„Akkor költözünk. Egy nagy háromszobásba.” Egy család lakásszerzési stratégiái egy pesti bérházban a II. világháborútól a forradalomig
“We’re Moving Then. To a three-room flat.” A Family’s Strategies of Home Acquisition in a Pest Apartment Building from the Second World War to the 195

Summary/Abstract: The study is an analysis of the diaries of the Roman Catholic teenage sisters Margit and Judit Molnár (fictitious names), to describe a family’s strategies to move from a one-bedroom flat into a two-bedroom one in a Budapest apartment building. Their home acquisition strategies were fundamentally influenced by their perceptions about the society they lived in. One of the primary motifs was the family’s profound anti-Semitism, which rested on the dichotomy of ‘poor Christian Hungarians’ versus ‘rich foreign (i.e. non-Hungarian) Jews’. For them, the Jewish neighbours personified Jewry, and they projected their experience of them onto the entire Jewish population. In 1943 and 1944 they came to assume that the Jewish neighbours’ flat can be obtained through their own connections within the building prior to the flat’s official seizure by authorities. Their strategy based on personal persuasion remained unsuccessful because the neighbours refused to relinquish their right to live in their home until the summer of 1944 when they were forced to move into a segregated Jewish building (one of the so-called Yellow Star Buildings) by the authorities. Finally, the Molnár family was able to swap with a Roman Catholic neighbour and move into a two-bed room flat after the war. Following the nationalisation of real estate, they tried to hold on to this larger flat using the same strategies they previously observed in their Jewish neighbours with malice: they justified their right for the flat by increasing the number of residents registered at the same address.

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