memory and history. First, I give an overview of the repertoires of available types of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships.7 In order to put this into a comparative context, I also review the repertoires of types of resistance used by historians against the distortion of history in democracies. I then discuss the resistance of historians from four perspectives: the actors of resistance (historians and others); the conduct of resistance (acts and omissions), the motives for resistance (ethical, moral, professional, and political), and the impact (short-term and long-term) of resistance.

Repertoires of Resistance to the Distortion of History under Dictatorships

In the following overview of the repertoires at the disposal of dissident historians to resist the distortion of history under dictatorships, twenty-five types of resistance are distinguished.8 They cover a broad range of activities in four concentric layers: resistance from prison, private resistance outside prison, public resistance outside prison, and, finally, outsider shows of solidarity, usually by actors living in democracies but sometimes also by people living under other dictatorships. The general line is to start with the more invisible and private activities and move gradually to more public and defiant ways of resistance, although it proved difficult to catch the diverse reality of resistance on a simple scale from invisibility to publicity.

Table 1. Repertoires of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships9

Resistance from prison. Prison may seem an unlikely place to start an overview of repertoires of forms of resistance, but there are relatively numerous reports about historians who read history in their cells and kept diaries or notebooks in which they penned thoughts of a historical nature. Some inmates who were not historians, when given the opportunity, were able to obtain history degrees through correspondence courses. A few authors drafted historical novels in prison, and others were able to conduct some historical research and work on historical manuscripts. A few also knew of channels with which they could smuggle their writings out of prison. Next to these usually solitary activities, there were also more interactive moments, for instance when detainees taught history to their fellow inmates. However, this happened only rarely.

Private resistance outside prison. One cannot save a profession when its professionals are left in the dark. Many historians living in repressive contexts have demonstrated solidarity with their persecuted colleagues and discreetly supported them. The Czechoslovak philosopher of history Jan Patočka, one of the dissident intellectuals who deeply thought about the phenomenon of resistance, called this the “solidarity of the shaken.”10 I call it “insider solidarity.”

At the level of historical knowledge, academics, teachers, and students were sometimes able to organize petitions to rescue innovative history textbooks or to protest against biased ones. When circumstances allowed, historians who were internally displaced in times of civil war helped set up refugee campuses in remote areas of their home countries. Occasionally, archival information was smuggled abroad. Undercover teaching and unofficial lectures during secret seminars were options in several countries. This secret teaching and lecturing sometimes spilled over into unofficial discussions held on a small scale in private homes. These informal gatherings were the metaphorical oxygen which sustained underground historical writing in many dictatorships.

Dissident historical research could take different shapes. Some historians witnessed the repression unfolding before their eyes and documented it as eyewitnesses in real time to rescue sources and create a basis for future study. Another mode of resistance was the secret collection and analysis of data, for example by copying documents clandestinely. Not surprisingly, such covert research concentrated on the blank spots of history. In semi-repressive or politically hybrid contexts, it was sometimes even possible to publish reports about the repression experienced by the historical profession. A few historians became attracted to the gray zones, blank spots, and black holes of censorship and shifted their research toward the historical taboos, or if they had already made these areas the focus of their work, then they stubbornly refused to shift away from them or to withdraw into safer spaces of research. Writing about the past to critically comment on the present was a frequent technique of historical analogy which was intended to call telling precedents to mind to arouse historical consciousness and briefly create a sense of connection over time. Numerous historians preferred to publish their manuscripts in self-made editions and distribute them in small underground circles.

Public resistance outside prison. Some historians opted for public confrontation with tyranny by attacking, if not destroying, the historical myths that buttressed dictatorial power. They openly doubted the authenticity of ancient legends that supported the legitimacy of the authoritarian political system, and they endured much hostility for having done so. Others criticized the official rewriting of history with its blank spots by publicly and directly advocating a right to historical truth and by defending the intrinsic value of the methodical search for such truth. Another powerful public tool was the organization of peaceful public commemorations, for example, at the foot of a well-known monument, on a significant historical anniversary, or during the funeral of a colleague or public figure. If these kinds of commemorations served as rallying points for political opposition, they were frequently perceived as threats to the public order.

Sometimes, historians secretly collected sources to indict the leaders of their countries in the hopes of someday even seeing them actually be prosecuted. In some countries, appeals were issued to prosecute deceased leaders for the human rights violations that they had ordered or committed during their rule. Though legally impossible (since the dead cannot be indicted or prosecuted), such appeals were nevertheless powerful history lessons. Surprisingly enough, there were several such calls to indict deceased leaders, and some even led to posthumous trials against deceased heads of state.11

On multiple occasions, dissidents emphasized the unbreakable bond between a free and responsible historical profession and democracy, arguing that a democratic society alone respects the human rights necessary to allow the historical profession to thrive. Some even sent dramatic appeals to the head of state with complaints about the deplorable conditions of the historical profession. If the letters were private, they could be neglected, though they could also spark harassment of and persecution against their authors; if these letters were (or became) public or when they were cast and distributed as public memoranda, they often made retaliation against their authors unavoidable if the regime did not want to lose face, though this was a risky strategy that could backfire.

Some historians defied the repression of their craft by making gestures of disobedience calculated for maximum symbolic impact. They usually proceeded by surprise, and mostly at great personal sacrifice. In this sense, giving public talks with a critical approach to history was often an act of bravery. Resigning from one’s job or position or refusing to sign a loyalty declaration or take a loyalty oath to the ruling elite or ideology were other signs of courage.

Sometimes resistance came with a delay, when a single copy of a book believed to be entirely destroyed suddenly emerged after years or decades and led to reprints. Likewise, now and then, manuscripts that had been thought lost were rediscovered. Although often the product of coincidence but not infrequently also of secret rescue plans, such discoveries offer us glimpses of the survival and rescue effects and the subtle satisfaction of delayed revenge. We could call this resistance after the fact.

Outsider solidarity. If historians living under dictatorial regimes dared take advantage of international conferences abroad as platforms to publicize their plight, they faced expulsion or charges of “enemy propaganda” or “treason” upon their return, if they were allowed re-entry at all. When we turn our attention to the historians who lived in exile, we see that many of them smuggled sources and works from abroad back home or stayed discreetly in contact with those left behind via networks of messengers. A significant minority of these exiled historians established publication outlets and historical institutions abroad, including study centers and universities in exile, to make the critical voices about the history of their home countries heard. Much of this work was public and sometimes highly visible. The same could be said about signs of moral or material solidarity by diaspora historians with their persecuted compatriots, such as signing petitions in protest against the dictatorship’s history politics or as part of efforts to boost the morale of those left behind.

Many of these types of resistance to dictatorships were strengthened by tokens of professional solidarity in democratic or even in other dictatorial countries. This outsider solidarity was not free of risk. The harshest punishment for historians living in democracies who wished to help repressed colleagues living under dictatorships was to end up on a visa blacklist, which in many cases forced them to change specialisms or even careers. As a sign of moral solidarity, some waged campaigns for their persecuted colleagues, for instance by signing petitions and statements or writing letters of protest to repressive authorities.12 National history associations sometimes refused to send their delegates to conferences in problematic countries, and international history associations could block certain countries from acting as hosts for their congresses. Some scholars resigned their membership in foreign academies or returned distinctions. And many historians used their freedom to write or teach uninhibitedly about the controversial aspects, blank spots, and falsified histories of tyrannical regimes. These gestures were signs of moral and symbolic solidarity.

Some went further and organized forms of material solidarity by creating safe havens in democratic countries. Much cultural heritage was safeguarded in this way, including archives. Material solidarity also extended to people. When they were lucky, refugee historians were offered a welcome and sometimes employment upon arrival in their host countries. In short, transnational networks of solidarity played their own role in the history of resistance.

The repertoires of resistance under dictatorships presented above need further refinement and are far from exhaustive. Nevertheless, as they are based on dozens of post-1945 examples collected from all over the world, they should give a reliable picture of the tools available to historians living under repressive regimes. How many historians actually used them depended on many variables, such as the intensity and duration of the dictatorship, the strength of its repression apparatus, the population size and mobilization power of the historical community and institutions, and the connections this community had with the outside world. In the case of the more public activities identified above, we are certainly talking about a small minority of historians in any given dictatorship.

Repertoires of Resistance to the Distortion of History in Democracies

It would be a serious mistake to believe that democracies were immune to assaults on the integrity of history and memory—and that the historians in these democracies were therefore unfamiliar with the phenomenon of resistance. The difference with dictatorships is not that democracies endure fewer attacks on the historical profession but that these attacks are less devastating in their effects and are usually countered at an early stage and with less fear of retaliation. The paramount cause for this difference is, of course, the stronger position of the right to freedom of expression in democracies.

In myriad ways, historians living in democracies could and did actively contribute to the creation of a domestic and global climate in which history is studied responsibly. The following bird eye’s view of seventeen modalities gives an impression of the array of tools at their disposal.

Table 2. Repertoires of resistance to the distortion of history in democracies13

The search for historical truth so central to the work of historians harbors several dimensions of resistance. Some overlap, such as, for example, the refutation of historical myths, historical disinformation, and propaganda on the one hand and the fight against the intentional denial of corroborated past genocides and other crimes on the other. The uncontested proliferation of myth, falsity, and denial, especially online, undermines society’s trust in the reliable knowledge produced by responsible history practitioners. Another dimension starts from the premise that it is the task of the community of historians to study the past in its entirety, including its dark episodes. If this premise is valid, it follows that it is historians’ collective duty to pay due attention to the taboos of history and areas of history shrouded in secrecy.

Explicit and structural attention to the ethical and moral dimensions of historical scholarship is often still lacking in scores of academic history curricula, yet where it is taught, it can contribute powerfully to a climate of responsible history. Part of this dimension lies in developing an awareness of the presence of abuses of history and of the different modes of opposing them: prevention, investigation, disclosure, and sanction.

Campaigning for effective laws that encourage freedom of expression, freedom of information, and archival access is a long-term legal strategy which requires perseverance. Denouncing laws with provisions that unreasonably limit access to records is usually part of this strategy. More generally, any laws that produce chilling effects on the freedom of expression about the past (for example, defamation laws that impose criminal sanctions or disproportional damages) should be denounced. The tendency of states to promulgate memory laws that prescribe the desired content of historical debate and/or proscribe alternative views of the past also inhibits a broad understanding of the past from multiple perspectives. It is a sign of the judicialization of historical content and should be opposed.

Action can shift from the legal to the political level. Attempts of the government to interfere with history works it has itself commissioned should be and have been opposed. The refusal to sign loyalty declarations or take loyalty oaths was another strategy. Historians living in emerging democracies that have to deal with a repressive past of lies and secrecy may fulfill a political duty by participating in initiatives that foster transitional justice (historians’ commissions, truth commissions, tribunals, reparation and reconciliation efforts). One poignant part of this effort could be a soul-searching operation into the role of the historical profession in the previous era of repression and violence accompanied, if need be, by public apologies for its mistakes and distortions.

Recent historical injustice can be tackled with measures that fit the United Nations Reparation Principles. These principles distinguish five types of reparation: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, prevention, and satisfaction.14 The last type, satisfaction or symbolic reparation, in particular is relevant to the field of memory and history. It includes measures such as truth-finding, the search for dead bodies, posthumous rehabilitation, official apologies, commemorations, and history education about the violent episodes of the past. The number of websites dedicated to historians who suffered political repression and lost their lives is increasing.15

Outsider solidarity with those persecuted under dictatorships connects resistance under dictatorships with resistance in democracies. Similarly, solidarity can also be openly shown with domestic colleagues who have been attacked or unjustly penalized or dismissed.

Scores of historians have participated in one or several of these resistance acts in democratic contexts. The democratic repertoire is discussed here mainly for comparative purposes, as the differences between forms of resistance under dictatorships and forms of resistance in democracies are large.

Actors of Resistance

The repertoires of types of resistance available under dictatorships will now be analyzed from four perspectives: agency, conduct, motivation, and impact. The purpose of this analysis is to answer the question whether resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships, as part of the wider history of resistance and freedom, made any difference. Let us first look again at the actors in the four layers of resistance: resistance from prison, private resistance outside prison, public resistance outside prison, and outsider solidarity.

Resistance from prison constitutes a special category. Doing historical research and writing history from prison, if tolerated at all, were survival strategies first of all, devised as a means of somehow giving long and tedious prison years a purpose. Resistance to the system was usually a secondary effect here. Teaching history in prison, because of its direct effect upon other inmates, served resistance purposes most. If works written in prison had any resistance effect after their publication outside prison, it was usually unintended at the moment of their creation, and the effect always came later. This did not prevent some historical works from causing a stir upon publication, not the least because of the special appeal that works written in prison have. Some became bestsellers.

Outside prison, modalities for resistance were greater, although in repressive societies the margins of freedom remained narrow and fragile. It is difficult to tell whether resistance to censorship performed outside prison generally made a difference. Private resistance was often invisible except among the smallest of circles. This makes any evaluation of its frequency and importance impossible. Public resistance regularly produced a rescue effect: the mission to safeguard sources, works, and monuments could be fulfilled in a variety of ways. When publicly protesting historians were silenced, often the substitution effect came into play. Novelists, playwrights, journalists, storytellers, and singers then took care of suppressed historical interpretations, sheltering them and keeping them alive when collective memory was in danger of extinction because the silenced and silent historians were not able to refute the heralded truths of official historical propaganda.

In addition, historians sometimes acted without intending to be part of any form of resistance, although their conduct could be or was interpreted as such. Many historians who were in prison or who remained in the privacy of their homes did not particularly identify themselves as opponents of the system. In a dictatorial context, however, merely performing the role of a professional scholar (methodically and responsibly collecting and analyzing past data, no matter where this led) was already a very political act. This is so because the scholar’s findings, when disclosed, are received in a nervous political atmosphere in which they risk rejection, regardless of the scholar’s intentions. All historians, including the most apolitical, knew that they were putting themselves in danger merely by practicing their profession in an uncompromisingly responsible manner.

If we leave the repressive context and look at outsider solidarity (i.e. gestures of moral and material solidarity made in other countries), we can speculate with a little more certainty. The success of outsider solidarity was heavily influenced by factors such as the strength of the historical craft in the country before it succumbed to tyranny; the continuity, once the dictatorship was installed, of pre-existing networks with the outside world; and the historical ties between assisting and receiving countries. But displays of solidarity always had something unpredictable: depending on political or other fashions, some countries, some historiographical traditions, some individuals, and some works aroused more sympathy than others.

If we look at the four groups of resisters more generally as intellectuals, they can enrich typologies and theories about intellectuals,16 whether or not the latter are construed according to criteria such as independence from authorities, visibility in public forums, intentionality and intensity of activity, or levels of professional, political, and social engagement. This is so because the repertoires do not show that resistance is necessarily the opposite of the ruling power. Rather, it can pervade all segments of society, including government itself. Leading intellectuals, court historians, and official historians often had small margins of freedom and criticism, and some skillfully exploited these margins, tweaked too much rigidity, or tolerated niches of resistance in and outside the official historiographical bureaucracy. Purely instrumental views of these historians as willing tools of the regime fail. Even intellectuals close to the centers of power could operate in a resistance mode now and then.

Conduct of Resistance

Any analysis of the conduct of resistance should begin with some caveats about the role of silences, the selectivity of data, and the low comparability of resistance types. To begin with, the notion of “conduct of resistance” should not be interpreted too narrowly. Resistance is usually expressed as an act. However, precisely in situations of repression, disagreement and resistance can also be expressed as an omission rather than an act, for example, when historians refuse to comply with an order or when they meet dictatorial orders with indifference, if not passive resistance. Now and then, silences are telling.17

In the same way, not all conduct of resistance is analyzed here. Many stories were not included in the database that constitutes the basis for this evaluation because they were unknown (either generally or by me). The low-profile character of private, anonymous, or pseudonymous resistance is the primary reason why much relevant conduct remains invisible. In addition, many historians very likely took care to erase all or most traces of their resistance out of safety concerns. Were these unnoticed gestures of resistance done in vain and doomed to oblivion? Do acts of resistance have to be witnessed in order to be meaningful? The answer is that every act of resistance is witnessed by at least one person, namely the actor. Any act, however small and difficult to trace, could linger on, sometimes for a fleeting moment, sometimes for years, in the mind of its creator at least, who may have felt heartened by it. Or it may have been noticed by a few others and inspired them instantly or long after the fact. Therefore, even hidden or quasi-invisible acts or gestures of resistance are meaningful. Despite this, it remains true that a regime paradox is at work: given the unequal tolerance of criticism in different regimes, there is less information about more resistance in dictatorial societies and more information about less resistance in democratic societies.

Finally, types of resistance are difficult to compare, as they span a multi-faceted spectrum of private and public activities, from silent support for clandestine acts to symbolic gestures and occasional contributions to acts of open defiance. Some acts consisted of small offstage acts done without fanfare and often hidden behind a screen of ambiguity or silence, while others required public bravery or quixotry. Some were spontaneous, occurring in a flash, while others were carefully planned or deliberately provocative and continued for years.

With these caveats in mind, it is possible to draw three cautious conclusions about the conduct of resistance. The first regards the specificity of history as compared to other scientific disciplines. Although the types of anti-dictatorial resistance presented here were deployed in the realms of history and memory, most could serve mutatis mutandis as resistance formats for other scientific disciplines as well. Helping someone flee a country, for example, basically involved a range of acts regardless of whether the refugee was a historian, a sociologist, or another type of scholar. Very few types of resistance seem unique to the historical profession, though these types include the subversive use of historical analogies to convey covert criticism of present-day politics, the brave exposure of historical taboos and myths, the courageous plea in defense of the basic principle of historical truth, and the somewhat odd practice of bringing accusations or charges against deceased leaders. These types of resistance are difficult to replicate in other disciplines.

A second conclusion is that inspiration for resistance can circulate among countries and across eras. An excellent example illustrating both is the organization of clandestine history classes or underground history seminars. This was a typically Polish medium of resistance under Russian rule before World War I, under German rule during World War II, and under Soviet rule between 1977 and 1989. In neighboring countries of the post-1945 Eastern European bloc, similar initiatives popped up. Likewise, the samizdat version of resistance, while not absent in the rest of the world, is typically associated with anti-communist resistance in the USSR and its satellite states.

Finally, the question arises as to what extent the modes of resistance under dictatorships and democracies were comparable. Undoubtedly, a similar spirit of courage and perseverance pervades the acts in both regime types, although the risks were evidently extremely unequal. Under dictatorships, the main problem for resisters is to invent ways to circumvent the repressive apparatus. The suppression of history not only engenders infertility (referred to as the sterility effect in the introduction) but also stimulates its opposite, the creativity to escape control, although sometimes only at the cost of a huge investment of effort. The preferred environment to perform acts of resistance seems to be a small community or network, either clandestine or not, with a minimum of interaction with the outside world.

In democracies, the threat of repressive power is generally low (but certainly not non-existent) and the challenges are comparatively less exacting. The spheres of action the study of which is complicated under dictatorships (prison and private activities) are less important in democracies, because there are fewer historians in prison and people have fewer reasons not to speak in public. Paradoxically, however, the larger freedom in democracies seems to generate a greater variety of forces that can impose restraints upon historians. Under dictatorships, the pattern is clear, at least in principle: the powers that restrict the historians’ work are the dictator and his apparatus of formal institutions (including the parliament, the courts, the leading political party, the police, military, and security, and the censorship bureau) and informal means (thugs and death squads operating in the shadows). In democracies, states can impede historians directly or indirectly (although in less violent ways and less unchecked than their counterparts under dictatorships), but the censorial role of semi-public and private lobbies, groups, and individuals is potentially larger. The paramount difference between the two regime types for the successful organization of resistance in the fields of memory and history, then, is the degree of freedom of expression, including the ability to conduct open, adversarial debates about the past.

Another thought worth pondering is the plight of historians in societies that are in transition from dictatorship to democracy. A counterintuitive observation is that the life of a historian in a time of transition may be riskier than in a time of dictatorship. Entrenched dictatorships, because they wield ruthless power, firmly deter and block incriminating historical research. In contrast, freer conditions in emergent democracies prompt or encourage bold historical research into the crimes of previous dictatorships or into past instances of systemic violence. However, in these transitional times, the safety conditions are usually weak, transforming historians into targets of the military and allies of the military who seek to install or restore authoritarian rule. Consequently, strategies of resistance are precarious even under circumstances in which expectations and perspectives for better professional lives rapidly increase.

Motives for Resistance

When we ask why some historians feel the need to express criticism under circumstances of persecution and censorship, many motives play a role or act together, but the most important ones are ethical, moral, professional, and political.18 Each motive serves different purposes, but the boundaries between them are fluid.

Ethical motives reflect the question of how to live a good life. Resisters have ethical motives if they follow their conscience and act regardless of how others behave. At a certain moment, they have decided that the situation is unbearable, and they want to express their protest (cautiously or recklessly) even if they are the only ones and regardless of examples, followers, and consequences. Some perform small gestures to illustrate principles, while others risk their jobs or lives.

Moral motives reflect the question of how to behave toward others. Resisters have moral motives if they aim to inspire and mobilize others to support them silently (passive resistance) or to follow their example openly (active resistance) and together form an expanding pool of protest.

If historians act for what they call professional motives, these motives are usually a combination of ethical and moral reasons applied to the historian’s craft. Resisters have professional motives if they think that professional duties (such as sincerity and accuracy), professional standards of methodology (such as following the rules of logic), and professional procedures (such as peer review and debate) have to be respected and protected at all costs and/or to set an example for present and future generations. Convinced of the professional and social importance of a responsibly produced history or judging that the attack on the integrity of memory and history or the injustice done to historians has become unbearable, they act out of principle and/or with the intention of inspiring others.

Sometimes, political motives come on top of the other reasons. They reflect the determination to influence and change the political system. Resisters have political motives if they aim to criticize the political system with a view to change it radically. Whereas in a democratic context change means perfecting the system, in a dictatorial context, change means replacing it.

Impact of Resistance

Given the heterogeneity in terms of agency, conduct, and motivation, how can we evaluate the impact of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships? A necessary step is to distinguish immediate and remote impact. It is too simple to evaluate resistance only in the short term, that is, when the dictatorship is nascent or unfolding or at the moment of its downfall. We should also measure the less visible long-term impact on the psychological condition of all those involved, including contemporaries and future observers.

Turning to the short term, one can take the pessimistic or the optimistic view. One must admit that, from a pessimistic perspective, resistance did not (and simply could not) counterbalance systemic violence and organized attacks on the historical profession. Dictatorships ruined much of the historical profession with ruthless power. We will never know which historical sources and facts, and which innovative interpretations and arguments about the past, were lost forever when and because historians were persecuted.19 In many cases, it took years, if not generations, to rebuild only partly what was torn asunder. And often losses and disappearances were irreparable.

From an optimistic perspective, the harvest of resistance is rich: in the end, much was also saved at the material level of archives, manuscripts, works, monuments, and education, as well as at the symbolic level of principles and values. Attacks were countered, secrets uncovered, distortions denounced, indifference neutralized, sterility fertilized, distrust disarmed, and principles affirmed, with timidity or with confidence.

Looking at the long term, a surprising number of acts of resistance inspired and became examples or precedents of moral courage. Two types in particular, it seems to me, have this special potential. The first is when the resisters proceeded as they thought they should in order to exercise their craft responsibly with reckless disregard of warnings and consequences and without chasing any effects. The second special type of resistance which gets easily etched in memory occurs when the act was performed with a certain bravado, for example, when daring historical analogies were used or when historians began reorienting their work toward the eras and topics considered taboo. Something extraordinary happens when a given conduct transforms into example and precedent: the epistemological status of that conduct alters under the gaze of those watching it because more information on how to live can be extracted from it.

Once instances of moral courage are perceived as examples or precedents, they comfort those who otherwise feel alone and powerless in the same or in similar repressive contexts. Likewise, they can enlighten future generations as precedents long after the events to which they refer have disappeared. As long as stories of commitment and integrity are told and retold or even only fleetingly referred to, they inspire hope and pride, not only in the spur of the moment but also over time. In short, they create a memory effect. One then feels part of a proud tradition of holding the standards of scholarly integrity aloft in the face of likely censorship. This is a tradition to be aware of, to care for, and to strengthen. The memory effect of resistance, either in its immediate or remote form, is an underestimated force. This article aspires to be part of that memory effect: it is a tribute both to those historians who once resisted tyrannical power and to those who retell their stories as an inspiration for present and future battles.

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Staying in the Family? The Role of the Vienne Kinship in Reclaiming the Neapolitan Heritage under King Charles I    

Gergely Kiss

University of Pécs

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):3-17 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.3

Recent years of research have provided a much clearer understanding of the diplomatic relations of King Charles I. In the dynastic relations of the Angevin rulers of Hungary, the building and exploitation of kinship ties can be seen as an important tool. In this context, previous studies have completely neglected the role of Charles I’s two sisters, Beatrix and Clementia, although the former, as the wife of John II, dauphin of Vienne, and the latter, as the wife of the French king Louis X, had considerable diplomatic potential. The present study examines in more detail the network of relationships that developed through Beatrix. Beatrix is perhaps the more significant of the two sisters in part relations with Clementia were much more limited and also because attempts to recover the Neapolitan inheritance were more indirect in the relations with Clementia. This was not the case with the kinship of Vienne, through which Charles I tried to assert the interests of the Angevins of Hungary in the Neapolitan throne. The present study aims to show the role played by Beatrix’s husband, John II, lord of Tour de Pins, dauphin of Vienne, and his younger son, Humbert II, in achieving the objectives of the Angevins of Naples in Hungary.

Keywords: Angevins, Árpád dynasty, Naples, Dauphiné of Vienne, Hungary, dynastic relations, kinship

Introduction

In the last years of the thirteenth century, fateful events took place in Naples. Two of the three children of Charles Martel and Clementia of Habsburg, Charles (Caroberto) and Beatrix, orphaned by the sudden deaths of their parents, were to experience a decisive change in their lives. In both cases, the already aged grandfather, King Charles II of Naples (1285–1309), and his son Robert played a decisive role in the events. On May 25, 1296, Beatrix was married to John II, dauphin of Vienne and lord of Tour de Pin (1306–1319).1 Shortly afterwards, in early 1297, Caroberto was excluded from the succession to the throne of Naples in favor of his uncle Robert and, as is well known, was soon afterwards sent on his way to take possession of his future inheritance in Hungary.2 Three events also took place in the first half of the fourteenth century that require further explanation. These events were also closely linked to Hungary and Naples, and they involved the Dauphiné playing an important, even leading role. In 1317, Caroberto, already king of Hungary as Charles I (1301–1342), asked his brother-in-law, Dauphin John II of Vienne (1306–1319), for help reclaiming the heritage of Naples, and a decade and a half later, the younger son of the latter was involved in Charles I’s negotiations in Naples in 1333, the aim of which was to secure the rule of the Angevins of Hungary over Naples by marrying Prince Andrew and Joan, the granddaughter of Robert I king of Naples (1309–1343). The dauphin also played a major role in the negotiations. Humbert II, who in the meantime had become lord of the Dauphiné, subsequently intervened in the “affairs of Naples.” In light of the events described above, it is reasonable to assume that the Dauphiné, in the vicinity of Provence, was in some way an active participant in relations between Naples and Hungary from the end of the thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. The only obstacle to this, at least so far, has been the scarcity of knowledge about one of the actors, the dauphin of Vienne. There are many relevant sources, so the neglect in the secondary literature of the role of the province is due not to a lack of information, but rather to a lack of interest.

In the case of Charles I, who succeeded the kings of the Árpáds, the dominant opinion in the secondary literature is still that the first Angevin ruler of Hungary, amid the struggle against the oligarchs to gain the Hungarian royal throne, had no real opportunity to claim his right to Naples. Fortunately, the situation is now much clearer as regards the ruler’s apparent inactivity in this area of foreign policy.3 In relation to Naples, it is important to note that Charles I had already attempted to recover his paternal inheritance before the negotiations between him and his uncle Robert I started after 1328. In Charles I’s attempts to gain control of Naples, the possibility of diplomatic mediation through dynastic kinship relations is evident. As we shall see below, the dauphins of Vienne played an important role in this.

Many of the details concerning the events discussed below were previously unknown due to a lack of research. This is not the only reason they merit our attention, however. They are also interesting because they shed some light on the diplomatic tools that were used to promote certain dynastic interests. Indeed, kinship ties allowed the parties to use the most natural means possible to further their goals, whether these aims concerned staking a claim to the Neapolitan inheritance of the Angevins in Hungary or forming or strengthening any kind of political alliance. The members of the dynasty, particularly the three children of Charles Martell, Charles, Beatrix, and Clementia (who were geographically very distant from one another), nevertheless actively helped one another, thus furthering the cause of the dynasty. This was also different from classical diplomacy in that the parties did not take the traditional route: they did not send diplomats or envoys to one another’s courts but rather sought to achieve their goals informally by winning each other over within the family. It is hardly necessary to go into detail concerning Caroberto’s career, and the real novelty lies with his two sisters, Clementia and Beatrix, and especially one of the latter’s sons, Humbert. In the following, only the latter will be discussed, so it is worth briefly outlining the main stages of his life.

Relatives Distant but Connected

The betrothal of Charles Martell’s daughters was in the diplomatic interests of the Angevins of Naples. Long after her siblings had been married, Clementia of Hungary4 became the wife of King Louis X of France (1314–1316) in 1315.5 She had a career that could have helped her brother a lot, but their relationship was rather casual.6 The queen of France was widowed a year after the marriage, and her political influence was severely reduced. Still, there was a strong bond between Clementia and the Dauphiné of Vienne in maintaining family ties and in the persistent cultivation of dynastic memory. In the years before her death in 1328, Clementia took several measures to preserve the dynastic memory of the Angevins of Naples, the Capetians, but in terms of direct personal relations, the Angevins of Hungary played little part, in contrast to their relatives in Vienne.7 Clementia’s sister, Beatrix of Hungary, lived in Dauphiné from 1296, as we have seen.8 She gave birth to a son, Guigues, in 1309 and a second child, Humbert, three years later.9 After the death of her husband, John II (1319), Beatrix became a Cistercian nun at Val-de-Bressieux. In 1345, she continued her life in the Beauvoir castle granted to her by her son Humbert II until 1349. She died in 1354 in the Abbey of Saint-Juste-en-Royans.10

Her son Humbert was born in 1312. Not much is known about his youth, he gained the title of Lord of Faucigny and the income that went with it. In 1328–1329, his mother Beatrix sent him to the court of King Charles I of Hungary, probably with the support of his aunt, the dowager Queen Clementia of France. He stayed there until 1332, when he was moved to the court of Robert I of Naples. In the autumn of 1333, he returned from here to Dauphiné to take over the government of the province after the death of his brother Guigues VIII (1319–1333). The last dauphin of Vienne, balancing among neighboring powers, made several attempts to sell the province. Finally, in 1349, Humbert II abdicated in favor of the French Valois dynasty. In 1345–1347, he took part in a crusade. On his return home, after the sale of the province, he joined the Dominicans and became a friar. In 1350, Clement VI appointed him patriarch of Alexandria. Two years later he became administrator of the Archdiocese of Reims, and in 1355 he was traveling to Avignon to be transferred to Paris when he died on route on May 22 at Clairmont.11

Dynastic Identity and Diplomatic Opportunities

It was extremely important for a dynasty to define itself, mainly by highlighting its links with related ruling families. From this point of view, one of the main elements of dynastic representation was the expression of identity. The instruments of this could be textual, as can be clearly seen in Beatrix’s case with the consistent use of the adjective “Hungarian.” With Clementia, it was expressed more indirectly. Another possibility was the use of visual elements for this purpose, whether in the form of symbols of authority on coins or in the most varied forms of coats of arms. The interpretation of these forms of symbolic expression can be based on research on numismatics and the history of art and heraldry, but it is also worth looking beyond the mere representational nature of these elements to their role in diplomacy. The most obvious use of the latter was to mobilize kinship relations to achieve diplomatic ends. This could be achieved either through recourse to a dynastic relative or through the gift or bequest of easily transported objects to various family members (gift-giving).12

But how did this all work for Clementia, Beatrix, and, especially, Humbert? It is relatively easy to trace the origins of these forms of symbolic expression and representation in the case of Clementia, because the sources regularly note that she was the daughter of the Hungarian king Charles Martel, who could have claimed the land of the Árpáds through his mother, Mary of Hungary (†1323). As the wife of Charles II of Naples and daughter of Stephen V of Hungary, she was the most active player in the propagation of representations of the Hungarian royal dynasty abroad. One need merely think of the frescoes and tombs of Santa Maria Donnaregina in Naples or the paintings of Simone Martini, who worked for the court of Naples.13 Mary “served as a mother” to Clementia, and they remained in contact even after Clementia left Naples.14 This is also important because in 1319, Clementia, Mary, Robert I, his wife Sancia of Mallorca were present at the translatio of the relics of St. Louis of Toulouse. Charles II’s son, who had entered the Franciscan Order and had been canonized shortly before, was a central figure in the establishment of the dynastic sanctity of the Angevins. St. Louis of Toulouse was the Angevin saint around whom the dynasty’s kinsmen, the Capetians and the Árpáds, clustered. The two ruling families were then surrounded by dynastic sanctity. But the interconnections involved much more than that, since close kinship ties were woven between the dynasties that were held up as models.15 These kinship ties were expressed in dynastic representation, resulting in the dual heraldic representations that appear regularly in both Naples and in the patrimony of Clementia, but also in that of the dauphin of Vienne, Humbert II. In any case, the point of origin must have been Naples, and it was due to their aspirations and efforts that this dynastic representation appeared and remained both in the Capetian court and in the Dauphiné. This additional aspect of kinship, the idea of dynastic sanctity, was embedded in all the courts concerned and was present in Naples, in the daily life and patrimony of Clementia, in the Dauphiné, and even in Hungary. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it did not remain a mere representational accessory, but rather, in addition to its obvious prestige and prestige-enhancing character, it was used for its diplomatic potential.

Dauphiné at the Service of the Interests of the Angevins in Hungary

John and Beatrix’s marriage16 was clearly intended to reinforce the alliance of the Dauphiné with the possessions of the Angevins of Naples in Provence, the Kingdom of France, and important territories in northern Italy and neighboring the empire, the preparation for which can be traced back to 1292.17 Later, first Humbert I (1282–1306) and then his son John II became vassals of King Charles II of Naples.18 With the marriage of 1296, the Angevins of Naples strengthened their position in northern Italy, on the eastern and northeastern frontiers of their own Provencal territories.19 In addition to Naples, the central and northern parts of Italy and the provinces of the former Kingdom of Arles played a key role in the plans to build the “Angevin Empire.” Provence and Forcalquier, as parts of this empire, could be seen as a secure hinterland in the 1260s–1280s, and the Angevin influence was strong in Piedmont, so the time had come to forge closer links with Dauphiné. But this alliance was also needed by the dauphin of Vienne, Humbert I, who, despite existing kinship ties,20 was facing territorial disputes with his cousin, Amédée V, count of Savoy.21 The settlement of these conflicts continued over the course of the following decades, and the relationship between the two provinces was characterized by a fragile peace and recurrent skirmishes.22

In close connection with this, a more serious system of confederation slowly developed around the Dauphiné in the first decade of the 1300s. From the reign of Rudolf I onwards, the dauphins of Vienne, whether John I (1263–1282) or Humbert I, had been on good terms with the Habsburgs. This did not change during the reign of John II, although King Henry VII of Germany (1308–1313) tried to gain the latter’s favor.23 This is mainly due to the fact that the Dauphiné already had influential allies in the early 1310s. John II had the support of the French royal family (Philip IV, Charles of Valois) and was not without the help and alliance of King Robert I of Naples. Their support from the French side is explained by an undoubted Savoy-Plantagenet alliance. Henry VII’s efforts to restore imperial power in Italy had a very serious effect on the political ambitions of Robert I, who, like his predecessors, was, on the contrary, interested in maintaining formal imperial supremacy. It is therefore not surprising to find Dauphiné among the important allies of Naples in the 1310s.24

Therefore, looking at the development of the dynastic political relations of the dauphin of Vienne at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Dauphiné was part of a Neapolitan-French alliance and also had good relations with the Habsburgs. It thus can be assumed that two decades after the marriage of John II and Beatrix in 1296, King Charles I of Hungary may have considered the dauphin of Vienne a suitable intermediary to secure his own claims in Naples. Because of the apparent strengthening of relations between Naples and Vienne in the early 1310s and in particular a six-year military alliance concluded in 1314,25 it is understandable why Charles I should have turned to his brother-in-law to assert his rights. Accordingly, on February 22, 1317, Charles I entrusted John II with the task of representing his interests as procurator and obtaining from King Robert of Naples the rights to the principalities of Salerno and Mont Sant Angelo. These rights originally had been granted to Charles Martel by his father as a hereditary fief, but in 1304, they were transferred by Charles II of Anjou to Robert, his third son, which is why the King of Hungary claimed his inheritance on the basis of the previous legal situation.26 The situation seemed all the more favorable, since at that time King Robert I of Naples had just managed to forge a Guelf alliance against the Ghibellines. He married his own son Charles to Catherine of Austria, daughter of Albert I of Habsburg (1316), and took action against the Visconti in Genoa. King Charles I of Hungary was also on good terms with the Habsburgs.27

Unfortunately, the sources reveal nothing about the consequences of this request. We do not know whether John II took any action on behalf of his brother-in-law or whether he even contacted Robert I. In addition to the request of the Hungarian king, there is only one report (of dubious credibility) according to which the Hungarian King Charles I would have asked the dauphin of Vienne to send one of his sons to him, who he would take care of in his court. There is no evidence that this request was actually made at the time, and it is more likely that this source preserved a memory of a later event, namely when John II’s younger son Humbert spent an extended period of time in the court of Charles I just over a decade later.28 Even if John II’s invitation did not lead to a decisive breakthrough, it is noteworthy that Charles I sought to exploit the diplomatic potential of family ties by involving his brother-in-law, the head of a strategically placed province. What is certain, however, is that Charles I did not win the rights he wanted, and it was more than a decade before any substantial progress was made on the Neapolitan succession.

Charles, son and heir of Robert I, Prince of Calabria, died in 1328. The consequences of his death are familiar from the secondary literature: negotiations began between the Kingdom of Naples and Hungary, leading to the betrothal of Robert I’s granddaughter Joan to Charles I’s son Prince Andrew in Naples in the autumn of 1333. The aim of the marriage was to regain the Neapolitan inheritance with the planned coronation of Andrew.29 Although Humbert, the youngest son of Beatrix, the widowed dauphine, could hardly have been involved in the preparatory diplomatic negotiations, it is worth noting that from 1329 he was at the court of his uncle, Charles I. The 17-year-old son had probably come here with the aim of acquiring knowledge of politics and preparing himself for his future reign. In the 1320s, his brother Guigues further strengthened his alliance with the French crown, and this was not altered by the fact that in early 1328, the last male descendant of Capetian lineage, Charles IV (1322–1328), was succeeded on the throne by Philip VI (1328–1350), the first Valois monarch.30 The strengthening of the French connection not only meant an alliance between the two monarchs, Charles IV, then Philip VI, and Guigues VIII, but also a new and more intense phase of relations between the relatives. Indeed, the fact that both Beatrix and Humbert figured so prominently in Clementia’s will and bequest can only be explained by the increase in the intensity of the relationship.31 And this was also the case with the relationship between Clementia and King Charles I of Hungary. In 1322–1323, the confessor of Clementia, Jacobus de Corvo, was apparently appointed bishop of Zagreb by Pope John XXII (1316–1334) at the intervention of the dowager queen, but this was ultimately rejected by Charles I, who supported his own candidate, Ladislaus Kaboli.32 There was only indirect contact between brother and sister at the time, probably through Roger Clarot of Clementia’s court.33 This could be seen as an isolated event. However, Humbert was on his way to the court of Charles I at the turn of 1328–1329, and several members of the Druget family, who were Clementia’s servants and kinsmen, appeared at the Hungarian court almost the day after the death of the dowager queen. This suggests that links between the courts of Paris, Vienne, and Hungary had always existed, but that they intensified rapidly in the second half of the 1320s.34 This is certainly remarkable and, in my opinion, explains why Beatrix’s younger son, the nephew of Clementia and King Charles I of Hungary, became the focus of diplomatic relations.

The question now is the extent to which the young and inexperienced Humbert could have been of any help to his uncle, Charles I. It seems that, for the time being, the first Angevin monarch of Hungary welcomed his nephew to his court more because of his future potential and close family ties. Humbert, who had good French and Neapolitan connections, could still be useful in the negotiations on the Neapolitan succession, which were just beginning at the time. The moment to take advantage of this opportunity came in 1332, when Charles sent his nephew to Naples. Robert I, who, like the Hungarian king, welcomed him, provided him with the benefits appropriate to his status and, as Charles had done, did not hesitate to employ Humbert for his own purposes. To achieve this goal, the king of Naples married Humbert to Marie des Baux, the daughter of one of his closest confidants, Bertrand III des Baux, Count of Andria. The mother of Humbert’s wife’s was none other than Beatrix of Anjou, daughter of Mary of Hungary. In this way, the dynastic links between the Angevins of Naples and of Hungary and the dauphins of Vienne were further strengthened. Humbert expressed this immediately in a typical manner. On the occasion of his marriage, he commissioned a tableau with the coats of arms of the Baux family and the Árpáds.35 He gave the name Andrew to his son, who was born shortly afterwards, a name which had no known tradition among the Angevins of Naples nor the dauphins of Vienne and was therefore due solely to the influence of the Angevin court in Hungary.36

In the light of all this, it is easier to understand why Robert I entrusted Humbert with the task of welcoming Charles I and his son Andrew to the court and accompanying them to Naples in September 1333.37 The presence of a well-known relative, who had previously spent time at the Hungarian royal court, obviously contributed to the success of the negotiations to settle the important question of the succession of Naples. However, Humbert was soon called away by the affairs of Dauphiné. On August 26, his brother Guigues VIII died unexpectedly, and he had to return as soon as possible to take over the government of the province, which was temporarily being administered by his mother, Beatrix of Hungary.38

As for Humbert’s activities in Italy, it may be concluded that Charles I was able to use him to promote his dynastic interests in Naples. Robert, for his part, did not let this opportunity pass unused either, for he had found in Humbert both a natural “family” intermediary for Charles, who was obviously anxious to inherit Naples, and an important ally in a province neighboring Provence. The fact that Humbert’s relations were cordial with both the Neapolitan ruler Robert and his maternal uncle Charles I explains why the last dauphin of Vienne figures so frequently in later Neapolitan-Hungarian relations.

Conclusion

The reclamation of the Neapolitan heritage was apparently one of the most important elements of the dynastic policy of King Charles I of Hungary. To achieve his goal, however, he mobilized almost exclusively the diplomatic potential of his kinship relations. In 1317, his brother-in-law John II, dauphin of Vienne, and in 1332–1333 his son, the Hungarian king’s nephew Humbert, served in this role. The Vienne kinship was valued by the Angevin monarch because of his good relations with the court of Naples. In addition to the fact of kinship, both of Charles I’s sisters, Clementia and Beatrix, promoted the dynastic identity of the Angevins and the Árpáds and emphasized it in the various ways in which they gave expression to their ties and their positions of influence. In addition, in the late 1320s, relations between these geographically distant relatives were strengthened again, when Charles I’s claim to the throne of Naples was renewed after 1317.

Archival Sources

Archives Départementales d’Isère, Grenoble (ADI)

Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseille (ADBR)

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano [former Archivio Segreto Vaticano] (AAV)

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (BNF)

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Lemonde, Anne. “Le Dauphiné, trait d’union entre deux mondes? Grenoble-Paris-Naples, 1226–1349.” In Circulation des idées et des pratiques politiques. France et Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle), edited by Anne Lemonde, Ilaria Taddei, 129–48. Collection de l’École Française de Rome 478. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2013.

Lemonde-Santamaria, Anne. “Autour du transport du Dauphiné à la Couronne de France (1349).” In  Annexer? Les déplacements de frontières à la fin du Moyen Âge. Edited byPierreSavy, Stéphan Péquignot, 115–39. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016.

Leone de Castris, Pierluigi. “La peinture à Naples de Charles Ier à Robert d’Anjou.” In L’Europe des Anjou: Aventure des princes angevins du xiii au xve siècle, edited by Francesco Aceto, 104–21. Paris: Somogyi Éditions, 2001.

Lucherini, Vinni. “The Journey of the Hungarian King Charles I from Visegrád to Naples (1333): political implications and artistic consequences.” The Hungarian Historical Review 2, no. 2 (2013): 341–62.

Maléth, Ágnes. A Magyar Királyság és a Szentszék kapcsolata I. Károly korában (1301–1342) [The relations of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Holy See during the reign of King Charles I, 1301–1342]. Pécs: PTE BTK Középkori és Koraújkori Történeti Tanszék, 2020.

Marcieu, Humbert de. “Saincte vie et glorieux trespassement de Jehan Esmé, sire de Molines.” Bulletin d’histoire ecclésiastique et d’archéologie religieuse des diocèses de Valence, Gap, Grenoble et Viviers 9 (1888): 57−94.

Mérindol, Christian de. “Entre la France, la Hongrie et Naples: les Anjou.” In Staaten, Wappen, Dynastien: XVIII. Internationaler Kongreß für Genealogie und Heraldik in Innsbruck vom 5. bis 9. September 1988, 145–70. Innsbruck: Stadtmagistrat Innsbruck, 1988.

Mérindol, Christian de. “L’héraldique des princes angevins.” In Les princes angevins du xiiie au xve siècle. Un destin européen, edited by Noël-Yves Tonnerre, and Élisabeth Verry, 277–310. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003.

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Pinoteau, Hervé. “Promenade dans l’héraldique des Angevins de Naples et de Hongrie.” In Auxilium historiae : Tanulmányok a hetvenesztendős Bertényi Iván tiszteletére, edited by Tamás Körmendi, and Gábor Thoroczkay, 245–53. Budapest: ELTE BTK, 2009.

Skorka, Renáta. “De Luxembourg à Oradea: Histoire de la reine Béatrice de Hongrie”. Les princesses angevines: Femmes, identité et patrimoine dynastiques (Anjou, Hongrie, Italie méridionale, Provence, xiiie–xve siècle) – Varia – Atelier doctoral – Regards croisés. Ed. Marie-Madeleine de Cevins, Jean-Michel Matz, Gergely Kiss. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2017(Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, vol. 129, fasc. 2) 359–368.

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Voci, Anna Maria. “La capelle i corte dei primi sovrani Angioini di Napoli.” In L’État angevin. Pouvoir, culture et société entre XIIIe et XIVe siècle. Actes du colloque international organisé par l’American Academy in Rome, l’École française de Rome, l’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, l’U. M. R. Telemme et l’Université de Provence, l’Università degli studi di Napoli „Frederico II” (Romme-Naples, 7–11 novembre 1995), 447–74. Collection de l’École française de Rome 245. Rome: l’École française de Rome, 1998.

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Zsoldos, Attila. “Les filles des rois arpadiens de Hongrie comme instruments d’une politique dynastique.” In Les princesses angevines: Femmes, identité et patrimoine dynastiques (Anjou, Hongrie, Italie méridionale, Provence, xiiie–xve siècle) – Varia – Atelier doctoral – Regards croisés, edited by Marie-Madeleine de Cevins, Jean-Michel Matz, Gergely Kiss, 351–58. Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 129, fasc. 2. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2017.

Barbora Rambousková
University of Pardubice
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Darina Martykánová
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):363–394 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.363

In the mid-nineteenth century, physicians in the Czech lands could claim neither elite status as a professional group nor unquestioned authority in the medical field. Despite the legal protection granted by the Habsburg Monarchy, they did not have an efficient monopoly on medical authority and practice and had to face fierce competition from lay healers, male and female, and other medical professionals. This article examines how Czech-speaking physicians navigated social dynamics in nineteenth-century society in urban and rural areas and how they strove to strengthen their authority in the medical field both through appeals to their professional credentials and through class and gender discourses. We identify individual strategies of social ascension and collective efforts to boost the standing and authority of the whole professional group. Practices such as socializing in patriotic circles and authoring medical guidebooks for laymen proved as important as publications in the professional press and the work of professional associations in this complex effort, which was eventually crowned with success in interwar Czechoslovakia.

Keywords: social class, Czech physicians, professional authority, social mobility, individual strategies

In the mid-nineteenth century, physicians in the Czech lands could claim neither elite status as a professional group nor unquestioned authority in the medical field.1 Despite the legal protection granted by the Habsburg Monarchy,2 they did not have a monopoly on medical authority and practice and had to face fierce competition from lay healers, male and female, and other medical professionals.3 In this article, we analyze how Czech-speaking physicians navigated social dynamics in nineteenth-century society in urban and rural areas and how they strove to strengthen their authority in the medical field both through appeals to their professional credentials and through class and gender discourses. We identify individual strategies of social ascension and collective efforts to boost the standing and authority of the whole professional group. Practices such as socializing in patriotic circles, employing fashionable architects to have their houses built, and publishing memoirs proved as important in this complex but eventually successful effort as publications in the professional press and the work of the various professional associations.

Our analysis is based on one main type of primary source: physicians’ memoirs, unpublished and published (mostly during the physicians’ lifetime). We complement these sources with analyses of one physician’s edited notes, another physician’s private correspondence, and public lectures delivered by a physician’s child. They all share one feature: they were written in Czech. The use of Czech by authors in this multilingual and multiethnic region is a significant detail that should not be taken for granted or passed over. Further research also needs to be done on German-speaking physicians from this region, and it would be useful to compare the social backgrounds and careers of these physicians with the social backgrounds and careers of the physicians who left written narratives of their work in Czech. This would enable us to assess whether ethnic origins and the languages used in professional practice and social interaction were, in any way, relevant factors in a given doctor’s social status. Moreover, future research should also examine the careers of physicians who came from the Czech lands but pursued practice in the imperial capital, as those who “made it” in Vienna probably did not write or publish memoirs in Czech, even if they were born into Czech-speaking families.

The edited notes and memoirs written by several male Czech physicians from the years between 1836 and 1936 constitute a rich corpus of sources that allows us to examine the long-term development of the profession as perceived by the physicians throughout a period in which several major political and administrative changes took place that had an impact on the physicians’ professional practice.4 These notes and memoirs are sources of a personal nature from which we get hints concerning the physicians’ understanding of themselves as physicians, as Czechs, and as respectable men of a certain social standing. In the case of two nineteenth-century physicians, we learn about their origins, professional practice, sociability, and attitudes through extensive laudatory lectures given by their children in the early years of the twentieth century and then published in print. The very fact that physicians’ children engaged in such a practice and a growing number of physicians published their memoirs may point to the rise in the importance attributed to physicians by their close family members and by the physicians themselves and also to their increasing social standing. In these earlier memoirs and edited notes, family pride and Czech patriotism seem to have been among the motivations for publication. The memoirs from the later period offer proof of a perceived interest in the medical profession in Czechoslovakia, and they also tend to dwell on details concerning politicians, actors, other celebrities, and the changing political circumstances. The authors who had had bright professional careers under communism also seem to have sought to distance themselves in their writings from the regime and to stress their allegiance to the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), but this will be dealt with in future research.

Despite the differences among the sources, we observe a striking similarity in their structure and in the information they provide. The physicians tended to give details concerning their family backgrounds. They mention their parents and siblings, and sometimes they comment on their wider families. They explicitly address the financial means of their families, particularly linked to their own education. If they needed extra support and funding and their parents were unable to provide it, they tended to acknowledge this openly and even dwell on it. This indicates that, rather than trying to mask their social origins, they actually took pride in overcoming these initial financial obstacles. They describe their secondary studies, showcasing the key importance of the dense network of high schools created in Bohemia and Moravia in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 They also tend to explain their motivations for choosing to study medicine. Concerning the years spent at medical school, the physicians discuss their teachers and their lectures. Some critically assess their teachers, their attitudes, and their talents as teachers (or lack thereof). Their narratives dwell on the issue of practical training and on the choice of and preparation for future medical practice, including choosing a specialization and deciding whether to work at a hospital, start a private practice, or accept a public post in the provinces. Financial aspects of this decision-making process are often explicitly addressed.

The sections of the various narratives which touch on actual medical practice comment on everyday experiences with healing and its financial aspects. Medical doctors who worked in small towns tend to showcase their devotion to scientific innovation by commenting on the purchase and use of medical instruments, while physicians in urban settings linked to hospitals tend to make references to their professional publications and distinguished patients. Probably due to the notion of professional discretion, the edited memoirs do not include information on the diseases suffered by their patients or the treatments provided, but rather comment on how these distinguished patients came to require the services of a particular physician and on their social interactions with them. The physicians also comment on leisure activities, including occasional trips abroad, which were not always linked to their profession, including international conferences, patriotic events, theater excursions, and social occasions.

In the discussion below, we focus on the following questions: What was the social background of Czech-speaking physicians who practiced in the Czech lands in the second half of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth century? Which motives did they cite for their choice of profession and the choice of a specific professional path? Which aspects of their education and training did they emphasize? How did they present their professional practice to their readers? How were they perceived by the communities in which they lived? In what kinds of social events and pastimes did they engage, both professional and casual? How did they spend their free time? We then offer conjectures, based on the answers provided by the sources to these questions, concerning the relationships between the physicians’ social status and shifts in their social standing on the one hand and new legislation and social and political changes on the other.

Our historical analysis is enriched by sociological approaches and methodologies. Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical concepts, including economic, social, and cultural capital, as well as his notion of distinction.6 Erving Goffman’s emphasis on self-fashioning and the ritual elements in social interactions has made us sensitive to the different ways in which the physicians strove to embody what they considered their role and how they were transformed in the process. In line with the analysis by Kaat Wils, we understand that their attitudes, their ways of presenting themselves in their narratives, and their behavior can only be interpreted in relation to the specific and changing settings of their education and practice (including the state regulation of both) and to the internal dynamics of their professional community.7

The period under study allows for an analysis of long-term dynamics in a changing context, a methodological choice that makes it possible for us to de-naturalize the middle- and upper-middle class status the physicians achieved by the mid-twentieth century and explain it as a result of a culturally specific historical process. For the same purpose, we make occasional comparisons with other European countries in the same period. In the period under study, the Czech lands were part of the Habsburg Monarchy that morphed into Austria-Hungary in 1867, an imperial arrangement thought to be an efficient answer to the rising nationalist and constitutionalist movements in Hungary but left many other nationalist leaders less than satisfied. The Great War (1914–1918) opened the gate to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, a nation state in which the Czech lands played the leading role.

Major changes also took place in the institutional and legal framework of the medical practice. Austria was early in granting the exclusive practice of the medical profession to physicians with specific credentials by law (see footnote 2). The implementation of this legal measure was patchy, at best, and physicians still felt the pressure of competitors in the medical field in the 1860s and 1870s. There were several milestones in the institutionalization of healthcare: the creation in 1817 of the post of a municipal physician paid by the municipalities, the abolition of the nobility physicians (vrchnostenský lékař), which was a consequence of the drastic reduction in the role of nobility in the regional administration due to the revolutionary movements of 1848 and the imperial law on healthcare from 1870, which created a dense network of municipal and provincial physicians.8 In addition to state initiatives, the professional cohesion and social status of physicians were also boosted by medical associationism. The first professional associations were founded in the Czech lands in the early 1860s, and they showcased ethnolinguistic divisions. In 1861, German-speaking physicians founded an association in Prague and a journal titled Prager medizinische Wochenschrift. As was often the case in an environment marked by ethno-nationalist strife and competition, Czech-speaking physicians followed suit in 1862, founding the Spolek českých lékařů (Society of Czech Physicians)

and its journal, Časopis lékařů českých (Journal of Czech Physicians). In Moravia, an association of German-speaking physicians, Centralverein deutscher Ärzte, was active between 1875 and 1894.9

Social Origins of the Physicians and Funding for Their Studies

The fact that many university-educated Czech-speaking physicians who practiced in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Czech lands were of lower-middle class and working class (craftsmen/artisan) origins may come as a surprise. Both the documents examined in this article and the university registers analyzed by Barbora Rambousková show that many of them were sons of craftsmen. Josef Salmon,10 for example, was one of the five children of a stonemason, and Josef Pavlík11 was the son of a miller, a craft that tended to come with a certain material wellbeing but still implied manual labor. A glance at the origins of the Czech cultural nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century confirms the presence of craftsmen’s children among liberal professionals in the Czech lands. The physician Norbert Mrštík12 offers a paradigmatic example of this: his father was a shoemaker, and he became a physician. His brothers, Alois and Vilém, who became famous writers and playwrights, went on to be part of the Czech cultural elite. One of the reasons behind this social mobility might be the fact that, in the Austrian Empire and particularly in the wealthy kingdom of Bohemia, a dense network of high schools had been established in the first half of the nineteenth century. It therefore became rather easy for a well-off artisan family to support its sons, and the study of medicine was seen as a means of social ascension for the whole family. The public high school system granted these lower-middle and working-class young men important cultural capital, the wider family network and other patrons provided funding, and the expected outcome was for the future doctor to achieve social capital that could be passed on to future generations.

For lower-class students, the funding of their studies was clearly a matter of concern, though the physicians never attribute the decision to study medicine to financial motivations. Instead, they stress their desire to help others or illness/death in their family, following the centuries-long tradition of physicians’ self-fashioning as selfless benefactors of the sick. However, they do acknowledge the problems they faced because the lack of money often became obvious already when they were in high school. One option to solve this problem was to call on wealthier relatives, or the budding physicians could turn to others, such as wealthy patrons, the Church, and, later, patriotic societies. Josef Salmon, for example, did his first four years of high school at the German Piarist High School in the town of Mladá Boleslav in central Bohemia. His uncle, royal and imperial civil servant Josef Dolanský, worked at this institution and supported Josef during his studies. Due to Josef’s excellent academic performance, he was given the opportunity to continue his studies at the College of Clementinum in Prague. From 1862 on, he received 124 zlatých/guldens a year from the Johann Anton Střepský Foundation, which depended on the Royal and Imperial Governor’s Office. In exchange, he had to assist at all Catholic festivities in the Saint Vitus Cathedral and the Basilica of Saint George. Still, to earn more, he had to complement his scholarship with private lessons. After he finished his secondary education, he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in 1864 and successfully concluded his studies in 1870 as doctor of medicine. Salmon’s story was not exceptional. Many students worked, mostly teaching younger primary and high school students, and some of them saved up to invest in their professional practice.13

The first half of the twentieth century brought about an important shift. The authors of the edited memoirs now tended to be of middle class-origin, often sons or relatives of a physician (Vladimír Vondráček, for instance).14 Jan Bělehrádek15 was the son of a clerk with a degree in law. Zdeněk Mařatka’s father was a renowned artist, and his uncle and cousin were physicians.16 Jiří Syllaba’s father belonged to the medical elite of the time. He was personal physician to the first president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.17 Josef Charvát18 stands out among these sons of middle-class professionals as a “remnant of the past,” when many physicians had been of artisan-working class origins. But he was also the child of his time, consciously commenting on his social background and proud of his rise through hard work and merit. As noted above, it was common for high school and medical students not only in the Czech lands, but also in Germany, Spain, and France to support themselves through private lessons. European fiction and memoirs are full of references to the financial difficulties students faced when pursuing their studies. However, Charvát’s willingness to support himself by accepting a working-class job as a night watchman speaks of the porousness of Czech society in terms of social class. Charvát, whose father was a locksmith and whose mother worked as a concierge and did laundry for people in the neighborhood, felt that he faced no mental barriers to this kind of job, nor did he feel any need to hide it when he became a respectable doctor. On the contrary, he seems to have been proud of this, considering it another sign of his individual merit, one that further distinguished him from his more privileged colleagues.

Choosing a Path within the Medical Profession

Social origins continued to shape the physicians’ careers after they finished their studies. Diplomas did not serve as equalizers. Once they had a diploma in their hands, the young men faced a key decision: choose between a practice that combined healing with medical research or take a well-paid post in the provinces which would grant them a stable income and the respect of local society but which would also place them on the lower echelons of the professional community. Hospital practice, scientific pursuits, and life in the capital were important considerations in the hierarchy of both social and professional prestige. From our sample, it seems that the young physicians’ social origins were a key factor in the early-career choice of professional path. The physicians who opted for a career in research knew that they would have to work at a clinic free of charge for several years before they received a salaried post. Vladimír Vondráček (1895–1978) stated he had served the state free of charge for 15 years. During this time, they could, of course, work for private clients, which Vondráček did, but whether they were actually willing or able to take such a risk and attract paying clients more often than not depended on the social status of the given physician’s family.19

In the 1830s and 1840s, these career patterns were not yet clearly distinguishable and the situation was hard to read for the young graduates, as the memoir by Frantisek Bouček, who studied in Vienna, indicates: “Right after graduating, I wanted to stay in the hospital, but due to the lack of money and unstable health I could not.”20 He therefore chose to practice in his hometown of Hradec Králové, but this also proved difficult, partly for personal reasons. Bouček complained that his local friends expected him to provide care for them for free. He also complained about structural problems, namely the lack of a clear career path for young physicians: “What misery there is among the physicians! Many had to leave the hospital without getting any post. Nobody takes care of the physicians.”21 After a few years of practicing in Hradec, in 1838, Bouček applied for the post of praktikant at the General Hospital in Vienna. He brought with him his meagre savings, 212 zlatých/guldens, to establish himself in the city. Once again, as a young physician with no connections in the Habsburg capital, he wrestled with various challenges. Bouček ultimately accepted the post of manor physician-surgeon in the manor of Poděbrady in Bohemia, an administrative unit that represented the continuing administrative functions exercised by noble families in Austria, a remnant of feudal structures that did not exist, for example, in France or Spain at the time. Poděbrady manor covered an extensive area, and Bouček had to provide care for people in 63 villages which were often hard to access. He received a fixed salary of approx. 30 guldens a year, a flat in the Poděbrady chateau, wood for heating, and cereals. His tasks consisted of providing healthcare for the manor officials, servants, and retirees, for the sick in the manor hospital, and for poor subjects. He also had to supervise the recruits and carry out cadaver examinations and autopsies. When he could get private patients (he was allowed to provide care for them after he had fulfilled his manor duties), they would often pay him in specie, and Bouček stated that it would have been almost impossible for a physician to practice in the rural parts of the country without a fixed salary. In 1848, bondage was abolished and so was the nobility’s administrative role. Bouček lost his post and a “cruel struggle for existence”22 began. He moved to the town of Chlumec in Eastern Bohemia, where he worked as a physician to the poor and as a coroner. He was paid for each service rendered, with no fixed salary, and this was a source of anguish for him. He later returned to Poděbrady, where he accumulated several posts. It took him decades to establish a relatively comfortable living for himself.23

Josef Pavlík, who was the son of a miller and thus also not a child of privilege, showed clear determination. He decided to study medicine after his mother died of illness. To fund his studies, he gave private lessons during his high school years. After graduating from the University of Prague, he worked at the university hospital with the obstetrician Karel Pawlik. He admitted to his daughter later in his life that his decision to leave his promising hospital career and settle in the provincial town of Tábor was motivated by financial reasons, in addition to his wish to “work among the people.” In 1900, he combined his long-term post in Tábor as municipal physician with work for the Workers’ Illness Fund, which provided medical care for insured workers and employees. He clearly made the right choice leaving Prague, as he established a prosperous practice that allowed him to buy a house in the city center and travel abroad. He traveled to Spain, Morocco, and Algiers. He did not give up on the ambition to keep up with progress in the medical sciences either. With his own money, he bought an x-ray machine for his practice in 1910, and he also attended the World Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. He had a lively and remarkable social life, both in local and national circles. While in Spain, for instance, he was invited to attend the celebration of the fiftieth birthday of Oskar Nedbal, a famous Czechoslovak opera singer, engaged in the Bratislava Opera, who was on a widely advertised tour on the Iberian Peninsula. In his town of residence, he was active in the patriotic circles, taking part in the campaign to build a monument to Jan Hus, a medieval Bohemian preacher and reformer who became one of the main symbols of Czech nationalism.24

Josef Salmon, who practiced from 1870 to 1921, also sought financial stability after graduating. He applied for a post in the imperial army but was rejected on the grounds of “physical weakness.” He found employment at the Emperor Franz Joseph Children’s Hospital in Prague. He started as an assistant physician but rose to serve as deputy head of a hospital department (zástupce primáře). He also provided care for poor patients, which seems to have been expected of hospital physicians with a charitable spirit or social consciousness in many places in Europe and beyond at the time. In 1876, he opened a private practice in Prague. In addition to receiving paying patients, he also provided care for those insured by the Vltava Insurance Bank, which guaranteed him a steady income of 200 guldens per year. He built a respectable clientele. As he noted, his last patient in 1921 was the daughter of the president of the Czechoslovak Supreme Court. He had provided care for four generations of this prominent family.25

Vladimír Vondráček was the son of a middle-class family who started his career in the interwar period. Vondráček was even more explicit about the financial considerations involved in the choice of career path. He complained that most of the hospital posts available for recent graduates (such as junior doctor or secundarius) meant working with no salary. The graduates were supposed to be grateful to get practical training and prestige linked to a job in hospital, while they lived off money earned by providing care for private patients and/or family money. Vondráček, who clearly positioned himself against this system, nevertheless admitted that he worked “for the republic” for free for 15 years, abandoning ambitions to work as a psychiatrist, which was the most interesting field of medicine to him: “During that period, I understood I needed to deepen my knowledge of internal medicine. I found it interesting, and it also seemed to me that it would ensure me better financial conditions than I could have had at the time in psychiatry, it was not even clear if I would not have to leave Prague.”26 His precarious financial situation finally made him accept a post as spa physician in the Slovak spa of Ľubochňa (or Fenyőháza, by its Hungarian name). Slovakia was not considered a particularly desirable destination among the Czech physicians, and the pay and extra income were good. It was thanks to his practice as spa physician in Slovakia that Vondráček was able to save enough money to move back to Prague and establish himself as psychiatrist, the branch of medicine he had always dreamt of pursuing. 27

The sources suggest that the situation for physicians improved in the interwar period, and more salaried posts were available in the hospitals. Several factors contributed to this change. First and foremost, more hospitals were opened in many cities and towns in Czechoslovakia, providing a growing number of salaried posts for qualified physicians. As the concept of hospital was rapidly becoming less and less associated with poverty and charity and the hospitals were becoming truly interclass28 establishments, the notion that physicians should work in them for free was gradually abandoned, too. Moreover, training at a clinic became mandatory if one sought to open a specialized private practice, and thus many graduates were, in fact, given a chance to catch the eye of a senior hospital physician who would support their careers if they were inclined towards combining care for hospital patients with medical research. As in the past, patronage thus continued to be important even as medical institutions were expanding and consolidating. However, the powerful men who wished to provide support for young, talented people now had more opportunities to help them find a paid post that would truly enable them to follow the path their patrons had envisaged for them, as there were more such posts available in the system.

The career of Josef Charvát is a good case study of these changing patterns. As a young medical student from a working-class background, he worked with Professor Lhoták at the Pharmacology Institute as a medical student. As he notes in his memoirs, he did the work of an assistant physician (with a corresponding salary of 900 Czechoslovak crowns), but as he had not yet graduated, he could only be officially employed as assistant scientific staff (200 crowns), though he was paid an extra 300 crowns. After he graduated, Charvát obtained a post at the II. Clinic of Internal Medicine. As he was paid 200 crowns there, it was probably a post of assistant scientific staff.29 Nonetheless, this proved a gateway to a stellar career for Charvát, the son of a locksmith and a concierge. His boss, Professor Josef Pelnář, was a well-respected, fatherly figure in the Prague medical community. He was also very authoritarian when convinced of someone’s professional value. Charvát, who had married as a student, was constantly concerned about his income. His original plan was to work in a hospital only for the time required to obtain a license for a private practice. But Pelnář stepped in, told him he should strive for habilitation, and arranged several training trips abroad (to Paris, London, and Belgrade) for his talented young colleague. Years later, when Charvát wanted to apply for the post of Director of the Internal Medicine Section in a provincial hospital in the town of Hradec Králové, Pelnář used his symbolic authority and told him: “You are not going anywhere, you are staying at the clinic.”30 Pelnář’s authoritarian care for his talented colleague eventually proved beneficial for Charvát. Thanks to Pelnář’s support, Charvát ended up reaching the highest echelons of the medical hierarchy in the Czechoslovak capital. Following Pelnář’s advice, he applied for and got the prestigious post of Head of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Polyclinic. During these years, he socialized with members of the highest echelons of Prague society. As a man of working-class origins, Charvát originally lacked the social and cultural capital a physician would need to get private patients, but Pelnář was there for him in this sense, too. When Charvát opened a private practice, Pelnář recommended him to wealthy people, who became his patients. Charvát stressed that he used the income thus obtained to purchase medical equipment in order better to provide care for his patients, who came both from the capital and from rural areas. During the last days of World War II, he participated in the occupation by Czech medical staff of the First German Clinic of Internal Medicine in the General Hospital, where he remained until his retirement in 1970, successfully continuing his career under the communist regime.

Pelnář appears as a key actor in the career of two other physicians who wrote memoirs but came from far more privileged families than Charvát. One of them was Jiří Syllaba and the other was Zdenek Mařatka. As noted earlier, Syllaba was born into the Czech social elite. He was the son of the president’s personal physician. After finishing his studies in 1926, he embarked on several journeys abroad to further his education (he went to Great Britain, France, and the United States). After returning to Czechoslovakia, he worked at the II. Clinic of Internal Medicine of the General Hospital in Prague, headed (and lorded over) by Professor Pelnář. His post was that of an unpaid docent: a senior physician who “after his habilitation worked as scientist-researcher and as teacher at the clinic for free every morning (for 6 hours). He then had to earn his living through private practice, generally two or three times a week.”31 According to Syllaba, robust scientific activities at the clinic were possible because the staff ran parallel private practices: “At Pelnář‘s clinic, up to 50 scientists worked in the period between 1922 and 1938, including three extraordinary professors (Cmunt, Prusík and, later, Charvát), about 10 to 14 docents, several paid medical assistants, and more unpaid assistants, demonstrators, scientific staff, and fiškuses (medical students who practiced at a clinic even before the mandatory practice during their studies).”32 Pelnář’s ambitions reached beyond “his” clinic and encompassed Czech medicine as a whole. He strove to further the quality and status of the medical profession and also had nationalist goals. According to Syllaba, he came up with a plan to send his protégés to work as spa physicians. These were lucrative posts in pleasant locations. Pelnář’s intention was to boost the standing and improve the scientific infrastructure of Czech spas, but, as Syllaba explicitly stated, he also wanted to “Czechify” them (that is, to reduce their German character): “For that purpose, he selected Pirchan to work in Jáchymov, he sent Vančura to Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad), Šimek to Františkovy Lázně (Franziskenbad), […] Hejda to Bohdaneč.”33 Syllaba himself was chosen for a position at the most prestigious Czech spa resort, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), and he worked there every year for four months over the summer months between 1932 and 1938. Clearly, the fact that his father has served as President Masaryk’s personal physician may have played a role in him having been chosen for the most prestigious spa in the country.

Like Jiří Syllaba, Zdeněk Mařatka was also born into privilege, as he was the son of a famous Czech sculpturer. In his memoirs, Mařatka presented himself as having been very strategic in his career choices and having made the right decisions in terms of finance, professional prestige, and personal inclinations. His early and constant awareness of the possible pitfalls and opportunities in a career in medicine can be interpreted as a sign of his social and cultural capital. His uncle Ladislav and his cousin were also physicians. In a way, his uncle Ladislav served for Zdeněk as a negative example. Ladislav had worked with the prestigious surgeon Eduard Albert in Vienna, but, as his nephew put it, he had not had an entrepreneurial spirit and he had provided care for patients free of charge. He had ended up in dire straits and had had to leave Vienna and accept the post of municipal hygienist in Prague.34 Zdeněk was not going to allow this to be his career path. As a student, he started working voluntarily as an assistant medical student at a clinic even before he reached the stage of his studies when such practice was mandatory (which was called fiškusovat). Mařatka assisted Dr. Prusík, but he did not care for his approach, particularly the way Prusík treated his patients: “I felt [Prusík treated them like] experimental objects rather than as suffering individuals who need help.”35 In the fourth year of his studies, he went to assist the famous Professor Pelnář, following the advice of Dr. Syllaba. He worked there as medical assistant from 1936 to 1938 and, after 1939, as physician.

Mařatka’s memoirs offer very outspoken descriptions of the tensions at the clinic, informing us about the lasting importance of status, class, and patronage in the institutional settings of a modern hospital. The main cause of tension was the unclear decision-making hierarchies due to the hospital institutes being at both hospital departments and university clinics at the same time.36 As Mařatka put it,

The clinics were under the command of the Ministry of Education, and they were headed by a university professor. The same person was, at the same time, the director of the department and in this sense was under the command of the hospital’s director. (Medical) assistants were employees of the clinic, that is, of the Ministry of Education, but the junior doctors [Czech sekundář, lat. secundarius] were employees of the general hospital. This double-rail system was a source of constant conflicts between the assistants, who enjoyed higher social status, had longer vacations, and enjoyed several other advantages and the junior doctors, who were simple subordinate physicians as in other hospitals. To be employed at the clinic was nonetheless disadvantageous financially and meant economic hardship, as everyone had to start as a physician with no pay and show through his work whether he was capable of progressing in his qualification.37

Mařatka’s description clearly reveals that the career path associated with prestige and professional merit was, at the same time, a path accessible mostly to the well-off. Only those who, like Syllaba and Mařatka, could rely on their families’ support (or were lucky enough to find an extra source of income) could, in fact, prove their talent at the clinic. The expectation to work for free were a social barrier and a typical mechanism with which the elites managed to maintain their place in an ostensibly meritocratic system: only those who had extra financial means could afford to work for free, prove themselves professionally, and secure paid posts within the career line associated with higher prestige and, once the initial “filtering” period was over, with higher income.

There were other aspects to this system of informal filtering. Mařatka was well aware of the fact that the “capacity for autonomous scientific work” was understood not only a question of knowledge and skills but also of “character” and social class. As the head of the clinic, Pelnář expected the young men to participate in and speak at weekly public meetings of the Society of Czech Physicians. He also fostered self-confidence and a sense of esprit de corps and entitlement among the selected group of young men at his clinic, granting them the right to discuss and approve the selection of new colleagues, so they felt that they were an essential part of the process to which they had had to submit and thus became emotionally involved in its perpetuation and defense.38 Syllaba shows no hint of criticism when describing Pelnář’s authoritarian attitude toward his protégés. Even Mařatka’s more ambiguous description of the whole situation is a proof of the ways in which meritocratic discourse was used and how those who “succeeded” learn to perceive the system as a guarantee of quality, even if, like Mařatka, they acknowledged that it also worked as a social filter.

Mařatka called the clinic a “strainer” through which “only those passed who had skills and a will to renounce financial advantages temporarily and risk an unsure future,” but he also presented this filtering system as a desirable means of ensuring high standards and scientific progress at the clinic. While most of his colleagues ended up leaving to take better-paid posts as municipal physicians or physicians in other hospitals or devoted themselves fully to private practice, Mařatka climbed the ladder with the financial support of his middle-class family, including his wife, who worked as an employee in a bank, while her mother helped in the household. After working for free for two years, Mařatka obtained a fellowship of 200 and later 400 crowns a month. Several years later, he was earning 2,000 crowns a month as an assistant physician. He still complained about his salary after he earned his habilitation degree and worked as senior physician at a clinic (docent), and he maintained that he and his colleagues in the same position used their free afternoons to provide care for paying patients in their private surgeries.39 In such a system, middle-class men like Syllaba and Mařatka, particularly those who had family in Prague, could succeed if motivated. Working-class docents like Charvát were an exception. He “made it” due to the continuous and multifaceted support of the boss, Professor Pelnář. Had Pelnář not constantly guided Charvát in his career choices, scolded him for wanting to leave, recommended him for paid posts, and sent paying patients to his protégé’s private practice, Charvát (the talented son of a locksmith and a concierge) would probably have ended up working in a provincial hospital, like many of his, Mařatka’s, and Syllaba’s peers did.

Not all the patrons were as domineering as Pelnář. When invited by Professor Babák to join the faculty of medicine at Masaryk University in the Moravian city of Brno, the talented young scientist Jan Bělehrádek accepted the post under the condition that he could first pursue further studies abroad in the Belgian city of Leuven. After returning in 1923, he worked with Babák as junior physician, and he became a private docent in 1925. After Babák’s death, Bělehrádek took over a great part of his mentor’s work and was appointed extraordinary professor. It was now his turn to serve as a patron. He took pride in telling his son that he refused to favor the sons of his colleagues at the exams, and when some of them failed several times to pass, he advised them to pursue another career. Bělehrádek, who had been interested in science since as a child, also prided himself on his research. He must have been quite successful in his pursuits, as in 1934 he was made Chair of General Biology and dean of the faculty of medicine at Charles University in Prague, the oldest university in Central Europe. Again, timely intervention by a research-oriented patron, Professor Babák, had been decisive in setting the young Bělehrádek on track towards remarkable success in his desired academic career.40

“Slaves to Their Patients”: Class and the Rise of the Physicians’ Professional Authority

The clinic was clearly a privileged space of medical training, research, and practice and an important center where professional identities and self-confidence were forged. The existence of clinics enabled the physicians to present themselves as men of science and highly qualified professionals who had total control over their patients’ health and recovery.41 However, the physicians had to negotiate their collective status in everyday contact with patients, both in their homes and in private practices.42 Hospital care was becoming more important, and the emergence of an interclass hospital was underway, but in the second half of the nineteenth century, healthcare in Europe, including the Czech lands, was still far from being a hospital-centric system.43 When a physician provided care for his patients at their homes or at his private surgery, he could present himself as an important senior physician at a university hospital and as a renowned man of science,44 but he needed to use different tactics and tools to win his patients’ respect and earn a fee for his services. Vladan Hanulík, Daniela Tinková, Milena Lenderová, and Barbora Rambousková have done research on the relationship between patients and physicians in the Czech lands. In his recent article on several Czech physicians who worked in hospitals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hanulík shows that these physicians had precarious incomes and ambiguous social status. He quotes a physician who complained about the many physicians who, motivated by their “poverty,” bent over backwards to please their patients, including flirting and even sleeping with their upper class female patients.45 Still, at the same time, Hanulík shows that marriage to a wealthy patient of higher social status was also an option, from which we may interpret that these young physicians, if they played their cards well, could indeed be “read” by their patients as respectable bourgeois men.

The physicians who practiced in the Czech lands understood themselves as part of the good society, and they constantly worried about maintaining this status,46 not unlike physicians in France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. The sense of entitlement to live as a gentleman and the anguish caused by not being able to finance this lifestyle characterized the careers of most physicians until the late nineteenth century.47 Moreover, as Rambousková shows, Czech physicians, like their German and British colleagues, seemed very aware of the constant need to negotiate and assert their authority as experts with their patients. They had to engage in a twofold struggle: to assert their status as experts and to affirm their image as respectable men who were entitled to respectable incomes. Josef Salmon dwelt extensively on these issues when narrating his career to his son Jaroslav. He built his narrative on the highly topical notion of medical profession as a call (poslání), a mission, and a passion. This topos was common in the discourse of medical professionals in Europe and beyond. To support this image, he impressed his public with the sheer quantity of “visits”: 200,000 bedside visits plus patients for whom he provided care in his private practice. His “record” was 42 visits in one day during the influenza epidemic. He claimed that he provided care for patients from all social classes, stressing that patients of all social backgrounds liked him, but he also noted that he provided care for very prominent people, such as the world-famous composer Antonín Dvořák, Czech politician and journalist Julius Grégr, and the aristocrat Jiří (Georg) Lobkowicz. Overall, his practice was sustained by a stable clientele of paying patients, including several generations of some families. Like many physicians in Europe and America at the time, he maintained that he became a family friend of these long-term patients.48

However, he also addressed the issue of fees. As he put it, he charged his patients “according to their coat.” While he charged the most prominent patients 200 guldens, he insisted that he provided care for patients who “lived in the sous-terrain lodgings of the Prague houses” (in other words, poor patients) for free. While he adapted his fees to his patients’ financial circumstances, he claimed that he treated them all the same. He presents himself as friendly but strict, paying short visits. He took pride in memorizing his patients’ addresses and ailments. He maintains that he resisted pressure to prescribe unnecessary medicine and that he refused to continue treating patients who did not follow his recommendations. He presents himself as firm and assertive but also fair and caring authority figure. This image was on the rise as the new ideal of professional practice in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a physician of his time, though, Salmon did not hesitate to acknowledge the need to dress to impress. He emphasized that he changed his shirt and shoes twice a day to ensure that he would always be presentable.49

Bouček and Mrštík practiced in rural areas, where sources of income were limited and competition was high, particularly from healers whose presence in the medical field was well established, though the physicians came to consider it illegitimate by the mid-nineteenth century.50 According to Bouček, in the rural areas of Poděbrady, broken limbs were healed by the miller until 1870, the sick went to the charmer until the 1890s, and the local skinner (who was in charge of killing or getting rid of stray animals) provided the ill with ointments and pomades. The rural physicians’ patients were self-confident in terms of trying to control their healing and choosing expert advice and help only if they regarded it as necessary. They did not acknowledge the physicians claim of expertise or authority in the medical field. Rather, they saw the physician as one of many actors in the field from among whom they could choose. The physicians, of course, interpreted this attitude as a sign of ignorance and an inability to draw a distinction between medical science and quackery. Bouček made an observation in his narrative that captured his sense of resignation: “Once I found real human excrement placed onto phlegmon manus! Animal excrement is often placed on fresh wounds. Recently, an injured man was brought to me, the wound went through the skull up to the brain, and in order to stop the bleeding, they had put a horseshit on the wound!”51

Norbert Mrštík was particularly blunt in his correspondence about his view of the patients and competitors, which is perhaps not surprising, since his opinions were, initially, private and intended only for his family, which was not part of the community in which he practiced (the municipality of Olešnice). He took pride in his communication skills and in his capacity to convince and manipulate the patients: “I never would have guessed how good an actor I am [...]. People show trust in me, even an affinity, and all this not thanks to my scientific qualifications, but due to my able mouth and this so-called psychological exploitation of people’s stupidity, credulity, spoiledness, inclination to suggestion, etc.”52 To keep up appearances, Mrštík avoided places where people from different background socialized, such as the pub: “I don’t want to go to the pub and I will not go. I do not wish to give those leeches so much as a finger. Cool politeness––this is what these sparrow heads are impressed with.”53 In addition to expressing his disdain in terms of social class, cultural capital, and the urban-rural symbolic hierarchy, Mrštík depicted his patients as a bothersome drain on his energy and resolution. He dealt with them by combining distance with calculated moments of congeniality and benevolence.

Private practice in the city, including the capital, did not necessarily guarantee the physicians less competition (although at least in the urban environment competition came mostly from other physicians, not alternative healers) or more respect for their authority as experts. Vladimír Vondráček complains that, up until the 1930s, he had to provide care for patients in their homes, a complaint about a practice which had been common in earlier centuries, clearly made a posteriori, when this had become almost unimaginable. Vondráček complains about how patients would doctor-hop and about how hard it often was to make the patients describe their symptoms. But his primary complaint was that many sick and injured people still preferred to control their healing process and give advice to other people on their health instead of accepting the supreme authority of the physician and following his orders. Vondráček complains of this traditional attitude, presenting it as illegitimate and stupid due to the laymen’s lack of knowledge: “Few would dare to repair a watch, though more do try it with their car. […] Since the dawn of time, though, people have dared to repair their own organism, i.e., heal themselves or give advice on healing to others. However, they do not possess even the most basic knowledge of anatomy, physiology, or pathology.”54

The aforementioned Jirí Syllaba, who was also an urban practitioner, also insisted on the active role patients continued to play in private medical practice:

The sick naturally [...] choose physicians according to their nature, taste, and character: some prefer an outgoing, merry, and noisy physician, others a solemn, serious one. Some like them younger, some prefer older ones. Some prefer an energetic treatment, even a painful one, while others demand a painless one. Some patients always insist on operating immediately, others avoid even the mention of surgery. It is not rare to see the sick choosing the physician who is ready to tell them what they wish to hear. Often to the detriment of the patient himself.55

The physicians who worked at clinics commented less on their interactions with patients. This could be seen as an indication of their more robust position as experts whose authority was beyond question. However, many of them still wished to present themselves as benefactors of the patients and as people for whom patients mattered. One could think of Mařatka’s disapproving remark (mentioned earlier) concerning on Prusík’s tendency to treat his patients as experimental objects and his contention that this was the main reason why he switched to work with Pelnář, though Pelnář was clearly the more powerful patron of the two. Pelnář’s good reputation in this sense is confirmed by other sources, such as the memoirs of his other protégé, Jirí Charvát. Charvát admired Pelnář’s friendly attitude towards his patients. He affirms that Pelnář remembered his patients’ names and took time to chat with them. Pelnář is thus depicted as a powerful clinician who, however, still had some of the habits of the ideal physician from the times of bedside medicine,56 when physicians had provided care for paying patients in their homes, such as a caring and friendly attitude towards the patients and a willingness to take time to gain their trust through conversation, albeit in a setting marked by a clear hierarchy of authority and control over the process of healing, with the physician on top. The role of hospitals in enhancing physicians’ authority was by no means limited to Prague and Brno. The aforementioned Vladimír Vondráček, who served as head of a provincial hospital, offers a description which clearly reveals the prestige enjoyed by physicians in the clinic setting:

The head of a department at a provincial hospital performs all kinds of surgery, gut, limbs, sometimes also the throat, nose, ears, eyes […] The chief surgeon of a hospital was the lord and sovereign of the region, the good god, the savior, the healer. He was honored and appreciated, and his income was high, as there were classes in the hospital. However, his work was exhausting.57

However exhausting the work may have been in rural hospitals and however time-consuming it might have been for the urban clinicians to chase private patients, the framework of the interclass hospital guaranteed those who were employed there authority and the respect of their patients.

Among Colleagues: Vertical and Horizontal Ties

Relationships with colleagues were key in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the physicians’ quest for supreme authority and middle-class social status not only for themselves as individuals but for the whole profession. They needed to acknowledge existing professional hierarchies and make good use of them, but at the same time, they had to develop a strong collective identity that would reduce competition among them and allow them to present a common front vis à vis patients. In this sense, instead of insisting on specific individual privileges as university professors or royal physicians, even the most privileged physicians became involved in the mission to strengthen the social standing of all physicians and their status as expert authorities. The white coat would become the symbol of this professional unity.

We have already discussed the continuing importance of patronage and the role of senior clinicians in shaping the careers of their younger colleagues. The quest for the consolidation of authority and status required horizontal solidarity, too. Notions of professional honor and collegiality were therefore mobilized to regulate competition among physicians and police their behavior, since questionable conduct on the part of one physician could cast a shadow on his colleagues. Medical journals and societies became useful spaces for internal discussion, where disputes and conflicts could be addressed so that physicians could face patients with coherent and consistent attitudes and discourse. Physicians in the Czech lands, whether Czech-speaking or German-speaking (or both), did not fall for the tribunals of honor and dueling like the physicians in the German Empire analyzed by Andreas-Holger Maehle. They stuck to their petit-bourgeois ways and showed respect for state institutions and administrative procedures, peppering their discourse with nationalist attitudes and meritocratic topoi.58 Moreover, while physicians were expected to ridicule alternative healers and undermine their patients faith in these “charlatans,” they were also expected to refuse to listen to patients’ complaints about other doctors and discourage doctor-hopping by refusing to provide care for patients who were seeing other physicians. Salmon claims to have “hated” being invited to see a patient who was seeing another doctor, and if he discovered that one of his patients was seeing another doctor, he “took his hat and left, never to come back” (at least according to his account). He only provided care for another physician’s patients if asked to do so by the physician himself and only if he had a suggestion concerning a new treatment for the patient, and he insisted that his colleague be the one to communicate this suggestion to the patient. This behavior was far from the norm in a period when physicians still needed to compete for paying patients, but it was becoming an ideal. This is clear from the fact that Salmon’s colleagues liked and appreciated Salmon’s behavior and reinforced his reputation as a selfless and capable practitioner, capable of earning the trust of his patients who, in fact, included some of his colleagues.

In articulating a common ideal of the physician that would unite them all in terms of expert authority and social class physicians had to negotiate complex and often contradictory considerations and principles.59 Like their German, French, and Spanish counterparts, Czech physicians had to reconcile the notions of selflessness and sacrifice, which were the basis of their claim to honor (a concept that experienced a revival at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Central Europe)60, with the need to get and satisfy paying patients, whose fees they needed so that they and their families could maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Although pressure decreased with the growing number of well-paid posts and the spread of the medical insurance system (and in the 1920s and 1930s, physicians’ wives could also contribute to the family income as women’s work in white-collar jobs became respectable and even fashionable among the upper-middle classes in Prague), this tension still existed and influenced physicians’ relationships with their peers.

Syllaba, the son of an elite, well-off physician, proposed a typology of physicians according to their attitudes towards the medical profession. In his assessment, there were businesslike doctors who only saw their patients as a potential source of profits, but they were rare exceptions. Most physicians, he contended, were the “lovers of humankind” and fanatics of their profession, and they were in danger of being totally absorbed with and exhausted by the task of providing care for their patients. Syllaba’s criticism of this model is interesting, because it also stresses the importance of providing the best possible care for patients. He argues that, if they did not die prematurely of exhaustion, these selfless doctors who sacrificed themselves for their patients were unable to keep their medical knowledge up to date, which ended up affecting their skills as physicians. The ideal physician, according to Syllaba, sees the patient as an interesting “case” without forgetting that he or she is also a human being. As for himself, Syllaba emphasized his selflessness but also his interest in the progress of medicine:

I always tried to help the sick. I empathized with their feelings, tried to understand their inner state, to sympathize with their worries and anxieties, and to calm them down at least by word, if expert help was not possible anymore. I never understood medical profession as a business. To me, money was always only a means to buy medical books and cover the expenses of the travels of learning and study.61

Syllaba’s colleagues—and not only those from poorer families—did not hesitate to note that they had experienced financial problems in their professional careers and worried more about covering everyday expenses than about traveling to conferences abroad. They too, however, took pride in attending international conferences and buying medical instruments and literature to keep up with medical science. Urban or rural, GPs or clinicians, most physicians wished to be seen as caring healers and men of science, not mere businessmen.

Trust and camaraderie among physicians were also encouraged at the clinics. Mařatka writes about spending hours playing chess with his colleagues after they had quickly checked up on their patients. Pelnář’s habit of inviting his subordinates to participate in the decisions concerning the junior medical staff was another means of strengthening group identity. It was no coincidence that Pelnář emphatically encouraged his protégés to be active in the Society of Czech Physicians, which had the double aim of promoting the interests of the medical profession and those of ethnic Czechs among the country’s physicians.62 They were also expected to travel abroad to further their studies and to attend international events, such as conferences on medicine and hygiene, working towards the improvement of medicine and the medical profession and, at the same time, promoting Czech interests through scientific internationalism. This, of course, implied knowledge of foreign languages, a form of cultural capital that served as another social filter.

Keeping Up Appearances

The importance of informal sociability, appearance, and manners in the nine­teenth-century physicians’ quest for social recognition has been acknowledged and analyzed, for instance, in the work of Robert Nye on France, Andreas-Holger Maehle’s work on Germany, and Martykánová and Núñez-García’s research on Spain.63 The sources we discuss in this article show that, like their French and Spanish peers, Czech physicians were similarly aware of the need to create and maintain an image that combined bourgeois respectability with the aura of professional authority. The physicians, for example, comment on their clothes as a means of creating a certain impression. Salmon takes pride in changing his shirt and shoes twice a day to be always presentable in front of his patients. The period under study was a time of transition from dressing as a gentleman during practice to the professional uniform of the whitecoat, a very visible sign of the triumph of a strong collective professional identity over the socio-economic divides and hierarchies of prestige that had existed in the medical profession for centuries. There were still important differences, but by the end of the period under discussion, all physicians, both rich and poorer, whether clinicians or rural practitioners, saw an advantage in endorsing this common informal uniform.

While they opted for a white coat uniform when they practiced, physicians found other status symbols to put their social capital on display. An apartment or a house at a prestigious address was a sign of success in big cities and small towns alike.64 Some physicians had their villas built by prestigious architects. They attended social events and parties and dressed properly for the occasion: the gentlemen wore smoking jackets and their wives donned long dresses. They took pride in socializing with famous people.65 They also stressed their travels abroad, whether for professional reasons or leisure, thus projecting an image of cosmopolitanism.

It was not all about showing off. There were other ways of expressing one’s middle-class status, such as charity. As his son argues, Dr. Pavlík was frustrated by his patients’ poverty, and we have no reason to doubt his honest indignation, but the fact that he instructed his wife to send his patients food and clothes for their children can also be read as a means of reaffirming his family’s position among the middle classes, since charity was one of the mechanisms of social distinction, one that began to become particularly associated with femininity in the mid-nineteenth century. The role of the wife was, overall, quite important and in a process of change: some physicians acknowledged their wives’ key contributions to running the medical practice as nurses and accountants (Vondráček), while others presented them as companions at elite social gatherings (Charvát) and during their various travels. The case of Mařatka, whose wife helped him support the family’s middle class lifestyle with her salary as a bank clerk while her mother took care of the household, is a clear sign of new times in a Czechoslovakia led by the openly feminist president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who added his wife’s surname to his own, and where an active women’s movement existed which successfully promoted political and civil rights for women.66 A working, professional wife could now be an asset, not only in economic terms, but also as a clear sign of the modern Czech man’s progressive attitude.

Patriotism was another way of asserting and affirming social status and presenting oneself as a respectable Czech gentleman. Physicians who practiced in towns were often active in patriotic societies, contributed to the local press, and actively participated in local middle-class social life by attending the theater, for instance. Physicians in big cities often had important Czech politicians and intellectuals among their patients, and as they note in their memoirs, they took pride in this. Several of them stress their resistance to the German occupation and the persecution they suffered during World War II, a very rewarding strategy of self-presentation in a society in which the “fight against fascism” remained a key part of the national narrative across different political regimes and political cultures during the second half of the twentieth century.67

Concluding Remarks: Future Comparisons and a Trans-Imperial Analysis

As in this article we focus on a specific group of physicians who wrote about their practice in Czech, we need to acknowledge that we cannot make generalizations about the physicians born and bred in the Czech lands, in part because we excluded physicians who practiced in the Czech lands but did not write in Czech but also because we left out doctors from Czech-speaking families whose professional careers developed mostly in other parts of the empire, particularly in Vienna. We nonetheless observe, even within this narrower group, several dynamics that had parallels in other European countries. First and foremost, there were two forces that led to the creation of a stronger collective identity of physicians as members of a profession. One was the quest for indisputable authority in the medical field, expelling or subordinating other actors, a quest that united physicians by giving them a common purpose and common enemies, despite differences in individual wealth and prestige among them. The other one was the redefinition of social status after the crisis of the Ancien Régime. The hierarchical society began to give way to equality before the law and new ways of legitimizing social differences. In the emerging class society, physicians struggled to position themselves firmly among the middle classes not only as individuals, but also as a professional group. We have observed how they mobilized economic, social, and cultural capital in this collective pursuit. We have also shown how social differences shaped professional careers and how exceptions were integrated, interpreted, and used to legitimize the system and its hierarchies. In particular, we have identified a pattern: when a man knew he could rely on his middle-class family’s material support, he could dream of pursuing a career in research. For less well-off physicians, however, obtaining a diploma was a costly achievement, and they felt compelled to start earning money as soon as they finished their studies. They sought posts that offered stable salaries and opportunities to earn extra income from private patients. The latter was not always easy in poorer regions, and even if physicians had private patients, they were often paid in specie rather than in cash. Patronage was a way of overcoming these material obstacles, and this practice did not disappear at the end of the period. Rather, it was strengthened due to the patrons’ growing capacity to get paid posts for their protégés. In addition to individual patronage, the growing institutionalization of healthcare ended up giving most physicians some degree of financial stability, reducing the tension between the image of a selfless, lifesaving doctor and the need to secure an income that would permit a physician to live a middle-class life even when faced with competition from his peers. By the early twentieth century, a commitment to scientific progress and patriotism emerged as two other important pillars of the social representation of Czech physicians.

Archival Sources

Muzeum Českého ráje v Turnově [Museum of Český ráj in Turnov]

A – P-JS. Documents of physician Josef Salmon.

Státní okresní archiv Tábor [State District Archive in Tábor]

Rodinný archiv Petříčkův [Archive of Petříček‘s family] Documents of physician Josef Pavlík.

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Zsuzsa Bokor
Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):395–432 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.395

This paper presents the distinctive manner in which the Hungarian public health system in Transylvania was built up, parallel to the state structures in the interwar period. In several policies and public health projects, the young medical generation of the 1930s formed the basis of the biologically based ethnic community of Hungarians in Transylvania. This process was presented by them as part of ethnic survival and made the presence of the doctor necessary. The paper discusses the foundation of minority health institutes and also the discourses around the formation of these.

Keywords: public health, interwar, Transylvania, Hungarian doctors, minority health protection, maternal and infant protection

Having found itself in the position of a minority after World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Hungarian minority in Transylvania developed numerous survival strategies1 aimed mostly at its survival as a cultural and linguistic community. Public health, which in turn-of-the-century Hungary had already had a solid institutional foundation and a large number of specialists,2 underwent major changes in interwar Transylvania. The health problems of the community were only sporadically part of minority policy, and these issues were left, in general, to civilian philanthropic organizations.3 In the 1930s, however, this took an interesting turn when the number of Hungarian doctors increased, and the previously civilian-initiated public health programs were professionalized and gained new momentum and a new function as part of a specific minority community-building project. The main issues of European public health discourses came to the fore: saving the nation, the race, the health of the peasants, the dangers of venereal diseases, alcoholism, and the protection of infants and mothers. The alleged biological element of community building, which built on a strong turn-of-the-century tradition, became more prominent in the various discourses.

The short period which forms the chronological framework for my discussion here begins with the search for a strategy by a new generation of the group of so-called erdélyi fiatalok (Transylvanian youths) and the process in which they were involved in 1930 of constructing a new minority identity. The period under discussion came to a close with the outbreak of World War II, the Second Vienna Award (1940), the dismantling of minority institutions, and their integration into the Hungarian national institutional network.

In this article, I examine the manner in which the Hungarian public health system in Transylvania was built up parallel to rather than as part of the state structures in interwar Romania. This public health movement was not particularly ambitious, which is not surprising given the lack of financial resources. In addition to studying minority health policy, in this article, I also examine how an alleged biological basis of Transylvanian Hungarianness was formulated and how this notion of biological racial kinship or ethnicity figures in these discourses and the ways in which the scientific paradigm of eugenics, which was extremely popular at the time, especially in the Eastern and Central European medical sphere, became part of the construction of minority identity.

The Hungarian Medical Profession in Transylvania in the Interwar Decades: The Labor Market and Problems of Recruitment

In 1919, when Transylvania was made part of Romania, the newly formed political-administrative authorities began taking over the most important and biggest university of the region, the university in Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania). The Kolozsvári Magyar Királyi Ferencz József Tudományegyetem (Franz Joseph Hungarian Royal University of Kolozsvár) and its Faculty of Medicine moved to Budapest and then to Szeged in 1921. Very few of the leading figures remained in Transylvania, as the new Romanian state obliged intellectuals, including doctors, to take an oath of loyalty to the Romanian state and nation, which contributed to the mass emigration of Hungarian intellectuals. The change was also reflected in the decline of the number of medical students, as the number of Hungarian students who enrolled in the Romanian university was negligible, mainly due to a lack of language skills.4 As Victor Karady and Lucian Nastasă have emphasized in their monograph, for the authorities, the university meant a “symbolic process of nationalization of the region in the framework of the “Great Romanian” nation state.5

The Transylvanian medical profession dwindled after 1919, and its labor market opportunities became more limited. Hungarian doctors were less often employed in state institutions, and most of them pursued their work in private practice. There were only a few “Hungarian hospitals”6 in the country, all of them in large cities. However, these institutions could provide a living for a very limited number of doctors, and it is also clear from the sources that the recruitment of the urban medical elite was mainly favored by private hospitals. In 1937, 80 percent of the 7,669 doctors in Romania lived in cities, while the vast majority of the population lived in villages. According to contemporary statistics, a significant number of doctors working in Hungarian-majority villages were also of Romanian nationality, making communication difficult between patients and doctors.7

The Hungarian doctors of the period who lived and worked for the most part in one of the major cities, were scientific specialists in at least one field of medicine. They reported mostly on diagnoses, data, and research in medical journals, without interpreting them in any ethnic context. They did not play any particular role in minority organizations, and they did not explicitly embrace, as a group, any specific political credo. They were not particularly involved in any kind of health policy or minority policy. Most of the Hungarian-language medical forums, such as Egészség (Health), Erdélyi Orvosi Lap (Transylvanian Medical Journal) (1920–1925), Praxis medici (1924–1940), Clinica et laboratorium (1932–1949), and Orvosi Szemle (Medical Review) (1928–1938) were professional journals that did not discuss health policy issues pertaining in any specific way to the Hungarian communities. It is also noteworthy that, unlike their Romanian counterparts, they did not talk in public about the so-called “social diseases,” such as syphilis and other venereal diseases, which were considered among the biggest problems in Romania in the postwar period. The Hungarian-language press also tended to interpret the press statements made by Romanian doctors and health officials.8 Although they occasionally gave lectures to wider audiences, this was not the main orientation of this elite group. In the Medical Section of the Transylvanian Museum Association (Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület Orvostudományi Szakosztálya, hereinafter referred to as EME), departmental meetings were exclusively meetings among experts, and although lectures held to the wider public on health care and health issues were among the subjects addressed at these meetings, these experts also held talks that were intended for members of the more educated middle classes, who lived for the most part in the cities. In the decade after World War I, Hungarian doctors rarely addressed public health problems in their publications in medical journals or other forums. There were no organizations, no clearly articulated concepts of public health policy, and certainly no notions of minority health policy9 behind the few publications on the subject, which were usually related to the highlighted diseases of the time, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, infant mortality, etc. (which were referred to as “social diseases,” or bolile sociale in Romanian).10

During the first decade of the interwar period, the medical elite was undergoing a process of disintegration, though at the same time, the members of this elite were searching for new opportunities for institutionalization and for the security provided by the old institutions.11 The medical elite was looking inwards, and largely ignoring the questions faced by contemporary society.

Hungarian Patients Should Be Treated by Hungarian Doctors:12
The Ethnicization of Medical Interests

In the 1930s, there was a pronounced outward shift, with the medical elite becoming more sensitive to and engaged with the problems faced by the surrounding ethnic community. This was a period during which doctors, marginalized on ethnic grounds by the new state apparatus, also sought to organize themselves on ethnic grounds.

The Romanian state was neglecting the Hungarian communities, and this neglect had become a major talking point among the Hungarians, with experts criticizing the state’s failure to participate in the modernization of health care in settlements populated by Hungarian-majorities. It is almost impossible to compare the situations in different regions under the jurisdiction of the Romanian public health system, which was underdeveloped from the outset. In 1938, the Ministry of Health did an extensive survey of the health situation in Romania.13 Some of the reports submitted by the health inspectors provide useful information regarding the circumstances in the localities with Hungarian majorities, pointing out that the health conditions in these regions were a cause for concern. The health campaign, organized and conducted by the Ministry of Health and Social Works (and given the title “Sanitary Offensive”), resulted in the publication of monographs containing data about geography, topography, vegetation, climate, demography, household hygienic and sanitary conditions, sanitation infrastructure, and sanitation organizations in the Romanian regions. Nearly 74 percent of households were visited during the two-month campaign, 7,700,000 individuals were examined, over 42,000 radiological examinations were done, over 77,000 blood tests were taken, and over 360,000 injections were given. Although all the administrative regions, counties, and cities are included in these numbers, the case studies that suggest a more active medical presence are from localities with a Romanian majority. The Report of the General Inspectorate of Health of Sibiu/Szeben County points out that public health conditions in some of the cities of the Székely Land (Gyergyószentmiklós/Gheorgheni, Székelyudvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc, Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc) were not satisfactory, as was also the case in the rural region of Csík/Ciuc and Udvarhely/Odorheiu. The report also notes that the situation in Csík County was the worst in terms of hospital beds, with a total of 100 beds and one hospital bed for every 1,571 inhabitants.14 These data underline the concerns voiced by Hungarian doctors at the time and offer a rough impression of the ways in which the health policy of the period had clear disadvantageous consequences for Hungarian-speaking communities.15 The data also shows, however, that most of the Romanian regions were also underdeveloped from the perspective of health care. The survey results were not satisfactory anywhere, at least not by European standards. In the rural area of Csík County, there were 15 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants (a detail mentioned several times by Hungarian doctors). The same was true in Udvarhely County, and there were only 21 doctors total in Háromszék County. But this sum was not below the national average. In fact, in the villages in Romania, the ratio was even worse, since according to calculations, there were 9.6 doctors for every 100,000 people.16

In Hungary, this ratio increased after World War I (some historians have contended to say this was due to the migration of doctors from the territories annexed by the surrounding states), as there were suddenly 56 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants. This brought Hungary up to the level of Western European countries. In 1921–1922, France had 62 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, Germany had 73, Denmark 60, and Norway 40.17

The living conditions of Hungarian doctors were explained in the various sources by their ethnic belonging, and their employment barriers were associated with the region’s underdevelopment. However, for some of the physicians of the time, the idea of having Hungarian doctors treat Hungarian patients seemed like a promising project. Transylvanian Hungarian physician Béla Schmidt, who organized a Hungarian-language midwife-training course in Târgu Mures/Marosvásárhely after the war, made the following proposal:

Thus, there remains nothing left but to build and awaken racial consciousness on a stronger and broader basis. An awakened and lively racial consciousness can bring with it the hope that the young Hungarian doctor can also hope to find a job. Because the idea of a “Hungarian patient being treated by a Hungarian doctor” will only become a reality if Hungarian national consciousness is strengthened and revived.18

As Schmidt’s suggestion clearly illustrates, one of the issues at hand was that Hungarian doctors needed Hungarian patients in order to earn a livelihood. For Schmidt, the development of Hungarian national consciousness (and thus of a system of relations between patients and doctors that was founded on a notion of ethnic or national belonging) was a prerequisite for the ideal positioning of Hungarian doctors.

The feeling of professional deprivation among doctors was therefore closely linked to a series of social and administrative factors. However, the main cause for concern, beyond the feelings of neglect and professional marginalization, was the fact that the institutionalization of public health in Romania was part of a larger ethnicizing discourse used by the leading Romanian medical elite: the notion of Romanian identity as a fundamentally racial, biological identity lay at the core of these health politics. According to this discourse, the nation was defined by biological factors, and thus ethnic minorities were considered dysgenic elements and not part of the biological body of the nation.19 This biological definition of the nation provided a pretext and justification for eugenics, which was closely linked to biopolitical interventionism and radical health regulation measures. It is also noteworthy that the board of these public health institutes was represented by a medical elite that was engaged in this discourse.

By the 1930s, a new generation had emerged in the elite layer of the Transylvanian Hungarian medical community which took an active role in communicating scientific knowledge to the lower classes and did not perceive its work merely as a scientific task, but rather undertook the project of saving “the people” as a kind of missionary endeavor. Most of the doctors involved in the public health movement had graduated from Romanian universities after World War I, but most of them were socialized in religious communities, and almost all of them were members of a Church. Although they were also members of the EME’s medical section, they usually distanced themselves from the EME’s medical elite.

Before analyzing the work of this group, I will discuss some elements of the context: first, the idea of népszolgálat, or “work in the social service of the people,” which was the alleged moral basis of their work, and second, the research and service projects undertaken in rural areas in which the doctors were involved.

The Christian Socialist Idea of Népszolgálat (Work in the Social Service of the People)20 and Népközösség (Community of the People)

Young Hungarian intellectuals, dissatisfied with the minority politics of the elites in the 1920s, developed a new model of social organization in the 1930s, and the subject of Hungarian minority policy in Transylvania has generated a body of secondary literature too vast to summarize here.21 I would like instead briefly to touch on the idea of work in the social service of the people (népszolgálat) promoted by young intellectuals as an essential part of the ideological context in which the new generation of physicians worked. Népszolgálat was more than a political idea, as it sought to unite a highly stratified society, the whole minority community, or the so-called népközösség or “community of the people.” According to Nándor Bárdi,22 the Transylvanian Hungarian Christian socialist national and social attitude had two parallel theological foundations. For Catholics, the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI and its social teachings were decisive, and they formed the foundation of the social spirituality advocated by Áron Márton (1896–1980), an ethnic Hungarian Roman Catholic prelate and bishop of Gyulafehérvár/Alba Iulia. Márton distanced himself from any extremist nationalist ideas. He formulated his ideological standpoint as follows: “We demand freedom, but we are in a hurry to bury liberalism. We are calling for social care, and a radical reform of society, but we cannot go with Marxism. We undertake the sacred duty of loving the race, but the worship of blood is heresy.”23 Protestant authors promoted a critical view of the nation, based on a moral foundation: this moralized view of community was laid down by the Reformed Bishop Sándor Makkai in his work, Magunk revíziója (The Revision of Ourselves).

Creating new foundations for a society by reevaluating existing infrastructure, traditions, and human resources was evidently an enormous plan for a community.24 As Dezső Albrecht, one of the young elite leaders of the community, stated in 1937, “[b]efore the war, Transylvanian Hungarian society was not receptive to social or deeper national issues, its spirit was also fragmented in many directions, the conservative-nationalist conception of the aristocracy and the nobility, the radicalism of the urban bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were equally insensitive to social work, social organization, and social forces in general.”25

The idea of working in the social service of the people was incorporated into a holistic view of the nation, in which the collective care of body and soul were prioritized. Albrecht captured the essence of the Hungarian community as follows:

The protection of body and soul through the cultivation of body and soul. [...] An abandoned ethnic organization, deprived of the beneficent assistance of the state, whose natural development of its national existence has been blocked, is forced to rely on these fourfold activities: 1. Protection of the soul, i.e., the protection of morals, 2. Protection of the body, or health, 3. Ensuring prosperity, i.e., economic protection, 4. the cultivation of culture, i.e., the protection of literacy. These four activities are preserved and encouraged by political activity.26

Rural Healthcare Programs in the 1930s

Several rural programs were created in Romania after the war, and the discourse of the populist “national ontology”27 also gained an important place in public discussions. Rural culture and rural lifestyle were given more and more attention in the life of the Hungarian minority as well. The figure of the peasant became the seed of national revival. Similarly to Dimitrie Gusti’s sociological research school,28 the Sarló-mozgalom, or Sickle Movement, of the Hungarian minority community in Czechoslovakia, and the Szegedi Fiatalok Művészeti Kollégiuma, or Art College of the Szeged Youth, various monographic research projects29 were launched by the intellectuals gathered around the journal Erdélyi Fiatalok (Transylvanian Youth). Thus, turn towards village and peasant culture and life was not a passing interest among a small group of intellectuals. It was a pillar of minority policy and the foundation of a unified social vision for the minority. The intellectuals who represented the renewal of Hungarian culture, identity, and wellbeing among Romanian Hungarians, like their Czechoslovakian counterparts, “wanted to address, orientate, and integrate the village masses into their minority society organized on a national basis.”30 The self-help cooperatives were excellent examples of this social organization. The Mészkő cooperative, initiated by Ferenc Balázs,31 enjoyed varying degrees of success,32 and the Ágisz cooperatives launched by Sándor Kacsó33 were able to employ intellectuals, such as doctors, lawyers, economists, whose salaries were paid by the community itself through monthly contributions.

The Hungarian initiatives in Transylvania differed both from the village research movements in neighboring countries and the Romanian Gusti movement in that the entire activity of social organization had to be planned and implemented without any state support, and village education projects and research became integral parts of the efforts to strengthen the ethnic minority community. Since these initiatives had no state support, the ecclesiastical world, which had contributed to the upbringing of this generation and in which this movement could operate, was even more powerful.

The doctors of the new generation also proclaimed the need for a new approach, emphasizing their responsibility for the wellbeing of the community. The critique of the elitism of the previous medical generations played an important role in the self-definition of the new generation of doctors: “We need a selfless (and not a materialistic) soul, a new generation of Hungarian doctors who are less demanding, who see the human and Hungarian depths of the issue, and who are self-aware in their willingness to address this issue. And Hungarian society must make every effort to help them so that they can be properly organized to provide the most elementary initial opportunities for settling in the village.”34

The doctors involved in the endeavor—András Nagy, Béla Jancsó, Ernő Manyák, Kálmán Parádi, Elek Bakk, Béla Schmidt, and Lajos Küttel—were the best-known medical figures of the movement. They did not create independent medical organizations, but they were linked to the basic idea of social service. They worked in church organizations and cooperatives, and they were involved in the scientific research done by the new intellectuals.

Since the idea of work in the social service of the people was part of a Christian-based social stance, the doctors who joined for the most part had strong ties to the Church. They were mostly young doctors from the medical department of the Katolikus Népszövetség Orvosi Szakosztálya35 (Roman Catholic League of People): András Nagy, Ernő Manyák, Kálmán Parádi, Lajos Küttel, Béla Schmidt, and teachers from denominational schools, like Béla Jancsó. However, it was not unusual for them to be involved in programs organized by other denominations.

How can improvements be made to public health without a supportive public health policy? The medical elite of the 1930s claimed that there had to be a separate public health system for the Hungarian minority, because this community was very different from the majority ethnic group. The idea of institutionalized minority public health, integrated into state health policy but also somewhat separate from it, was conceived in the mid-1930s. Experts usually cited the shortcomings of the post-war Romanian health system as an argument for the establishment of a minority health policy, but they also noted the state’s alleged lack of concern for minorities. The ethnocentric nature of state public health measures meant that Hungarian settlements were left out of the development process and were given less attention by the Romanian authorities.

In the initial phases, cooperation with the state was still a priority, as Béla Schmidt noted in a later issue of Magyar Népegészségügyi Szemle (Hungarian Public Health Review) in 1937.36 Schmidt still thought that results could be achieved in minority health policy through the Hungarian political party Országos Magyar Párt, or OMP (National Hungarian Party),37 and he felt that a public health protection department should be established as part of this policy. The primary task of this department would have been the biopolitical mapping of the Hungarian population. The other ethnic health policy program, which was formulated by András Nagy,38 drew up a specific minority health policy.39 This program, however, considered the work of the OMP useless and, in contrast to Schmidt, it called for the establishment of a new health governing body, independent of politics, based on the Church, and building on the younger generation of the 1930s: “This health policy is the work of younger generations.”40 It was not organized against the state, but rather envisioned a public health program that would run parallel to the state institutions. An alternative to state care would have been the creation of a controlling public health body, a “silent association of doctors doing Christian social work,” “a body entrusted with the health care of the minority churches.”41

In his health policy program, András Nagy devised a plan for the creation of institutions, and he offered an explanation for the alleged necessity of a parallel minority health policy:

We have different problems which are in many ways different from those of the predominant people, and the same problems manifest themselves in a different way in a Hungarian ethnic context. […] However, the birth and death rates differ from one ethnic group to another, the causes of mortality are different, and each suffer from different diseases.42

The minority health system was envisaged to be as complete as the state health system. It had to be based on research and censuses, and its operation had to be ensured by a public health management center which placed emphasis on the training of health personnel and medical students, the creation of health institutions with Church support and private funding, and conveying medical knowledge to the public with the help of village doctors, trained doctors and teachers, the press, and by prevention and treatment.

The Main Problems of Hungarian Minority Health Policy

Demographic indicators: birth rates, emigration

The increased concern of the Hungarian elite in Transylvania about demographic indicators can be observed after the publication of the results of the 1930 census.43 According to the 1930 census, Hungarians constituted 7.9 percent of the total population of Romania (18,057,028). Most of them (94 percent) lived in Transylvania.44 According to the new data, there was a decrease of nearly 200,000 compared to 20 years earlier.45

The other demographic phenomenon that was a cause for concern was the large scale of emigration. According to some data, 197,000 Hungarians left Transylvania between 1918 and 1922.46 The emerging concern surrounding the demographic data was also significantly influenced by the Romanian interpretation of the census data. In Romanian public opinion, the reception of the data was dominated by anti-revisionist views and the fears voiced by Sabin Manuilă, the head of the Romanian Demographic Institute, who was in charge of the Romanian census in 1930. Manuilă did not hide his joy at the fact that the Hungarian population in Transylvania was decreasing, and he also regularly influenced public opinion concerning the Romanianization of the region. “Time,” he said to Romanian newspapers, “quickly brings the definitive consolidation of the Romanian ethnic mass and at the same time grinds down the country’s ethnic minority groups.”47 He also added that “[e]thnic minorities are becoming fewer and fewer in our country, in a country whose population is growing vertiginously.”48

Many of the medical activists wondered how birth rates in the minority community could be increased. An array of public health education materials illustrates clearly the areas of life in which doctors wanted to make a difference. The series launched by Ágisz Hasznos Könyvtár (Ágisz Useful Library) from Brassó/Braşov49 undertook the publication of a number of health protection brochures, and the Reformed Church’s journal Kiáltó Szó (Word of Outcry) also published a special edition of articles by Béla Jancsó.50

The main concern of this health policy was the perceived need to control demographic trends, and infant health, maternal health, and the one-child issue were given priority. It is perhaps no coincidence that the tangible results of this health policy were most visible in the discussion of birth rates, which may have been due to doctors’ active cooperation with the Hungarian women’s associations and women’s religious organizations in Transylvania.

Maternal and infant protection

A broader social interest among Hungarian doctors in preventive care for infants emerged during World War I. In the public mind, the fate of the nation was inextricably linked to the health of the next generation and, of course, to the birth rates. The preoccupation with the health of future generations and the protection of mothers and infants was most powerfully expressed in the activities of the Országos Stefánia Szövetség az Anyák és Csecsemők Védelmére (National Stefánia Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants).

After World War I, doctors had an even more important role in defending the supposed biological integrity of the community.51 As was the case in Hungary, the new medical authorities in Romania made proposals concerning efforts to resolve the chaos in the wake of the war and to remove remnants of the previous political system. After World War I, a newly formed biopower provided for the security of the nation’s health in Greater Romania. During this period, a range of reforms were introduced directly attaching the body and human sexuality to fertility in an attempt to control women’s sexuality, to put women’s bodies in the service of a eugenic ideal, and “to increase the rate of healthy births.”52

Transylvanian Hungarian doctors also took on these tasks. They were the only ones qualified to give precise instructions to the community regarding its alleged biological integrity. And since childbirth and nursing were the mothers’ domain, they provided a broad amount of information, including subjects such as childbirth, childrearing, and issue ranging from children’s shoes to bacteria, children’s psychology, and the role of fresh air in children’s growth.

In the following, I discuss some concepts included in the public health programs conceived by Hungarian medical doctors in Transylvania. I examine the initiatives of Lajos Küttel, the infant protection activism of András Nagy, and some brochures edited for mothers in the interwar period.

Lajos Küttel’s name appeared in the Transylvanian Hungarian public discourse in the mid-1930s, as he regularly gave lectures to large audiences in Kolozsvár on inheritance, racial biology, and eugenics.53 In 1935, as a doctor in Torockó/Trascău, he started a model campaign in his own village. The idea of the demonstration district54 or “public health demonstration district” came from the United States. Essentially, a public health demonstration district was an experimental colony the aim of which was to establish and test “model health institutions.”55 While the campaigns in Eastern Europe (including Romania and Hungary) were supported by the Rockefeller Foundation,56 the Torockó project was carried out on a voluntary basis by the local intellectuals and the district doctor.57 In the infant clinic, 42 babies were examined regularly and vaccinated, and mothers were given advice on infant care. The doctor organized training courses on infant protection for nurses among local volunteers.58 These nurses spent one day a week in the clinic and visited families with babies. The infant unit kept family registers and monitored the health situation of families.

Küttel planned to extend the model campaign to the whole of Transylvania, and he intended the Torockó infant protection action to serve as a model. In his policy paper, regarding the organization of child protection actions among the Roman Catholic, Reformed, and Unitarian and Evangelical Churches in Romania (hereinafter referred to as Draft59), he reports on the infant protection activities in Torockó and develops the operational plan for a Transylvanian Hungarian Church-based infant protection association. The infant protection association was never actually created, but the women’s associations all made the problem of infant protection a priority, and in the autumn of 1936, the Unitarian Women’s Association organized a course on infant protection with Küttel. The course included lectures on the physical and psychological development of children, healthy ways of feeding, alternative infant feeding, formula feeding, general hygiene, and illnesses. Five of the 16 lectures were on heredity and eugenics, which were Küttel’s main areas of interest.

The Draft was one of the most remarkable initiatives of the Hungarian medical organization in the interwar period, as it modeled all the possibilities and perspectives that these two decades offered for the development of the public health movement: infant protection as a privileged field of minority biopolitics; the necessity of public health organization; the exclusive role of the Churches in the organization; and the extreme importance of the defense of the minority community understood as a biological community.

The Draft offers an unusual biological anthropological point of view: the reason for making mothers aware of the maternal instinct to provide care was to reverse the selection mechanism of nature. In this process of awareness-raising, Küttel considered morally and religiously sound infant protection important, but he claimed that in the circumstances faced by the minority community, Hungarians in Transylvania must prioritize the national objective, which was to “increase the strength of the nation.” This is noteworthy because he expected Church support to implement the plan, but he wanted to involve the Church not as a moral authority but as a management unit, since it was the most organized body for the ethnic community.

The Draft proposes a eugenically-oriented project that goes beyond turn-of-the-century charity infant care and focuses on a new paradigm, the improvement of the national community’s demographic indicators. In his 1936 treatise on eugenics Átörökléstan és eugénia kérdések (Heredity Theory and the Questions of Eugenics),60 Küttel argues in favor of negative eugenics in the sense of Mendelian eugenics, supporting his arguments with Scandinavian, German, and American examples, while positive eugenics is discussed in just one short chapter. He writes in first person plural, emphasizing not only his own position but also making the reader feel coopted. He is explicit in his contention that the large rural populations in Central Europe with high birth rates represent a “lower social stratum” than the populations of the modern, secularized Western states, and he claims that “the higher social strata is, on average, composed of more intelligent, healthier, and more industrious people than the lower social strata, on average.”61 The Catholic doctor András Nagy criticized Küttel for not taking Catholic views into account and for having composed a treatise the purpose of which was to promote and pass the German sterilization law for the Hungarian public.62 Küttel replied with the phrase attributed to Galileo Galilei: “eppur si muove,” or “and yet it moves.”63

Despite Nagy’s objections, there are common grounds in his work and Küttel’s career. Both were members of the Medical Section of the Catholic League of People, and Nagy was well acquainted with Küttel’s professional activities, both the Torockó demonstration district and his interest in eugenics. Küttel’s work inspired Nagy to devise a plan for a public health center that was even more complex than the one in Torockó, which would become the nursing home (or health home or midwives’ house) in Csíksomlyó/Şumuleu Ciuc. This home started out as a network of midwives but later grew into a complex maternity hospital which helped women from the rural area of Csík County provide care for their newborn babies. The nursing home as an institution for infant protection was also promoted by the Romanian Sanitation Law in 1930. Iuliu Moldovan,64 who signed the law, stressed that rural medical dispensers should be more than just places to cure illness. He suggested that small institutions employing a doctor and a midwife should also do preventive work, and he proposed the name “nursing home” (casă de ocrotire) instead of “dispensary,”65 placing emphasis on prevention instead of treatment.

In 1937, due to the joint efforts of the Roman Catholic Church, the Society of the Sisters of Social Service (Szociális Testvérek Társasága),66 the President of the Catholic Women’s Association, Mrs. Paula Bethlen (née Jósika, the wife of György Bethlen), and the physician András Nagy, the Salvator Egészségház (Salvator Nursing Home) was established. Initially, it employed a team of midwives who carried out family visits, provided prenatal and postnatal care, and offered assistance with home births in villages around Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc. In 1938, it became a maternity hospital and employed a full-time doctor. In the beginning, it provided social support only for women for whom it would have been risky to give birth at home, mainly because of their health or hygienic conditions.67 Between September 1938 and August 1940, 100 births were registered at the nursing home. Women usually stayed in the maternity ward for 10 days, during which time they received thorough “training” in childcare. This was a very specific, direct form of infant protection, education for the mother, the rewriting of former popular customs (which according to doctors were difficult to change), healing practices, and hygiene rules.

These two projects offer a good insight into how different ideologies can underlie similar types of initiatives. While Küttel was interested in improving the supposed biological quality of the ethnic community, and he emphasized that his work was not a form of charitable activity. András Nagy, in contrast, embraced Áron Márton’s idea of work in the social service of the people and regarded his own policy as a philanthropic social program. It is also interesting to observe the different roles assigned by policymakers to the Church.

Handbooks for Mothers: “Childcare Has to Be Done without Sentimentality, Almost Mechanically” 68

The press (e.g., Magyar Nép, or Hungarian Nation, Harangszó, or Toll of the Bell) and health magazines (Magyar Népegészségügyi Szemle or Hungarian Public Health Observer) regularly published articles aimed at mothers. The most complex materials were the medical booklets and brochures regarding healthy mothering and infant care.69 Most of these booklets were written for general use, but some contained the curriculum for a specific course, usually a denominational course, and therefore provided mother and baby care wrapped in the dogmatic teachings of the respective Church. For example, the course Anyák iskolája (School for Mothers),70 which was organized by the Roman Catholic Women’s Association, discusses the principles of Christian marriage, stresses the importance of having children, and condemns birth control. In addition to marriage, parenting, and social issues, the most important chapter on health issues was written by András Nagy.

The doctor monitored the development of individuals from the beginning of their lives, through several types of supervised activities:

1. Prenatal care. The full medicalization of pregnancy is justified by the dangers of pregnancy. Nagy described pregnancy as follows: “the maternal condition [...] imposes a great burden on the mother, may be harmful to her health, and is almost as dangerous to her life as pneumonia, as is proved by the great number of diseases and deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth.”71 On the level of discourse, a new register of feeling was introduced: that of deterrence, which was not an encouraging but rather a terrifying discursive practice intended, presumably, to instill doubt or fear of the possible consequences.
2. Giving birth following medical instructions. In the 1930s, doctors were rarely present for births. Midwives trained in medical institutions were expected to assist at birth. In anticipation of the eventuality that women might have to give birth without assistance, infant care booklets covered all the details of labor and delivery and gave precise instructions to the woman giving birth. Giving birth was not seen as a normal, natural human action anymore, but rather was considered a scheduled medical act.
3. Postpartum control. The aim was to protect the mother’s health during the puerperium by emphasizing basic hygienic principles and delegitimizing old folk practices and popular traditional knowledge.
4. Requirements/rules for the care and feeding of the infant. These subjects were addressed in the most extensive chapters in the information booklets. These chapters dealt with every aspect of the newborn infant’s care: cleaning, swaddling, dressing, breastfeeding, alternative feeding methods, etc. They emphasized the importance of strictness in breastfeeding and specified the duration of feeding and the length of time between two feedings: “strictly, precisely, at the same time.”72
5. The outsourcing of infant care to the medical sector, the complete elimination of local “superstitious” healing practices and popular traditional healers (the doctors called them charlatans), and the acceptance of the doctor as the only legitimate healer. On the one hand, this is a responsibility, but on the other hand, the doctor–parent relationship also implies the social judgements of the mother: “The physical and mental development and health of the child is proof of how caring, good, and clever the parents are, and especially the mother. Such parents and mothers always seek in good time the advice and help of the one who has learned it and whose sacred duty is to give such advice and help: the doctor.”73
6. Rules for childrearing. The authors of the booklets encouraged as little physical contact as possible between mother and baby, and care for babies was to be done without any sentimentality to avoid illness. They condemned kissing and rocking infants, as well as unscheduled feedings and comfort feeding of the newborn,74 mentioning that healthy infants do not cry but stay in their beds all day long. “If it is necessary to care for the infant, it has to be done without sentimentality, almost mechanically, because the satisfaction of the baby’s wishes will give it a few minutes of pleasure but will be harmful later in life. If he sees that his wish is not fulfilled when he cries, he stops crying and stops trying to achieve something by crying.”75
7. Infant protection was regarded as important not simply for the health of newborns or because of demographic indicators, but also because it offered the promise, from a longer-term perspective, of a healthy youth with a strong character and a sense of action. “If he can do the small tasks himself, he will become independent and self-confident, and he will be able to take on big tasks when he grows up,” the specialists contended in an effort to impress upon their readers the necessity of maintaining distance when rearing a child.76 Youth in this discourse was a demographic and public health issue, especially in terms of employment policy: due to migration, it is precisely the lack of a viable, leading intellectual class that needs to be filled by youth education. Youth becomes one of the main and complex symbols of this social agenda. It is also a primary thread in the idea of the common people, the new man. As would be made concrete later in the program of the Romániai Magyar Népközösség (Community of the Romanian Hungarian People), there was an expectation regarding the intellectual and emotional education development of young individuals whose main qualities were initiative, good organizational skills, obedience, responsibility, solidarity, constant perseverance, and a good understanding of the broad interrelationships among issues.77

The idea of consistent, meticulous childrearing and the minimization of physical contact between mother and child was based on the vision of a new generation growing up under strict, almost military conditions, raised by a health-conscious mother, under constant medical supervision, and thus able to function in the world as biologically fully developed individuals. The biologically perfect youth represented a social stratum on which the future of a minority could be based.

Examining ASTRA’s78 medical propaganda in Romania and comparing it with publications of the infant protection associations in Hungary79 and the Transylvanian Hungarian medical information booklets, we see similar trends in infant care and childrearing in interwar Hungary and interwar Romania. Each was operating according to the same principles: the need for hygiene, fresh air, attention, adherence to the baby’s schedule, putting the baby to bed, and strict programming of the infant’s sleep and eating.80 Drops in birth rates and cases of infant mortality were attributed to mothers’ alleged ignorance and the use of birth control,81 and a healthy baby was considered the future of a healthy nation.

In the Transylvanian Hungarian texts, there is a much closer association between the infant and the youth. In these texts, the infant is associated with the powerful young individual of a new ethnic community. This was a prospective gaze, and it therefore promoted a much more militaristic, more severe attitude and made a more strenuous call for distance between parent and child than the Romanian literature or the Hungarian literature written and published in Hungary. It is notable that the distancing attitudes and the condemnation of pampering are much stronger in the Transylvanian materials. The fear of attachment was built, as a new layer, on the medical culture of caution and excessive concern for health protection. The environment constructed in this way seems to be rather a minority bubble or “greenhouse.” Growing up in a “greenhouse” was a distant goal, a means of survival, and a way of coping with harsh conditions. This vision was used as a justification for the alleged need for strict, transparent, and predictable care, the nurturing of both mother and newborn, and intensive medical control. This may have been why this type of infant care followed the turn-of-the-century tendency that Reinhard Spree notes in German infant care books so strictly. This paradigm “promoted purposefully organized, cleanliness-oriented, punctual, orderly, disciplined education. They warned against the imminent danger of indulgence and prescribed unrelenting strictness (unerbittliche Strenge).”82

The Question of Racial Qualities

Between 1900 and 1940, an impressive emphasis was placed in Hungary and Romania on defining race and its alleged connection to biological mechanisms of identification and classification. Physical anthropology, as Marius Turda has noted, became associated with all other processes intrinsic to the discussions of national identity, such as national particularity, historical destiny, and ethnic assimilation.83

Though the question of race was not at the forefront of the Transylvanian Hungarian youth community work or at least not in the way it was emphasized for Romanians or Transylvanian Saxons,84 supposed racial qualities or racial belonging were questions to be answered in the community’s self-positioning and in constructions of ethnic minority identity.85 These discussions were also responses to the majority’s eugenic discourses. Race, despite its eugenic connotations and uses among Hungarian doctors from Transylvania, was most often seen as synonymous with ethnicity and nationality, and as such, it was a regarded as an essential, even elemental component of the community.

The biologization of national identity in Romania became most pronounced after World War I. From the perspective of this understanding of national identity, the nation is described as a biological entity the birth and death rates of which must be kept under constant medical control. The Romanian eugenicists, like their Central European counterparts, were concerned about the fates of the newly emerging nation states. They worked to further the creation of a “homogeneous national community,” and almost all of them shared the conviction that “the state should be a nation state in which the ethnic majority constituted the nation.”86

In 2015, historian Marius Turda introduced the concept of eugenic subcultures.87 He pointed out that, in parallel to the dominant eugenic discourse popular in the majority cultures in Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar period, minorities also created eugenically oriented programs, despite the exclusionary nature, in general, of eugenics programs, which regarded ethnic minorities as dysgenic elements and not as part of the supposed biological body of the nation.

The Romanian Saxons also created a bureau for so-called racial protection, the Rassenamnt der Selbsthilfe (Self-Help Race Office), which was founded by Alfred Csallner and the Landesamt für Statistic und Sippenwesen (National Office for Statistics and Genealogy),88 as well as the Schwäbisch-Deutscher Kulturbund and the Kulturbund (Swabian-German Cultural Association) of the German minority in Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, and the Sudetendeutsche Jugendgemeinschaft (The Sudeten Germans’ State Association for German Youth Welfare).89 There are many common elements in the discourses of these institutes, which were focused on demographics but from the perspective of a racial and thus eugenic understanding of national identity. The alleged biological factors of the ethnic community were the most important elements in the identity project. The most important problems discussed by minority eugenicists were the issues of reproduction and the protection of marriage, children, and youths. The eugenicists prioritized birth rates and condemned abortion and the one-child system. Like their Hungarian contemporaries, the Saxon eugenicists, especially Alfred Csallner (but also members of the German Kulturbund in Vojvodina), placed great emphasis on birth rate trends and condemned the so-called Ein- und Zweikindersystem (one- and two-child system).90

Neither the Romanian nor the Saxon eugenicists’ initiatives were echoed among Hungarian youth activists, at least not explicitly. These activists distanced themselves from the eugenic agenda of the majority society, other minority associations, and the eugenic agendas in Hungary. No eugenic center was established, and the Transylvanian eugenics school, so famous at the turn of the century, disappeared after the Treaty of Trianon. One of the factors that certainly slowed down the spread of eugenics among the Hungarian elite was the fact that one of the important backers of the Transylvanian youth movement, the Roman Catholic Church (through the youth sections of the Roman Catholic League of People), strongly influenced the ideology of this society. The papal Casti Connubii91 condemned eugenics and all forms of social engineering. The other problem was the national policy of Nazi Germany, which was based on racial biology and was condemned by the members of the Transylvanian intelligentsia with religious backgrounds.

Although race biology was not embraced by young members of the Hungarian minority communities, the terminology used in the discourses of racial hygiene and eugenics was also part of the vocabulary of the Transylvanian Hungarian medical community. This was not coincidental, as this discourse was part of the postwar regeneration of nation states across Europe, and it was most often doctors and medical societies who took on the task of guarding the supposed biological body of the nation.

Eugenics had different connotations in these Transylvanian narratives.

1. It was used to explain public health problems and processes. The solutions proposed were taken from the toolbox of positive eugenics. The public health problems to be solved were usually linked to the supposed decline in the biological strength of Hungarians. In this context, therefore, eugenics is best understood as the purported science behind public health, and thus the most important keywords of positive eugenics were used in the discourses behind efforts to explain and improve public health. These terms included mixed marriage, falling birth rates, population decline, one-child system, and sexually transmitted diseases. In 1935, the Magyar Népegészségügyi Szemle opened with an article by a famous Hungarian eugenicist, Gábor Doros,92 on the front page with the title “Who should marry?” The article gives a eugenic reading of marriage, emphasizing the obligation to produce healthy offspring.
   The maintenance of the body, abstinence, and careful family planning were all part of a eugenic model through which parents could produce biological individuals of full (social) value. One of the main issues in reproduction was the one-child system. András Nagy gives a eugenic reading of this, saying that having only one child usually leads to the extinction of a species: “According to the eugenicists, having one offspring is also a selection process. Species that have lost their viability disappear from the world through the slow suicide of the one-armed man. The one-armed man occurs in parallel with the qualitative decline of species. The viable species are not one-legged.” He highlighted the Székely’s biological behavior, who anthropologically were though to belong to the more viable ancestral component of the Hungarian people, the East Baltic race, and thus were more reproductive than other groups of Transylvanian Hungarians.
   Eugenics also provided an explanation of how mixed marriages reduced the biological strength of the Hungarians,93 the other obstacle to healthy reproduction. Another physician, Elek Bakk, saw venereal diseases as one of the main causes of social degeneration and considered pre-marital medical visits as the main means of prevention: “When it comes to our animals, we strive for a pure and faultless breed, so that we can obtain healthy and plentiful products from them. With marriages, it’s a different story. People marry for money. Let us not wonder, then, if mankind is becoming more and more degenerate.”94
2. The allegedly scientific findings of eugenics were part of education and research: “Of course, we hardly need to emphasize that the aspects of eugenic education must be included in the health education at all levels of education,”95 András Nagy declared. Racial health as a subject was part of the curriculum of professional training in some institutions, at the Department of Pastoral Medicine at the Faculty of Theology of Gyulafehérvár/Alba Iulia, for instance, but also for other participants in the courses on infant protection and midwife training. Although eugenics was part of the curriculum, there was a lack of eugenic specialists. Béla Jancsó complained about the lack of such specialists in his 1934 career guidance course for young people, in which he emphasized the need for specialists in eugenics: “Our people are threatened by diseases in their physiological nature, and there is no one who can fight for a healthier Hungarianness with eugenics, the science of creating healthier generations, which is so advanced worldwide.”96 Race biology was also an extremely important aspect of village surveys. “Public Health Issues,” the fourth chapter of Béla Demeter’s handbook for rural surveys, included more than 100 questions regarding the health situation of the village studied. The last 10 questions referred to allegedly racial/biological characteristics and inherited diseases.97
3. Eugenics served to strengthen national consciousness by buttressing the notion that the nation was a biological entity with allegedly scientific principles. In one of his studies, András Nagy describes the racial structure of the Hungarians in Transylvania in a very graphic way. According to him, Hungarian people are largely descended from two indigenous components, the Turanian and the Eastern Baltic racial component. In his assessment, the latter had never had the element of warrior glory. They were hardworking people with good birth rates.98 In the same study, he identified the collective goal of the Hungarians in Transylvania as follows: “Let’s reproduce! […] Not for the purpose of expansion, but solely for the purpose of giving laborers to the lands that need to be cultivated, in order to create new families in the greatest possible number and with the largest possible population, and as such, maintaining an internal tension capable of withstanding external pressures.”99

In 1939, the term “community of the people” (népközösség) became politicized. The political representation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania was taken over by the institution called the Romániai Magyar Népközösség (Community of the Romanian Hungarian People), the objectives of which seemed to include the idea of work in the service of the people of the 1930s. In the Community of the Romanian Hungarian People, founded in 1939, we find the intellectuals who were already well known from the columns of Hitel (Credit) and Erdélyi Fiatalok and who thought about social and cultural issues. The idea of work in the social service of the people began to exert some influence at the political level in the social construction of the community. The idea of the community of the people and of work in the service of the people found explicit expression in the program of the Community of the Romanian Hungarian People:100

The world crisis of today, which will sweep across the breadth of all humanity, the depth of all human questions, can only be solved by a new man and a new humanity. The new man is the whole man. […] The community of the Hungarians in Romania is the community of the people: a racial (blood) community, spiritual community (language, culture), and the community of destiny. Racial community, because descent is a common biological endowment, which is the bearer of all the specific spiritual and physical characteristics.101

The biological strength of the Hungarian people, often mentioned in the public health movements of the 1930s, was given a major role in this socio-political program:

The aim of the health program is to preserve and develop the biological stock of the Hungarian people, and for this reason: a) to nurture the awareness of shared origins as a blood community and to warn people of their biological duties, which make possible the survival and healthy development of the race (and its distinctive soul) and b) to build up the appropriate institutions of demography, medical treatment, prevention, and the health of the race and to clarify their tasks by means of preliminary health surveys and anthropological, race-biological, and race-characterological research.102

Conclusions

The construction of an understanding of ethnic identity based on a notion of biological belonging was in part a response by minority communities in interwar Central Europe to precarious citizenship situations, the disintegration of the health system, and neglect (or even the adoption of a hostile stance) by the state. In the case of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, difficult access to resources and the underdevelopment of health infrastructure in minority communities, which were both evidence of state neglect, mobilized the young medical generation of the 1930s and formed one pillar of an understanding of the ethnic community of Hungarians in Transylvania as a biological community. This understanding made the presence of the doctor a necessary part of a commitment to the health and prosperity of this community. A kind of local (regional) bio-control was emerging, which was not state-based but functioned in a similar way: it created a powerful organization and governing body. The individual was no longer important as an individual, but rather as part of a community, understood as a biological unity. This local biopower, through disciplinary technologies, controlled individual bodies in the same way, treated the community as a social and biological body, and was interested in its biological processes, such as birth and death rates, health maintenance habits, etc.

In this program, eugenics appears to have been understood as a kind of regeneration program, but instead of being the guiding paradigm, it remained a tool with which to achieve the goal. The initiatives of Hungarian doctors in the 1930s cannot be considered eugenic initiatives. While most of the eugenic movements across Europe worked to emphasize the primacy of the biological paradigm, for the Hungarian elite in Transylvania, biological, spiritual, and cultural aspects together became the defining factors of the ethnic community. What was new, however, compared to previous elite discourses, was that the supposed biological factor had come to be understood as an essential component of the life of the minority community and indeed was equated with the very survival of this community. Eugenic discourse became part of the identity-building processes.

This discourse, which put emphasis on the defense of the biological nation, was unique. It put the defense of the race on a quasi-eugenic basis by eliminating the state, the central element essential to eugenic modernization. All this was organized from below, while Romanian public health (and its eugenics engine) not only received state support, but also implemented state centralization to maintain the supposed nation’s health. The Transylvanian Hungarian public health movements were opposed neither to power nor to the majority society. Rather, they were parallel projects working on a regional level and mobilizing members of the Transylvanian Hungarian community.

The discourse of positive eugenics became part of a socio-political program, incorporated into the concept of the népközösség, a notion which had been refined over the years, and then politicized in 1939 and validated in the identity-building process of an ethnic minority.

The Community of the Romanian Hungarian People ended its activity in 1940 in Northern Transylvania, and medical public health activism was redefined. Medical institutions and medical higher education became part of a complex, national Hungarian health system, and the terms ethnicity, népközösség, and race were given new meanings.

Archival Sources

A Szociális Testvérek Társaságának Levéltára, Kolozsvár [Archives of the Society of the Sisters of Social Service, Cluj-Napoca]

Anyák iskolája [Mothers’ school]. Manuscript.

Az Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület Gyűjteményei [Collections of Hungarian Museum Association]

Jancsó Béla papers

A Romániai Magyar Népközösség munkaterve [Work Plan for the Community of the Romanian Hungarian People]. Manuscript.

Jancsó, Béla. Az orvosi pálya [Medical career].

Jancsó, Béla. Az orvosi pályaválasztás akadályai [Barriers to choosing a medical career].

Jancsó, Béla. Testünk gondozása. Előadások és megbeszélések anyaga a testi nevelés köréből. Férfi-és nőszövetségek, ifj., ker. egyesületek és leányszövetségek számára [Taking care of our bodies. Lectures and discussions on physical education. For men’s and women’s associations, Christian youth associations, and girls’ associations].

Magyar Unitárius Egyház Kolozsvári Gyűjtőlevéltára [Archives of the Hungarian Unitarian Church in Cluj]

Küttel, Lajos. Vázlat a romániai római katolikus, református, unitárius evan­gélikus egyház gyermekvédelmi akciójának megszervezéséről [Draft of the organization of child protection actions by the Roman Catholic, Reformed, and Unitarian Evangelical Churches in Romania].

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