Minority Networking Behind the Iron Curtain: The Petrozavodsk Finnish Theater and Finland, 1965–1985

Simo Mikkonen & Sampo Ikonen

University of Eastern Finland

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 90-115 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.90

This article examines the role of the Petrozavodsk Finnish Theater (PFT) in cultural exchanges between Finland and the Soviet Union from 1965 to 1985. As the only professional Finnish-language theater outside Finland, PFT occupied a unique position within Soviet cultural diplomacy. Despite lacking the prestige of major ensembles and the ideological weight of propaganda groups, PFT was allowed to tour Finland six times, an exceptional frequency for a Soviet troupe. These tours not only introduced Finnish audiences to a little-known minority theater but also gave PFT access to new plays, professional contacts, and opportunities to sustain Finnish-language culture in the context of Russification. Drawing on interviews, Finnish archival sources, and the diary of theater actor and cultural administrator William Hall, this article highlights both the official frameworks and the informal networks that shaped these exchanges. While the Soviet state sought to showcase its nationality policy, PFT artists used the exchanges to pursue their own goals: artistic renewal, language preservation, and community survival. This study situates PFT within the broader history of Cold War cultural diplomacy, showing how a peripheral minority institution could leverage international contacts to carve out cultural space. PFT’s story illustrates the entanglement of politics, identity, and theater across the Iron Curtain.

Keywords: cultural exchange, Cold War, minority theater, transnational networks, Karelia, Finland, Soviet Union

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Forced Knowledge Transfer: Ancient Near Eastern Studies and
German (Jewish) Displaced Scholars in Türkiye in the 1930s and 1940s

Sebastian Willert

Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 58-89 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.58

In the early 1930s, the Republic of Türkiye became a significant refuge for Jewish and oppositional scholars escaping Nazi persecution in Germany. Negotiations led by German pathologist Philipp Schwartz facilitated the relocation of around 1,000 academics to Türkiye, primarily to Istanbul and Ankara. This article focuses on two displaced German (Jewish) scholars in the discipline of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Benno Landsberger, one of the most significant figures in the field of Assyriology, was removed from his position at Leipzig University by the Nazi regime in 1935. He secured a professorship in Ankara, where he established contact with the charity organization Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland (Emergency Association for German Scholars Abroad). Landsberger played a pivotal role in mentoring refugee scholars, including his former student Fritz Rudolf Kraus, who was employed by the Turkish Ministry of Education at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul.

This article builds on the case studies of Landsberger and Kraus to explore the dynamics of knowledge production and transfer within Türkiye, particularly in the context of the experiences and contributions of displaced scholars. It focuses on the center-periphery relations between Istanbul and Ankara, elucidating how the dichotomy between the former Imperial capital and the emerging Republican center impacted the arrival and work of refugee academics. This micro-historical approach to the presence and impact of Landsberger and Kraus in Türkiye aims to examine a pattern of mentorship and knowledge transfer, Orientalist perspectives, and their implications for work relations. It uncovers the complex interactions between local and global actors, such as charity organizations, refugees, researchers, and state institutions, amidst the contentious identity policies prevalent in the first decades of the Kemalist Republic.

Keywords: forced academic migration, knowledge transfer, ancient Near Eastern studies, Türkiye, displaced scholars

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Shared Visions, Local Realities: Industrial Architecture Model Exchanges 
across the Habsburg Empire

Raluca-Maria Trifa

Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 30-57 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.30

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Habsburg Empire experienced an accelerated process of urban modernization driven by industrialization and infrastructural expansion. These developments were shaped by the mobility of architects and engineers trained primarily in Vienna and Budapest, whose professional trajectories connected imperial centers with regional cities. Focusing on Brno, Pécs, Timişoara, and Rijeka, this article examines the circulation of industrial architectural models across the Monarchy and challenges linear center-periphery interpretations of modernization. It argues that architectural transfer operated through multidirectional exchanges facilitated by educational institutions, professional networks, public competitions, municipal administrations, state monopolies, and private enterprises. While standardized solutions were widely employed, their implementation was mediated by local economic conditions, administrative frameworks, and municipal initiatives. The article highlights how regional cities functioned as active sites of adaptation and experimentation rather than passive recipients of metropolitan models. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of industrial architecture as a key agent of imperial integration, while also addressing the tensions, negotiations, and local specificities that shaped modernization processes.

Keywords: Habsburg Empire, architectural exchange, industrial heritage, infrastructure development, regional adaptation

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Mediators of Knowledge between Marginality and Mobility: Ludwig Gumplowicz
and the Making of Italian Elite Sociology

Kornel Trojan

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War, Graz

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 3-29 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.3

This article examines how Ludwig Gumplowicz’s trajectory from Krakow to Graz mediated between his Polish-Galician experiences and the emergence of Italian elite sociology. It argues that Gumplowicz’s sociology developed along a periphery-center-periphery path: first shaped in the conflicted milieu of Krakow, then institutionalized in Graz as part of the German-speaking academic heartlands of the Habsburg Empire, and finally reexported to the Italian-speaking Küstenland and to what was later to become a unified Italy, where it was appropriated and transformed by early elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca and Roberto Michels.

Conceptually, the article refines center-periphery approaches by treating them as heuristic and relational rather than as fixed hierarchies. So-called peripheries appear not as passive recipients but as centers of circulation in their own right. Italian students in Graz emerge as key cultural and scholarly mediators: through their mobility, translations, and professional networks, they carried Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology southward and helped recast it into Italian elite sociology.

Empirically, the article reconstructs the multilingual, mobile university landscape of the late Habsburg Empire and traces how patronage, academic travel, and journal networks enabled the southward transfer of ideas about sociology. In doing so, it contributes to debates on transnational intellectual history, the history of sociology, and Habsburg university history, using the case of Gumplowicz to show how regional universities and student mobility played a disproportionate role in the “viral,” adaptive circulation of concepts.

Keywords: Ludwig Gumplowicz, Italian elite sociology, conflict sociology, knowledge transfer, center-periphery, Habsburg Empire, academic mobility, Roberto Michels

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We Cannot See Ourselves Reflected in All Italian Institutions”: Reform Psychiatry, Habsburg Legacies, and Identity-Making in the Upper Adriatic Area

Francesco Toncich

Department of Humanities, University of Trieste

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 615-654 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.615

This article analyses the development of criticisms of psychiatric institutions and restraint-based treatments for psychiatric and neurological patients as a foundation for identity-making processes in the Upper Adriatic from a long-term perspective. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the region, which was once part of the Habsburg Empire but was by then divided between Italy and Yugoslavia, became a hub for the deinstitutionalization of a psychiatric system still burdened by its Fascist legacy. This reform fostered renewed identity-making within local society, rooted in early Habsburg-era psychiatry. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Austrian psychiatry in this region had embraced non-restraint and outpatient therapies based on the liberal idea of modernity, which exerted a lasting influence on the psychiatric institutions in Trieste and Gorizia. World War I and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy brought Italian rule, under which Fascism transformed psychiatry into a tool of repression, eradicating alternative treatments and creating a clash between psychiatric cultures. This clash became foundational to the development of an identitarian model, rooted in Habsburg nostalgia and a presumed local “tradition” of alternative psychiatry during periods of profound crisis and transformation, particularly the reforms in the institutional world of psychiatry in the 1960s–70s.

Keywords: deinstitutionalization of psychiatry, non-restraint, Upper Adriatic region, Habsburg psychiatry, Fascist psychiatry

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Discipline and Superiority: Neurasthenia and Masculinity in the Hungarian Medical Discourse

Gergely Magos

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Social Sciences

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 588-614 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.588

“The nerve is still a mystery, which is why neurasthenia is in vogue,” wrote Viktor Cholnoky, the renowned Hungarian writer in 1904.1 Indeed, neurasthenia, a mental disorder considered a typically male ailment, was at the forefront of medical discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet so far, it has largely escaped the attention of Hungarian medical historians. Neurasthenia can be interpreted through multiple analytical frameworks, and connections can be drawn between neurasthenia and experiences of modernization, nationalism, and social inequalities; the emergence of the middle class and consumer society; and the professionalization of psychology, among other factors. This paper aims to explore how neurasthenia, as a male mental disorder, was discussed in the Hungarian medical discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this medical concept contributed to the medicalization of male sexuality and also reinforced the existing social gender hierarchy. Male sexuality and male social roles are the focus of the paper, but I also briefly explore how anxieties over modernity and the perceived decline of the nation were linked to other male mental disorders, such as paralysis progressiva.

Keywords: neurasthenia, masculinity, male sexuality, medicalization

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